DEBT AND GRACE
AS RELATED TO THE DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.
BY C. F. HUDSON.
“The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” — Romans 6:23.
“Evil things are not entities; but good things are entities, since they are of God, who truly is,” — Athanasius.
“Here, at least, i.e. respecting the view here offered, let us hesitate, and suspend our judgment.” — Witsius.
“Even now. after eighteen centuries of Christianity, we may be involved in some enormous error, of which the Christianity of the future will make us ashamed.” — Tinet.
SECOND EDITION
BOSTON;
PUBLISHED BY JOHN P. JEWETT AND COMPANY.
CLEVELAND, OHIO: H, P. B. JEWETT.
1858.
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Three opinions respecting the ultimate destiny of bad men, differing from each other by one or two alleged measures of infinitude, yet each held by confessedly good men, must be held with a common modesty and command a degree of common respect. So wide a divergence of honest belief reminds all that they belong to an erring race. In the minds of some the fact encourages a general scepticism respecting the future destiny of man; and the same persons tell us that the Scriptures, whence so opposite views are supposed to be derived, must give little information and be of little value. Of those who prize the Scriptures as a Revelation, some doubt whether clear light on the perplexed subject was designed for man; it is better for us, they say, not to know precisely that with which duty does not concern us; others are solicitous that the import of the Revelation here should be better understood; and all, that it should be more deeply felt, and also that the occasion for scepticism should be somehow done away.
In a question of so transcendent importance, neither of the contested opinions can by a sober mind be easily exchanged for another. Such change can rarely be the result of a merely logical process; it will generally be attended with change or development of the moral feelings, and will meet friendly congratulations or fears. Yet because such changes often do not involve new states of feeling, it is a fair question whether the opinions themselves do not differ more as forms of thought than as expressions of sentiment; and whether beneath the apparent diversity there may not often be a substantial harmony. A discussion of the subject should elicit whatever truth lies in this direction.
In the inquiry for the true one of the three opinions, that which lies intermediate between the others, — which asserts neither the eternal happiness nor the eternal misery of those who may be worthy of neither, — claims its share of consideration. Can it be a just mean between two extremes? Is it apparently supported by manifold passages of Scripture? Can it reconcile apparently conflicting texts; or can it vindicate the peculiar doctrines of Christianity against opposite objections? Has it a respectable place in the history of Christian doctrine? Can it have been both held and lost by the Church? And if so, how is the grand error involved in its loss to be accounted for without impairing all confidence not only in man but in Providence itself?
It is easy to suggest such considerations respecting the view offered in the following pages. Whether such as make in its favour have had undue influence with the writer, he leaves for others to decide. He will only plead in behalf of certain features of his book, that his experience persuades him a treatise on the subject should be — even more than it is argumentative — one of suggestions and helps to the reader’s own thinking and investigation.
To various friends he is under many obligations for the suggestion of facts and thoughts, for aid in the prosecution of his inquiries, in securing a favourable publication of the book, and in revising the sheets for the press. He is sure that any resulting development of Christian truth will be to them, as it should be to himself, the best reward.
THE DIGNITY OF HUMAN NATURE
The Rationalist Theory.
The Christian Theory.
Influence of the two Theories.
Combination of the two Theories.
Effects of the Combination.
The Dignity of Wickedness.
EVIL AND GOD
Natural Evil.
Sin, Its Mystery.
The Origin, Economy, and End of Evil.
The Idea of God and the Conception of God.
The Four Theologies.
The Notion of Evil as an Eternal Necessity is Dualisti100:
The Analytic Argument.
Historical Illustration.
The Reaction
Agony of Faith.
Absolutism.
Reaction
Pantheism
THE THEODICIES
Theodicy a Duty
Absolutism.
Sin against God as an Infinite Being.
Sin against God as Infinite Love.
Sin as against the Divine Government.
Universal mistrust.
Sin as against the Universal Welfare.
In Suo Infinitu.
The Imperative Nature of Duty.
Historical Eternity of Sin.
Sin as the Greatest Evil.
Scientia Media De1:
Free Will.
Choice of two Infinities.
Choice of Penalties.
Infinite Motives.
The Redemption.
Pre-existence.
Eternal Sinfulness.
Law of Nature.
Phrensy
Restraint.
Twilight
EVIL TEMPORARY
Evil not Needful.
The Frailty of Evil
The Permission of Evil
Theism.
Is Evil only Now?
The Triumph of Faith
THE SCRIPTURAL ARGUMENT
Is the Immortality of the Soul assumed in the Bible?
Is the Immortality of the Soul implied in the Language of the Scriptures?
The General Tenor of Scriptural Language respecting Man’s Destiny.
Passages supposed to prove the Immortality of the Lost.
Circumstantial Evidence
THE RATIONAL ARGUMENT
The Metaphysical Argument.
The Psychological Argument.
The Moral Argument.
The Analogical Argument
SOUL AND BODY
Matter and Mind.
The Detention.
Do the Dead sleep?
Resurrection of the Unjust
THE HISTORICAL ARGUMENT
Eastern and Ancient Doctrine.
The Grecian Schools.
The Popular Faith
The Pious Fraud.
Fourfold Doctrine of the Immortality of a Class.
Early Christian Doctrine.
Blan’s Intermediate Nature.
The Origin of the Conflict.
Results in the Eastern Church.
Results in the Western Church.
Jewish and Mediaeval Doctrine.
Modem History
PHILOSOPHY OF ERROR
Reflex Influence of Theodicy.
Faith in Second Causes.
The Temporal and the Eternal.
The Unseen World.
The Mystery of Sin.
The Advantages of Evil over Good.
Theory of Satisfaction for Sin.
Theology of the Feelings.
Exegetical Causes.
Sense of Human Depravity.
Lack of Faith in the Power of Goodness.
Draco.
The Notion of Punishment as specially Moral.
Negative and Positive Evil.
Anchorite Conceptions of the Heavenly State.
Self-suspicion
HARMONY OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE.
Of Providence.
Of Grace.
Of Death.
Of Original Sin.
Of Punishment.
Of Pardon.
The Redeemer
PARADOXES OF PENALTY
Fear and Shame.
Severity and Certainty.
Mystery and Conviction
Eternal Death is Eternal Punishment.
The Second Death.
Far and Near.
Wrath and Love
THE MISSIONARY SPIRIT
Vicarious Immortality.
The Maternal Character of the Church.
The Missionary Motive.
The Campaigning Spirit.
A Test of Christian Character.
Gospel for the Heathen.
THE HIGHEST GOOD
Life the True Good.
Sensation and Motion.
Thought.
Free Will.
The Election.
Virtue.
The Atonement.
Faith.
Love
Principal Passages of Scriptures referred to
Index of Citations
THE DIGNITY OF HUMAN NATURE
“What is Man, that Thou art mindful of him?”
What is man in his essential nature? and what is his relation to God, to his government, and to an eternal world? What principles, of justice and honour, of goodness and grace, determine the relations of God to man? What does God owe to man, and what does man owe to God? What claim of human character entitles man, or what demand of divine law appoints him, to existence without end? Is immortality God’s debt, or his gift? Or may it be either? And if a debt, is it due to man’s nature, or to his conduct, good or bad? Whence does eternity become man’s own?
What is man? Respecting his nature and constitution there are various questions, not essential, yet very important, to be answered. Is the human personality simple, or complex? What are the mutual relations of soul and body? Is immortality a native vigour of man’s being, or a life to be sustained by adventitious aids? What is the divine image in which man was created? Is it still retained, or was it lost in the Fall? Man was made a little lower than the angels; what is now the rank and order of his being? What is the dignity of man, either in his proper nature, or in the character he may form? Does it compel him to become either angel or fiend, or is it peculiar to himself as man?
These questions are all asked in one other: Is man’s immortality contingent, or absolute? Was man created strictly immortal, or as a candidate for immortality? Is this his destiny, or his privilege? Is it the stamp of his very being, or is it the sign of his maturity? Is it the retribution, either of holiness or of sin, or is it the gift of divine favour? Is it of law, in the economy either of natural or moral government? or is it of grace, and never to be charged as debt, though the offered boon should be refused and come to naught? And if it be of grace, and be so regarded by men, is Eternal Life more likely to be rejected and scorned, or Redeeming Love to be abused, or are the ranks of the blessed likely to be less full, or later filled, or God’s plans to be frustrated, and the harmony of the world to be deranged?
Postponing the discussion of these fears until the truth shall be determined, we propose first to show that the dignity of man is not impaired, but enhanced, when we regard him as invited, not compelled, to be immortal.
1. THE RATIONALIST THEORY
We here reckon as Rationalists not only those modern Neologists who reject an alleged revelation of immortality, but all who rest the soul’s immortality upon metaphysical or logical proofs, as if they were sufficient without a revelation. The rationalist theory seeks a general law of human immortality, — a necessity
or nature of things, as distinct from the free methods of divine action. It subordinates the moral argument for an after life to the ontological. It regards the former as valid only to show the condition of the individual, in the immortality which he shares with the race. It infers the afterlife from an essence or a nature rather than from a character.
This theory, preferring the laws of nature to the assurances of its Author, consistently seeks man’s dignity in what he must be; that is, in a destiny. The adornments of virtue and holiness, and the attainment of heavenly glory, may enhance this dignity; but they do not constitute it. It may be tarnished by vice and it had not become philosophy and theology. But such it has become, and still remains. An able writer says of Synesius: “The old aristocratic intellectualism of the heathen world reigns in him to the last; but a kind heart often gets the better of philosophic pride, and he has much more of the Christian in him than the name.”
2. THE CHRISTIAN THEORY.
But even Synesius seems to confess, for once, the paramount importance of the Redemption, and, in one of his letters, to assert this as the ground of man’s dignity. “Man is a creature of high worth; and he is such because Christ was crucified for him.” And here we are bold to say that throughout the Scriptures the dignity of man is based on the work of Christ, and nothing else. It was lost, from the moment of the Fall.
Man’s glory then departed. The race became culprit, under sentence of death. The common opinion that in the absence of a Redemption the race would have utterly perished in Adam, is a concession that man’s whole being and all its glory is due to Christ; and it is simply consistent to say that his immortality was from the first contingent and not absolute, and that out of Christ he still has no immortality.
The characteristic of this theory is that it finds man’s dignity in what he may be. His immortal life is not a destiny, but a privilege. It may have been also a birth-right; but, once for felted, it is due to Him by whom it is recovered. Whatever the “divine image“ may have signified, it claimed the attention and regard of God, no longer than it was cherished by man. Did it denote holiness? It was lost in the act of sin. Was it a capacity for holiness, — a moral and responsible nature? It was worthless, when man became immoral and sinful. Was it lordship and dominion over the earth? every child of Adam has come into the world to suffer because this dominion was impaired, or but partly regained.
With respect to our lost condition, the Psalmist might, then, well ask: “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? or the son of man, that Thou visits him?“ The answer seems hardly to agree with the fact. “Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou made him to have dominion over the works of thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet.”
The passage can only be explained as a prophecy of Christ. This is required by the true sense of one important word, and is so understood by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. As if he had said: “Thou hast reduced him (the Son of Man) to be lower than the angels,* and him hast thou crowned with glory and honour, he is born king of the Jews; he is King over all. Under his feet, and in him, under the feet of Mankind, dost thou put all things. The subjection is not yet complete; but we see the One who was made a little lower than the angels, even Jesus, crowned, for his suffering of death, with glory and honour, that, as a free gift of God, he might taste death for all men. It is the right of those who receive him to become the sons of God.
He is the Captain of their salvation, leading them on to their proper dignity and final glory; sharing their nature that he might call them brethren; destroying him that had the power of death, the fear of which was a life-long bondage; triumphing over the grave, that he might show them the path of life; and opening the gates of the Heavenly City to all who should prove worthy of its citizenship, and its crown of righteousness.”
And whenever the Bible speaks of the Redemption, it finds the occasion of it in no high quality of man; he is never described as a lost child of wealth, or as a captive prince; but ever as beggarly poor, and vile. His only star of destiny was the sentence of death. Not destiny, but deliverance from it, gives him dignity. The Gospel offers him everything, and invites — with all the earnestness of divine love it urges — his acceptance. But it obtrudes upon him nothing; it compels no other choice than that which denotes the highest freedom, — the choice of all things or of nothing, and of the attendant glory or shame.
And this idea of privilege is the peculiar glory of all free states, and of every condition of freedom. In the Grecian games, it was a high honour to be a competitor, though there was but one fading crown. In our own country, it is an honour to every citizen that he may aspire to any office in the gift of the people, though thousands, in a true or false ambition, should signally fail. In the same view it is the highest dignity of man, that, though he has once lost all, he may now, by a free adoption and a new birth, come to a boundless estate, a heavenly inheritance; where the good fortune of one shall not dispossess another, but each one may be joint heir with the First-born, the heir of all.
3. INFLUENCE OF THE TWO THEORIES.
“Heroes,” said Varro, “should believe themselves the offspring of the gods, whether they be so or not; that by this means, the mind, confiding in its divine original, may aspire to nobler things.” This intimation of an immortality inherent, superhuman, yet doubtful, illustrates, we think, the real nature and influence of the rationalist theory. It is partly illustrated in the doctrine of the Stoics, who sought the proof of immortality in a certain heroism of human nature, an invincible energy which should raise the soul above the power of circumstances and of fate. But as the man of fortitude was alone worthy of immortality, he alone might expect to attain it. Yet this faith failed; and the “wise man“ of the Stoic school, scorning the weakness of other men, became himself weak. In his doctrine of suicide, he in fact sought to escape the ills of life by fleeing — he knew not whither.
The Platonists sought the proof of immortality in man’s intellectual nature. It was not the stern heroism of virtue, but rather mind and reason, that allied man to Deity; the capacity of knowledge was a divine thing. Not to say that this was the original error of mankind, desiring to “be as gods, knowing good and evil,” it is certain that, with the later Platonists, the argument became an occasion for haughty and supercilious pride. He was most assuredly divine who gave most evident proofs of intellect, and the common herd of men were simple and brutish. They were of no account, in the estimate of humanity. The philosophic were of high caste; and philosophy knew of no redemption for the unthinking. But the Platonic argument itself was as unsatisfying as it was flattering. No one could have prized it more than Cicero; but he says: “I have read Plato’s book (the Phaedo) over again and again; but, I know not how it comes to pass, so long as I am reading, I agree with it; but no sooner is the book out of my hands, than I begin to doubt whether man is immortal.”
The language used by Paul in comparing knowledge that puffs up, with charity that builds up, brings us to the Gnostic view of human dignity. Of Gnostic doctrine there were several varieties, combining in various measure the Greek, Persian, and Hindu systems of philosophy, with Christianity. It is worthy of notice that the Gnostics, in their account of man’s nature and constitution, used the terms mind and spirit taken the one from the philosophers and the other from the Scriptures, as equivalent. Thus the Valentinians spoke of themselves as spiritual, and therefore immortal, by nature. What the Christians called a grace, or gift, they regarded as something of their own, pertaining to their very being, and produced at the same time with themselves. They would certainly be saved; not by reason of their acts and conduct, but because they were naturally spiritual. Others they regarded as psychical, having soul without spirit, whose salvation was yet to be effected, and whose being was therefore of less account.
The practical effect of this persuasion of an absolute immortality was such as might be expected. As gold is not tarnished with filth, so the soul is not corrupted with vice. And if this Gnostic sentiment did not suggest, it at least encouraged the fanatical delusion that the child of God might do the same things which would be sinful in other men, and yet be free from guilt by the magic power of faith. The most learned of the early defenders of Christianity, whose writings show an intimate acquaintance with the corruptions of philosophy, asks what man has to fear, or what urgent reason can deter him from all manner of vices, if he possesses a divine immortality?
But when immortality is sought in a nature of things, and not either as a gift of divine goodness, or by assimilation to the divine character, the false faith brings its own retribution. There may be an immortality of things, as well as of persons; the honour of living for ever may be shared by man, not only with the gods, but with the brutes. The Hindu philosophy, which immortalizes all life, guards against this degradation by its doctrine of metempsychosis, in which the beasts are raised to human rank and are men in transition. But what the Hindu saves for human dignity in one way, he loses in another. The soul’s liability to inhabit a brutish form is in itself a humiliation, and it destroys the dominion of man over the lower orders of being. It not only becomes murder to kill an insect or an animalcule, but all brutes must be respectfully treated, and men must share all their work and bear all their burdens. What is lost here is, perhaps, sought to be made good in the degradation of woman, and in the distinctions of caste.
The anthropology of western nations has escaped this doctrine of equality with the brutes. But acute men have discovered that the common arguments for immortality are as good for the brute soul as for the human, and have found the dignity of man no longer in the bare notion of his immortality, but in the peculiar nature of it. And one eminent philosopher has endeavoured to save the dignity of man by saying that the souls of animals are “imperishable,” those of men, “immortal. ” And he regards the failure of the Schoolmen to make this distinction as having brought “great prejudice to the immortality of the human soul.”
“What should I fear, by fate exempt from death?”
Between the reaction of gloomy doubts of an after life, and the depreciated value of an immortality common to persons and to things, we need not wonder that the heathen world grew careless of human life. As suicide became the necessitous virtue of the Stoic, infanticide was so prevalent a custom that it alone would justify the charge made by Paul, that the Gentiles were “without natural affection.” It was never thought of as a crime; insomuch that the poet Terence puts into the mouth of the same man who said, “I am a man — whatever concerns man concerns me,” the command to his wife to destroy her child. The same direction is given in Ovid, by a man, of exemplary piety and unblemished integrity. And in the same place, the prohibition of infanticide by the Egyptians is remarked as singular: “Egypt has opposed very wise and humane laws to the practice of infanticide, now become general, and continuing unchecked by all other institutions.” And Tacitus speaks in like manner of the Jewish regard for infant life.*
Such, we believe, are the natural fruits of the philosophic persuasion of human immortality. The influences of the Christian doctrine will be stated more fully hereafter. We may here name the remarkable fact, that as soon as the Gospel was preached among the nations, humanity, in every condition and stage of life, acquired a new value, and a peculiar sacredness.
The life of man was no longer a common thing, but a peculiar gift of God. Its price was that of the ransom that saved it from death. Man’s dignity was that of the Prince of Life; yet a dignity not imposed, but to be received by the personal union to Christ. Hence the sentiment, “Destroy it not, for a blessing is in it,” gave to man, from the first moment of his being, an inestimable worth, in prospect of that which he might yet be. Thus Tertullian, animadverting on the frequency of homicide among the heathen, boasts of the Christian regard for life in embryo: “It is a hastening of homicide to prohibit the birth; nor does it signify whether one snatch away the life that is born, or strangle it unborn. He is already a human being, who is to be one; for the fruit is contained in the seed.”
4. COMBINATION OF THE TWO THEORIES.
That was wanting in the doctrine of immortality by nature, could certainly be supplied by the Gospel. And the doctrine of immortal life as a gratuity to be accepted, seemed capable of philosophic improvement. Hence it was natural that some views of the early Christians and of the philosophers of their day should be interchanged. In the spirit of a patronizing eclecticism, the latter, admiring the virtues and embracing the hopes of Christianity, were ready to defend it by their own modes of argument. And they were willing that man’s supposed inherent worth should be enhanced by a closer union with the incarnate Divine Word.
The Christians, in their turn, were pleased with the weapons offered them to parry the assaults of the sceptic; too often, perhaps, they hesitated to venture man’s entire dignity on the work of a crucified Nazarene. The philosopher could welcome the assurance of an immortality which he had deemed rational; the Christian could accept a rational defence of what might otherwise appear an implicit and blind faith. The union of the two doctrines would be assisted by the proneness of man to rest in second causes, and to derive the weightiest results from some “nature of things.” Why should not all created powers, — all laws of being, contribute to so great a work as the endless life of a human soul? Why need this depend, either in fact or in argument, upon the resurrection of a human form in Palestine, or upon the attestation of that fact, and of the promise that He who had risen from the dead should, at the last day, appear as Judge of both the quick and the dead?
By a process so gradual that it is marked only by an occasional shudder at the remote consequences, and an occasional sigh at the beclouded glory of Christ, immortality, and eternal life, came to mean two different things. The former became a natural endowment, — the birth-right of every human soul. The latter denoted rather an eternal happiness, and this alone was the especial gift of God through Christ. The one was a law of nature; the other was a superadded grace. The Christian scheme of man’s dignity, instead of supplanting the rationalist, was built upon it. The new wine was put into the old bottles; the new cloth was put upon the old garment.
5. EFFECTS OF THE COMBINATION.
Besides the supposed gain to man’s dignity, it was believed that the doctrine of an immortal nature was now secure from the presumptuous pride by which the philosopher had dishonoured it. Immortality and salvation were very different things. The godless life and the godlike destiny, which had been joined in wedlock, were now thought to be divided.
But the new idea — of an immortal soul to be saved or lost forever — had a terrible import. Was the doctrine made up of compatible elements? or, was a new conflict, within the Christian soul and the Christian Church, and destined to be a “Conflict of Ages,” now begun?
There had been heretofore two problems, as old as the Fall of Man: Whence came evil? and. Is there an after life? The former was not, and was not to be, solved. The latter was now answered by saying: We are all immortal. But this doctrine, in its new connection, created a new problem of immortal evil. For the old philosophic theories of future evil, as we shall see, were never so frightful as this. The evils which had been feared were either confined to the domain of matter, or they were intermitted, — an eternal vicissitude, as in the fancy of the Platonic year, or the Stoic notion of successive dissolutions of the world by fire. But now an evil absolutely endless and uninterrupted, changed only in a transition from earth to hell, from a mixed to an unmitigated form, and, perhaps, growing ever more horrible and intolerable, — such a world of evil was now to be feared, and to be accounted for. How should it be explained? How justified, either as due to the sins of men, or as necessary, — subserving or overriding the power of God? Was it sufficiently attested, either in the revealed Word of God, or in the constitution of man or of the world?
Waiving, for the present, the debates and doubts, the struggles to vindicate God’s power and justice, and to support the Christian’s faith, that have marked the history of the compound doctrine, we may here show that it has not enhanced the value of man’s being, nor promoted the dignity of his nature.
Arguments to show that the doctrine does this, are often advanced. Besides the current exhortations to repentance in the name of an immortal destiny, this has been assumed in a late discussion, and it is ably stated by another writer thus: “The spiritual life, or the first stage of the life eternal, is a recognition of the immutable Law of purity, rectitude, and love, not merely as abstractedly good, but as good to be applied to man, how disastrous soever the consequences of that application to him in his now actual condition. Better were it for him to be condemned by such a law, than to find himself villainously discharged from court on the ground that his nature does not admit of the application of a rule so high. Better that he should be condemned as guilty, than vilified as pitiable. Better for man to endure his doom among beings that have fallen, than that he should take his place among the most unfortunate of the mammalia.”
And the same sentiment appears in common expressions of an insuperable repugnance to the idea of a soul ceasing to be, which makes the doctrine of the immortality of the good alone, distasteful to multitudes even of Christian men.
But if we go behind the supposed terrible necessity of choosing eternal good or evil, the worth and dignity it confers on man’s being vanishes. “With the offer of eternal life, who would prefer the alternative of endless pain, to an end of being? Is the mortgage by which an estate may be for ever lost, deemed an incumbrance upon it, an abatement of its value? What, then, if, without mortgage, it were liable to be overgrown with endless thorns and thistles, and shut up as the escapeless prison of its possessor, — would it be of more worth? Would a paradise of delights be desirable, if it might, for the misconduct of a day or a year, be turned into a burning desert for one’s eternal home? The sentiment which shudders at the thought of such a choice is immensely different from the dislike of all responsibility, with which it is so often confounded. It is a sentiment of our common nature, abiding ever, from youth to age.
“I wish,” said a child to its mother, when first told of an immortality for weal or woe, “I wish I had never been born.” Must the child’s reason, or even its faith, be satisfied, when the mother can only answer, “But you are born?” And as it grows up, shall it be better satisfied when the theologian says: “Thus a double necessity, natural and judicial, binds the guilty soul upon the wheel of eternal death?“ He must himself exclaim: “At this fearful aspect of destiny, human nature pauses, and feels that, alas! Immortality is not Life! Her ravishment with the hope of an immortal existence disappears; she stops, and, in anxious misgivings for the race, inquires: ‘What must be the eternity of spiritual destinies already here begun?‘
From the presages of Nature she starts back with fear, and is almost ready to let fall from her lips the cup God has proffered of immortal existence.” And the hazard of such a destiny is “a mortal poison,” says an eloquent preacher, “which diffuses itself into every period of my life, rendering society tiresome, and life itself a cruel bitter. I cease to wonder that a fear of hell has made some melancholy and others mad; that it has inclined some to expose themselves to a living martyrdom by fleeing from all commerce with the rest of mankind; and others to suffer the most violent and terrible torments.” Well may we say in view of such a destiny: “If Christianity be true, it is tremendously true.”
But the moral dignity of man’s being can only keep pace with its value. If the necessity of choosing between infinite good and evil makes it poor, in the economy of happiness and misery, it is also worthless, in the estimate of virtue and vice, holiness and sin. For if man needs such a dire choice of motives to ensure a right choice, he is either infinitely weak or infinitely wricked. If the former, his dignity is nothing; if the latter, his dignity is purely monstrous. Each supposition should be considered.
(1.) Man is reduced to a dead thing, if he is so indifferent to his own well-being, or so insensible to the motives of virtue, that no gospel of eternal holiness or blessedness can quicken him into life. It is no compliment to human nature, to suppose that the a frightened of eternal whips and scorpions may impel man heavenward, though infinite attractions could Mot draw him thither. If there be such a man, he has no faculty of self-love, and no moral sense. His being lies in altogether another sphere. He is not human. He is no fit candidate for eternal life; why an heir of eternal being? He is an abortive work of nature, and the rank of his dignity cannot be assigned.
There is a hymn expressing the sentiment of modern times, when men are supposed to be, through fear not of death, all their life-time subject to bondage:
“Lo! on a narrow neck of land,
Between two boundless seas I stand, —
Yet how insensible!
A point of time, a moment’s space
Removes me to yon heavenly place,
Or shuts me up in hell!“
This wonder at man’s stupidity contains a reproach of him, as unworthy of his dignity. It ought to suggest a doubt. If man was once exalted above these terrors, they were needless; if he is so fallen as to be unmoved by them, they are useless.
But without asking if they are true, those who employ them, are ready, sometimes, in impatient despair, to contemn the unmoved as not worth saving. At other times, the riddle is referred to the infinite wickedness of men, which brings us to the second supposition, involving the doctrine of
6. THE DIGNITY OF WICKEDNESS
Guilt ceases to be degrading when it becomes immortal. The conception of a wickedness thoroughly consistent, ever persistent, and eternally subsistent, is intrinsically admirable and sublime. Endless guilt implies the power to sin and rebel for ever; and endless woe implies the capacity to suffer forever. It is a godlike faculty, if one can say to evil, “be thou my good,” with a purpose that cannot be broken through the lapse of eternal ages. It used to be said that a divine nature can not suffer; but it is more true that only a divine nature can suffer for ever; and by such invincible endurance the sinner is armed for eternal warfare against heaven. A mightier divine power may imprison and restrain him; but if an unconquerable will can still revolt, the power of eternal anguish sustains the dignity. The dignity is enhanced, if one may contend for ever with justice, and tantalize retribution, by adding sin to sin; and still more, if one may ever grow in fiendish capacity and malignity. If there be such rebels, they may certainly glory in the prerogative of imposing burdens, if not cares, upon the divine administration. Well might one of those fallen angels, who are “angels still,” say:
“Or if our substance be indeed divine, And cannot cease to be, we are at worst On this side nothing; and by proof we feel Our power sufficient to disturb His heaven, And by perpetual inroads to alarm, Though inaccessible. His fatal throne; Which, if not victory, is yet revenge.”
And the sublime fortitude had been described by an earlier poet:
“Let Him then work his horrible pleasure on me; Wreathe his black curling flames, tempest the air With volleyed thunders and wild warring winds, Rend from its roots the firm earth’s solid base. Heave from the roaring main the boisterous waves, And dash them to the stars; me let Him hurl, Caught in the fiery tempest, to the gloom Of deepest Tartarus; not all his power Can quench the ethereal breath of life in me.”
This sentiment of the dignity of eternal rebellion, of course belongs properly to the old gentile conception of a divine nature without a divine goodness. It has been reproduced in the modern literature of the so-called “Satanic School. ” - But, while it is too natural to the human heart, as we see in those bold and desperate souls who, abandoning all hopes of heaven, scorn the thought of moderate punishments in hell, — it is still a fair question whether it has not been encouraged by a false theology, and a doctrine of human dignity that talks much about Christ, yet is essentially unchristian.
This question is made more pertinent by the very common notion that the eternal destiny of the lost is of great use in the economy of the divine government; that in immortal wickedness may be illustrated the nature and desert of sin, for the warning of new created beings, or for the security and higher instruction of the saved. Evil “may be permitted to subsist as furnishing the requisite antagonism and occasion to virtue.” But usefulness brings dignity; and if the lost are fit to be conserved as chosen instruments of the general welfare, their-immortality cannot be without its honours.
And though we may conceive of them as useful in spite of themselves, and therefore justly punished, yet we must also regard them either as demented, — objects of pity and contempt, — or as knowing themselves to be overruled and employed for good, and perhaps claiming, with complacent shrewdness, that they do evil that good may come, and suffer, not for their sins alone, but “For the advantage of the Universe.”
Which accords with the dialogue between God and Satan respecting one devoting himself to the latter:
“The Lord. Knows thou Faust? Mephistopheles. The Doctor ay my Lord. Ay, my servant! Meph. He! Forsooth! he serves you in a famous fashion.”
Men are ready enough to say that the means is sanctified by the end; why not also that evil is dignified thereby, if God himself employs it forever?
EVIL AND GOD.
“It were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion a is unworthy of Him.” — Bacon
1. NATURAL EVIL.
Because all natural evil is transient, a theodicy respecting it is little demanded by human faith. Yet the problem is specially difficult, because that evil is not at once derived from moral considerations. The sufferings and death of animals are calamity, but not penalty. And though there may be compensation for them in the system, in an enhanced variety and measure of animal life, yet to the individual that suffers unduly, we know of no compensation. All that natural theology has done, or, perhaps, can do, is to reduce the sufferings of the brute creation to a mini- mum; and to show, if possible, that the brute, with no capacity for borrowing trouble, and all its pains reducing the term of its life, can not suffer more than it can enjoy.
A theodicy respecting man’s temporal sufferings is easier. Not to say that the most of them are the result of a fall, — either directly penal, or an admonition to seek a lost estate of good, — every case of unmerited calamity admits compensation in an afterlife. Sin and punishment aside, man may be no loser in the balancing of his pleasures and his pains; much that he does suffer is the fault of a querulous and ungrateful temper, aggravating the sorrows and overlooking the blessings of life.
The natural evils which man suffers are also disciplinary. Virtue demands a sphere of effort; and the ordeal has a specific value if it comes in the form of hardship or pain. Yet, we ought not to say that the worst system is the best system; for the highest virtues would be so far imperfect, if they were impossible without miseries that appear abnormal. Special virtues derived from the endurance of special evils, may, at least in part, justify the permission of them; but they cannot be the final cause or proper occasion of human woe.
2. SIN. ITS MYSTERY.
We must admit an essential difference between Pain and Sin, or natural and moral evil, unless conscience be a delusion, and the author of it, God or Fate, an impostor. The power that rules the world has added insult to injury, if man is only unfortunate, and not guilty. The theory which makes conscience a false accuser would prove too much. Man must have fallen very strangely, to conceive of right and wrong as things more significant than pleasure and pain; and of character as something more than an effect of circumstances or an accident of temper. The invention of virtue and vice, merit and demerit, praise and blame, if they be fictions, must rank as the highest poetic creations. Have men indeed “become as gods, knowing good and evil?“
In the old question of the origin of evil, we must carefully distinguish guilt from the facts with which it has been too often confounded. All the supposed solutions are only proximate to the real mystery. Sin is not mere imperfection; it is produced by no limitation of human faculties. It is not a corrupting taint of matter; the flesh cannot impose guilt upon the reluctant will. Nor is it the necessary effect of trial or discipline; when that is severe past endurance, it is no crime to be crushed by it. Nor is it accounted for by any temptation of the Adversary, nor by any notion of a divided empire of the world; he who chooses the wrong side in a contest between God and Satan, must have some other reason than that he finds two parties inviting his allegiance. Nor can it be a needful lesson or demonstration of the nature of good; it is not wrong, if it is the only path from inexperience to virtue.
We only know sin as a perverse act of the free will; a doing of what we know we ought not to do; a neglect to do what seems in itself right, and which must therefore, in its final result, be for the best. It is a revolt of the will against an authority which cannot be gainsaid, — the conscience. It follows from the very nature of sin, that the method of its origination is a mystery. It may be referred to its true producing cause, but never to a proper final cause, as a valid reason. It is essentially without reason, — an act of un-reason. To assign a good reason for it, would be to justify it as a thing reasonable, which is contrary to its nature. It knows no rational or logical connection. It knows no law; it is pure anomaly. It is the surd quantity which no theological algebra can determine. It can be reduced to no intelligible principle; it baffles explanation. As a causeless diversion from light to darkness, it has its only analogies in the substitution of brute force for reason, or of the direct falsehood
for such craft as may be deemed honourable in certain contests of human skill. But these analogies are only species of a common genus, and no solution of the mystery.’
“According to my conviction,” says Neander, “the origin of evil can only be understood as a fact — a fact possible by virtue of the freedom belonging to a created being, but not to be otherwise deduced or explained. It lies in the idea of evil that is an utterly inexplicable thing, and whoever would explain it nullifies the very idea of it. It is not the limits of our knowledge which make the origin of sin something inexplicable to us, but it follows from the essential nature of sin as an act of free will that it must remain to all eternity an inexplicable fact. It can only be understood empirically by means of the moral self-consciousness.” — Planting and Training of the Church, book 6, chapter 1, note. Compare Plato, Ep. 2, cited by Neander; — Laurentius Valla (see Leibnitz, Theodicee, § 412): “ We must, then, seek another cause of evil; and I doubt if the angels themselves know it; “ — Muller, Christian Doctrine of Sin, II., 187 - 191, Pulsford’s translation, and Kant, as there cited; — J. Tulloch, Theism, pp. 385- 387; — J. Young, The Mystery, pp. 181, 215.
3. THE ORIGIN, ECONOMY, AND END OF EVIL.
The first question of this complex problem, the famous Unde Malum, has been regarded as one of speculative philosophy. But we find that speculation can furnish only proximate solutions of it. We can show how sin is possible; we can name the power and describe the circumstances in which it can originate. In a calculation of chances we may raise a probability of its occurrence, as a contingency in the trial of countless free agents. But though a probable event, it can never seem approvable. Its becoming actual is an enigma beyond all speculation, which man can only solve by the plea of guilty.
The Economy of Evil is the theologian’s question. Unlike the sin of the individual, that of the multitude or of the whole race seems to suggest a solution in some general law, or in God’s own plan. A single trespass of his command might be unworthy of his notice; not so the long ages of a world’s rebel- lion. Does He permit, and yet abhor, so immense an evil? Is it all against his will? Here we easily forget that of the poet:
“If not so frequent, would not sin be strange? That ‘tis so frequent, this is stranger still.”
The sinfulness of every man is in fact as unaccountable as that of any man. The mystery is not solved by simple multiplication. The extended fact may prove coextensive influences, circumstances, disabilities; but never a necessity of guilt, either in man’s act or God’s plan.
The End of Evil is pre-eminently the Christian’s question. “Lord, what shall the end of these things be?” “Oh, let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end.” Shall it be temporary, or eternal? Shall it be conserved, and its conservation sanctified by reasons of God’s necessity or justice? or may it cease from the universe, as equally worthless and needless in the fair work of creation?
The triple problem we have proposed has been the trial of the skill, the moral integrity, and the faith, of the respective classes we have named. In every aspect it affects also our views of God’s character, not to say of His power and His nature.
4. THE IDEA OF GOD, AND THE CONCEPTION OF GOD.
That men should believe there is a God, the Maker and Ruler of the world, and that they should be agreed respecting His attributes, are two very different things. The idea of a God seems a part of our mental constitution, and, as the rudimentary principle of religion, is the same in all minds. A self-subsistent, mightiest, wisest, and best Being is of course God, and claims the homage of ail His creatures. But how shall His Power, Wisdom, and Goodness appear? — is a question to which there are as many replies as there are kinds of religion among men. The true answer gives the true conception of God, and the true religion. But between this true conception, and conceptions so false or so dim as to fade away in atheism, there are endless gradations. Men are not agreed respecting God’s natural attributes. Some regard Him as a formless Spirit; others, as having essentially a form, a body with its relations to space. With some, He is omnipresent by extension, — part here and part there; and eternal by succession of moments, — older now than He was then. Others discard such notions as gross and unworthy of a divine nature. And the moral attributes of God, even to godly men, appear as different as their views of what is wise, and just, and good. They conceive of God as variously as they do of his justice, wisdom, and goodness, and they worship Him accordingly. They differ as to the highest good; with some it is more intellectual, with others more spiritual, with others more social. And of all these men and their varying conceptions, we may say: “Like worshippers, like God.”
In one of the dialogues of Plato this distinction is finely illustrated. It is agreed that the sacred is that which is dear to the gods. But it happens that the gods themselves differ, so that what is dear to one is hateful to another; and almost every concrete thing is pleasing to some one of them.’ The great question remains, — what is the truly sacred, just, noble, and good, which all profess to regard, and which ought to be really dear to all?
The distinction between the idea and the conception of God is easily abused. We are sometimes told that all except those who have the absolutely true conception of God are idolaters. But we are not so easily hushed into modesty, when we compare ourselves with the worshippers of Moloch. We ask, would their god be worthy of divine honour, if he were real? or would our God be unworthy of divine honour, if he were real? On the other hand we are told that the idolater is a true worshipper, because his conception is that of a God. We answer, all worship “in spirit and in truth” is with reverent inquiry after the truest knowledge of God; false worship seeks to corrupt, or to ignore, a conception of God already too pure and holy. The one yearns after light; the other turns toward darkness. The God of the one is Deity obscured by the dimness of human thought; that of the other is Deity corrupted and un-deified by man’s passions.
The idea of God may be compared to the idea of a circle; the child can apprehend it. The true conception of God answers to the doctrine of the properties of the circle, which human learning has not yet exhausted. In a study of geometry, the circle may be so overlaid with illustrative figures, that the careless eye shall not regard it; a subordinate or contrasted figure shall usurp its place. So men have deified some power of temporal good, or some dire evil. Thus the ancients had a whole Olympus of gods to their liking, while the “unknown God,” as a barren idea, was neglected. The God of the affections will ever fill the thoughts.
The distinction we have made will be respected by those who employ the a priori argument for the being of God. They tell us there must be a self-existent One, the Archetype and Source of all good, because all men have an idea of such a Being. They certainly do not mean that there is just such a being as each man conceives God to be.
The distinction is vastly important. Freed from the abuse that confounds true and false worship, it still contains a caution to the true worshippers of God. They may dishonour Him by unworthy views and false conceptions. Fancying that they copy from Him, they may regard Him as altogether such an one as themselves, projecting their frail humanities as the models of infinite perfection. Theology may grow infallible and intolerant, mistaking a very false doctrine about God for a genuine doctrine of God. Or, when it is suggested that His character is maligned, we are told that He is of course infinitely perfect, — all men know that, — and he needs no vindication. This easy refuge from the conception to the idea of God, however, will betray itself. Agreed in the true idea of God, and developing it as best we can, by the help of the revelation in His works and His word, we may yet join issue to see if a prevalent conception of His character accords with that idea.
5. THE FOUR THEOLOGIES.
The unworthy opinions of God which denote a wrong solution of the problem of Evil arc various, but may be reduced to three classes; which, along with the true solution, we may style the four Theologies.
4. The fourth seeks to reconcile all Evil that has been or shall be with the Omnipotence of God, without sacrificing either His Justice or His Love, — His moral or His natural goodness. It must answer the question: Why does perfect Power and Wisdom permit that which perfect Holiness abhors? The solution of this problem will be the true Theism.
In a word, Evil is either God’s necessity, — or His choice, — or of Nature, and sin does not exist, — or it is simply permitted.
These four theologies will appear in their effects in the hearts of men. The first, creating an eternal conflict in the heavens, — difficulties of divine government past all relief, — produces an Agony of Faith.
The second, affirming that might makes right, and that the end will sanctify the means, encourages in these who possess power, the Prostitution of Faith. To the victims of its reason- less omnipotence it leaves only a Prostration of Faith.
The third, blotting out this baleful light from the heavens as worse than darkness, bequeaths to mankind an Eclipse of Faith.
The fourth, recognizing Evil as actual, yet hateful, leaves for man a Trial of Faith; by which, however, he need not be over- come, looking for some “restitution of all things;” in which hope the trial may end in a Triumph.
6. THE NOTION OF EVIL AS AN ETERNAL NECESSITY IS DUALISTIC.
The most gross and bald Dualism is that which asserts two personal, self-subsistent Gods, one good and the other evil, war- ring against each other. But there are various forms of Dual- ism aside from the notion of an evil God; and we shall define it to be the doctrine of evil as an eternal principle, whether this principle be taken as a Person, or as a Law of Nature. And with this definition we affirm
4. That the doctrine of evil as an eternal necessity is only a refined form of the doctrine of evil as an eternal principle, and is essentially dualistic.
5. That the doctrine of eternal sin or misery, as the result of an event in time, logically involves the eternal necessity of evil, and is dualistic.
These propositions may be supported both by analytical argument and by a historical induction of facts.
7. THE ANALITIC ARGUMENT.
The fact that sin is a result of freedom, may seem to bar all argument respecting it as a necessity. But it should be remembered that two parties are concerned with the entrance of sin in the world, and the freedom of one may be the necessity of the other. The doctrine of future punishment sometimes takes this form, — that because man has freely sinned, God must of necessity expose him to eternal suffering, lest sin should be too free, and the welfare of all beings be put in jeopardy.
But, it will be said, justice is certainly good and salutary; and if the justice of eternal suffering can be made out, it should not be accounted an evil.
In reply we ask: Is punished sin an evil? It is made up of three things, — guilt, pain, and the justice which connects them. Now the guilt is certainly an evil in itself, and so is the pain; the justice is doubtless good, or it would not be just. But what is it good for? Punitive justice denotes simply this, — that guilt and pain are good for each other. The ex- ample of punishment may happen also to be good for other beings; but this is an added consideration, extrinsic, and can never create the justice itself. Either, the need of exemplary punishment, whether to restrain the vicious or to encourage the virtuous, indicates just so much imperfection and evil. Even though the eternal miseries of hell should multiply the eternal joys of heaven, it still remains a dire necessity if those joys can be procured only at such expense. And if the best results of punished sin cannot make it an intrinsic good, much less can the abundance of it. From the thought of its being extended through immensity, and continued through eternity, even those who think it useful in its place would shrink back with horror. Good as guilt and pain may be for each other, they do not form a compound of any intrinsic value. They do not, like the fiery oxygen and the poisonous hydrogen, which the just chemistry of nature converts into a liquid blessing, — they do not add to the proper moral wealth of the world. On earth or in hell, the compound is no better than its elements, — evil, and only evil, and therefore it has no home in heaven.
Even granting, then, for argument’s sake, that justice should give sin and pain immortal wedlock, forbidding their mutual death-grapple, as when “The snaky sorceress that sat Fast by hell-gate, and kept the fatal key, Eose, and with hideous outcry rushed between”
Satan and Death, and each are eternized, the inquiry remains: Can sin and pain be an eternal fact, without an eternal necessity? If not necessary, then why actual? If it is said that man, absolutely immortal, shall sin forever hurt God’s efforts to change his evil purpose, then he imposes an immortal necessity upon God; and this becomes an eternal necessity, in the eternal reason for such immortality. The inverted pyramid, which grows up by occasion of a creature’s act, expanding into immensity, and whose limit is beyond the zenith, must rest upon another equally infinite, whose base reaches farther down than the nadir. The irreducible Evil was already latent in the eternal past, with god- like omnipotence defying the power of God. If He could not create free beings for an eternal good, without the contingency of eternal evil, then the contingency developing as fact, betrays an eternal necessity and fate.
Again, if this limitation of divine power is from the divine justice, then this attribute itself is enslaved to the sinful creature. The law, which was “holy, just, and good,” becomes a carte blanche which frail man may fill out as a sentence of infinite evil in the world. The norm of endless blessing, lie may convert into the instrument of an endless curse. And if the germ of a world’s welfare shall develop into a towering Upas tree, which no stroke of divine justice can fell, it is but an aggravation of the dire case to say that it is rooted in the depths of Infinite Goodness.
Again, if eternal sin or suffering is supposed needful, to display the divine character, to secure saints in perpetual holiness, or to give zest to the joys of their redemption, — such a contrast of Good and Evil is precisely the old philosophic Dualism. Goodness is not sufficient for its own uses. Evil must form the background in the picture of the Universe, to render the Beautiful, the True, the Just, and the Good, prominent and vivid. The destruction of all evil would be the suicide of all good. A restitution of all things that should leave no trace of the Adversary’s kingdom, would be a fatal victory — a signal defeat.
In this view, though good, in its very idea, ought to be universal, it must ever be in fact sectional. Its incursions into the do- main of Evil must be limited by certain bounds and conditions. “Two kingdoms, one of Christ and the other of Satan, will have their respective limits.” Goodness can never fill all worlds. The law that curbs the raging sea becomes its law: “Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther.” The wave of blessing must be stayed. God cannot be all in all. Angels and men, and we know not what other races of God’s own creatures, must be shared by him with the Power which He abhors. His advantage is in numbers only; the contest is a drawn battle in many a struggle. And we are often told that the immortal children of the Wicked One make ceaseless progress in their wickedness and woe; in its dreadful way. Evil thus keeps pace with Good, eternally.
Now whether this dominion of Evil be maintained by a personal God, or by an eternal necessity of things, it signifies little. And whether it be immovably fixed, or ever shifting, or ever recurring, as an eternal vicissitude, — makes no difference. In either case the power of God is forever inhibited. His dominion for ever limited. Wide regions of the universe can never be His own; and whether he is dispossessed by a foreign Power, or by an adverse necessity, the empire of eternity is a divided dominion; and the true doctrine of that empire is Dualism.
Our definition of Dualism is sanctioned by Kant (Das Ende aller Dinge), who regards Restorationism as better in theory, but the received doctrine as better in practice, securing the sense of accountability. The following statements in an able defence of the received doctrine will farther warrant our use of terms: “Either sin is for God altogether unconquerable, and then itself can never be God’s choice, and there would be an irreducible power in the world, opposed to God. This is precise and express Manichaism; for there remains only to give this power a Principle, to which a godlike power is due. Whether now this Principle be called Devil or Ahriman, it makes no difference.” He proceeds:
“If this resort is forbidden for him who would be no Manichsean, then there remains only this, — that sin is indeed conquerable by the power of God, but that it is, nevertheless, not actually reduced at the end of the world. Everyone sees the contradiction involved in this; for then we may suppose, instead of the world with sin, another condition of it without sin, and every way more perfect; so that there should be after the end of the world a higher form of its development; that is, the end is not the end. Thus it lies in the idea of the world, so far as it is to be an expression of the divine nature, that at the end all sin must be entirely and thoroughly done away; and this is, indisputably, the truth in the doctrine of Restoration which has obtained for it, over against a comfortless Manichaiism, ever and again, adherents.” Heinrich Erbkam. Studienund Kritiken 1838, Number 2, p. 409.
8. HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATION.
The Persian doctrine of Ormuzd and Ahriman is too well known to require extended notice. It is the most perfect example of a personal Dualism, with which it would be instructive to compare various systems of polytheism, and to show their similarity in the personification of one or more powers of evil. But our historic argument will be to show that the notion of evil as an eternal necessity leads naturally to the notion of a personal evil Deity.
Parsism was itself polytheistic. Ormuzd and Ahriman were not self-existent; they were the progeny of one who was called the Absolute, the Zerwan, “Time without beginning and without end,” Eternal. They were the active forces of the universe, appointed by a higher Power, for reasons disputed in Magian debates about the Origin of Evil. There were various opinions also respecting these gods themselves. Was Ahriman the eldest born fallen, like Satan, through pride, and was Ormuzd called to vanquish him and take his kingdom? “Which was the mightier? Was Ahriman to be at all worshipped or feared, while he had power? We will not decide points which the Magi left unsettled. Zoroaster, who is popularly regarded as a rank Dualist, seems to have been a reformer, perhaps a martyr, opposing the prevalent fear of Ahriman as a superstition. Ormnzd, Le knew, ought to prevail, and therefore men might safely confide in him. It was agreed, however, that though Ahriman might be reduced or destroyed, he was the cause of all evil; and the Greek historian gives us some glimpses of an anthropology corresponding to this Dualism, in the strong expressions of a Persian who in an hour of severe temptation was quite certain that he had two souls.
The Hindu Siva, or Destroyer, is too unlike the evil God of the Persians to be regarded as a counterpart. He is not malignant; what he destroys he reproduces. Still the triad of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva is akin to the Persian Dualism, as showing the Oriental proneness to attribute personal being to the primary and contrasted powers of the world.
The Greeks knew better how to think abstractly; and the early philosophers could explain the origin of evil without impeaching any divine being as its cause. It was the work of Fate. And though some atheists made Fate or Chance the cause of all things, good and bad, yet, in the more religious opinion. Fate or Necessity was especially the cause of Evil. Hence the Stoics made virtue itself to consist in patiently enduring what even the gods could not avert. And the chief interest of the ancient tragedy is in the fact that even justice and right are powerless before a relentless Destiny. “Man conquered by circumstances,” is the ancient idea, in contrast with the modern, — “Man conquering circumstances.” This power was in due time personified in the beautiful myth of the Parcfe, — Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, presiding over the destinies of men.
But even for fated evil, the human mind must seek a reason. And the effort to find this produced the oldest system of philosophic Dualism, the essential features of which may be found in almost every subsequent theology, and with frequent relapse into the notion of a personal evil God. This was the Pythagorean doctrine of opposite qualities as necessary to each other. There can be no even number without an odd number. Day and night, light and darkness, heat and cold, seem to rest each in the bosom of the other. There can be nothing straight, but in contrast with the crooked. Such contrasts meet us continually; and the conception of any thing seems most vivid and complete, when coupled with the conception of its opposite. By a sort of a priori reasoning it was argued that nothing can exist without its opposite.
Hence were inferred good and evil principles of all things, which might be named from any pair of opposite qualities, as one and many, right and left, straight and crooked, symmetrical and shapeless, composed and restless, light and dark. In the metaphysics of Aristotle these principles were distinguished, as form and privation. In the theology of Plato this contrast of good and evil appears as a Battle of the Universe, an “immortal conflict, greater than all other conflicts, and requiring a most wonderful care and vigilance.” “All nature and all worlds rise into deeply interested parties in this immortal strife. Order is everywhere struggling with disorder. Light is contending with darkness; truth with error; knowledge with ignorance. The science of medicine is fighting with disease; agriculture with the hostile stubbornness of the earth; art and science of every kind with rude and savage life. On a higher scale, the virtues are personified as in conflict with our sins Righteousness is engaged in a strife which knows no compromise with unrighteousness.
Temperance maintains an non intermitting struggle with her most powerful and unyielding antagonist. To crown all, God himself and the celestial powers are represented as everywhere contending with the evil soul, and with the dark, mindless, disorderly spirit of Matter.”
To the Persian doctrine it is w ell known that Isaiah alludes, when he speaks of Jehovah as having called Cyrus to his work, unmoved by any rivalry of adverse powers. “I am Jehovah, and none else; beside me there is no God; I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me. I am Jehovah, and none else; forming light, and creating darkness; making peace, and creating evil: I Jehovah am the author of all these things.” [45:5-7]
Homer had approached the doctrine of the divine supremacy, where he speaks of Jupiter as permitting and controlling evil as well as good.- For this he is censured by Plato, as implicating the divine goodness. “God,” says he, “doeth nothing evil, nor could He be the cause of anything evil. The Good, therefore, cannot be the author of all things, but only of those that are good, while He is never the author of the bad. God, therefore, cannot be the author of all things, as the many say, but only of few things is He the cause to man; for our good things are much fewer in number than our evil things. Of evil things, then, we must seek some other cause, and not the Deity.” Of this other cause Plato elsewhere speaks thus: “For God, wishing that all things should be good, and that there should be nothing bad, thus taking in hand the visible (or material), never at rest, but ever moving about in a strange and disorderly manner, reduced it as far as He could from disorder to order. For it is morally impossible for the best Being to do anything else but the best.” And in another passage this disorderly spirit of matter appears as a personal evil soul in the world: “The soul is the cause of all things good and evil, honourable and base, just and unjust, and of all contraries, if it is the cause of all things. The soul, then, that rules all things in their diverse ways, is not one, but manifold. We must suppose no less than two, — the one beneficent, and the other able to do the contrary.”
Such is the Platonic solution of the Pythagorean solution of the origin of evil. The law of contraries must be executed by opposing gods.
Four hundred years later, the philosophic doctrine is asserted again by Philo. Having defined the phrase, “They died before the Lord,” to mean “they lived,” he proceeds to speak of the punishment of Cain. “We find,” he says, “no account in the Law of the death of Cain, the wicked fratricide, but this declaration: ‘The Lord God put a mark upon Cain, lest anyone finding him should slay him.’ And why? It was, I think, because impiety is an interminable evil, which, once kindled, can never be extinguished. With which agrees that of the Poet:
‘Evil is an immortal thing, no death can efface it.’
Immortal in the present life, though before God it be a lifeless and dead thing, and, as a certain one says, like a dung-clod. But it behoved that diverse spheres should be assigned to things diverse; heaven to the good; to evil, the confines of earth. Therefore, the good tends upward, though sometimes it descends to us (for the Father thereof is bountiful), but it desires naturally to return home again. But evil abides here, removed as far as possible from the heavenly choir, flitting about this mortal life, and unable, by any death of its own, to leave mortal kind. Of which we have an eloquent witness among the wise men, in Theatetus, thus: ‘Evil cannot be utterly rooted out and destroyed; for there must ever be something opposite to the good. But as it can have no place among the heavenly beings, it is forced to sojourn with mortal nature, and in these earthly abodes. Wherefore we should strive to flee- heavenward as soon as we may; and we do thus flee, if we do our utmost to become like God.’ Cain, then, does not die; which signifies that evil will ever live, in a deadly sort, with men. Wherefore it was fitly said that the manslayer should die the death, [in the sense and] for the reasons just given.” In Plutarch we find the utilitarian defence of the dualistic system, for which Plato seems to have cared nothing. “It is impossible,” says he, “that all created things should be produced by one only cause, whether good or bad; for God is not the cause of any evil. But the harmony of this world is made up of contraries, as a lyre is compounded of base and treble.
This is the sentiment of the greatest poet (Euripides), and of the wisest of the ancients; for some of them believed there were two gods, who pursued opposite ends; one the author of all good, the other of all evil. Some call the author of good, God; and the other, Daemon.”
In the passage just cited from Philo, the reader will have discovered the sentiment that matter is inherently corrupt. This was the Gnostic doctrine, so notorious in the early history of Christianity. It was the heresy which so often led to the denial of Christ’s real incarnation. The most eminent assertors of this doctrine were Saturninus, Basilides, Valentinus, and Marcion, who all regarded matter, in its brute resistance and blind hostility to the divine power, as the evil principle. Gnostic speculations were not repressed, but rather promoted, by the persecutions of that age. “Deeper systems,” says Bunsen, “stirred up the religious and thoughtful mind of the times. It was, in particular, the old Oriental Dualism, that child both of a deep sense of the cause of sin, and of the wickedness and oppression of the ruling powers on earth, which now tried to establish itself as a Christian element.”
We have met with the suggestion that the phrase, “oppositions of science falsely so called” (1 Timothy 6: 20), is an allusion to the Gnostic theory of contrasted good and evil; but we are not prepared to adopt it. Conybeare and Howson refer the expression to the vain babblings and logomachies before named. But, declining a reference to the contrasts between Law and Gospel affirmed by Marcion, they say: “If there be an allusion to any Gnostic doctrines at all, it is more probable that it is to the dualistic opposition between the principles of good and evil in the world, which was an Oriental element in the philosophy of some of the early Gnostics.”
To this age belongs Tatian, who first asserted a penal immortality, and who afterwards led the sect of Encratites. And not long after lived Tertullian, who embraced and defended Montanism, an ascetic doctrine, “which, if it had generally prevailed, would either have destroyed the Church or the nature of man.” His character was “ severe, gloomy, and fiery.” He was “a foe to speculation, yet could not resist the impulses of a profound speculative intellect.” The following expression of his views is pertinent to our present argument. The Divine Reason, he says, “composed the universe of diverse elements, that all things might subsist by the union of opposing principles; of vacuum and matter, the animate and the inanimate, the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, light and darkness, even life and death.
The same Reason has also given Time an appointed and marked limitation, so that the first beginning thereof in which we live, should after a season come to an end; while that which follows, and for which we wait, should continue into a boundless eternity. When the interval shall have expired, and the fashion of the world itself, which is also temporal, like a vestibule to that eternal scheme, — then the whole human race shall be raised up, to answer for the good or evil deeds of this life, and shall be consigned over to a vast and endless eternity. There will not then be successive deaths and resurrections, but we shall be the same persons as now, and no other there- after; the worshippers of God, ever with God, clothed with a substance proper for endless duration; but the corrupt and ungodly in a punishment of mountains of fire, that has in its own nature a divine ministration of immortality.”
This passage is one of a class. It states evil as an eternal fact, with a philosophic necessity, but without a corresponding theology; for the age of theodicy was not yet. In this state of things appeared Manes, a Persian of the Magusaean sect, who held an absolute Dualism, and with whom, in the changes of contending parties, he was now banished from the kingdom. The formation of his system is thus indicated by Hase: “Having discovered many points of agreement between the doctrines of Mithraism, of Buddhism, and of Gnostic Christianity, and the principles of his own paternal faith, he believed himself called to combine these popular religions, especially Parsism and Christianity, into one universal religion.” To this task he was already invited by the Dualism for which Christians were even now reproached by their heathen opponents. Celsus charged them with holding that “ there is an execrable god, contrary to the great God.”
And Plotinus wrote a book against those Christians who asserted that this world was made by an evil god. The complaint of Athanasius, that“ some heretics, forsaking the ecclesiastical doctrine, and making shipwreck of of the faith, have falsely attributed a real nature and essence to evil,” also indicates that this doctrine was troublesome to the churches. This is most manifest from the lively account we have of a debate, real or fictitious, supposed to have been held between Manes and Archelaus, and which betrays an intense interest, on the part of the audience, in the question whether the doctrine of an evil god was true, or was to prevail.
One passage of this debate is most important, as showing that the eternity of evil was really the main question, and that the orthodox argument was apparently sustained, only when this dire eternity was given up. “If the human race should at length perish from the face of the earth, in such a way that they can sin no more, the substance of this evil tree, bearing no more fruit, would perish.” “And when,” asks Manes, “will that thing happen, that you tell of?” “I am only a man,” replied Archelaus, “ and do not know what will come; nevertheless I shall not leave that point without saying something upon it.” He afterwards says: “ Therefore it [death] has an end, because it began in time; and that is true which was spoken: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ For it was not unbegotten, but is shown to have both beginning and end.” Archelaus’s doctrine of the End of Evil is, indeed, restorationist; but the applause of the audience at the discomfort of Manes, when the dispute ends, is none the less significant.”
The history of the Manichaans is interesting for their crude opinions, their ascetic virtues and vices, and their sufferings. Persecuted, first as a Persian sect and then as Gnostic Christians, they still flourished and made proselytes everywhere. Augustine was for nine years of their persuasion, and after embracing Christianity spared no pains to convince them of their error. They were the first to suffer death as heretics, though not without remonstrance from such men as Ambrose. Under various names, among which was the title of boni homines, they survived until the eleventh century, when they were universally punished with death; and thereafter as a lingering sect, prevailing in some districts, as late as A. D. 1442.
Shortly after the time of Manes, Dualism recovered its philosophic form, in the writings of Lactantius, “the Christian Cicero.” He often speaks of evil as essential to the existence of good, by a law of contraries or a polarity of forces of which neither can subsist without the other. Evil is necessary to illustrate the nature of good, and therefore is made part of the original plan of the world. But even with Lactantius, who is most eloquent in the philosophic defence of the doctrine, it became in its development a personal Dualism. Christ and Satan are respectively the right hand and the left hand of God. And Satan is an anti- God, the rival of the true God. The Manichasan character of his theology was however so manifest, that one most objectionable passage was omitted from later manuscripts and earlier editions of his works, “ probably to save his reputation. “ It is admitted by Hase, with the remark that “his belief in a principle of evil appointed by God, and of equal rank with Christ, and in a millennial kingdom, may be regarded as a lingering shadow of the preceding century.”
It is here worthy of notice that Ritter reckons Synesius as incontestably a Dualist. Besides his opinions already noted, he gives as reasons for this judgment the following: “The world appeared to him to be a harmony composed of diverse elements. There are two principles, one of light, the other of darkness striving to wrest from the divine law its authority. How often does he speak of matter as the second principle! The material and the immaterial are coeternal. He denied the future destruction of the world, and the resurrection, regarding the body as the source of evil.”
The Lactantian form of Dualism appears in the writings of two eminent Mohammedans.” Among the Schoolmen the problem of Evil was thus solved by Dims Scotus; and Aquinas was, perhaps, once perplexed to refute this philosophy; if we may infer anything from his exclaiming in a fit of abstraction, in the presence of the king, striking the table with his hand, that “the argument was now conclusive against the Manichaeans.” The devout mystic Jacob Boehme is thought by some to derive evil by the same method.
The fictitious character of poetry exempts it from theological censure until it becomes the expression of a theology. Such is the fact in the case of the two great epics of Christendom, — the “Divina Commedia” and the “Paradise Lost.” In the former, the woes of lost men, however wicked or contemptible, honoured with immortal song, would move the stones to pity. In the latter, fallen angels are “angels still;” and the high rank and eternal power assigned to the Adversary justify the remark of one who says: “I have many times thought that it was owing to the lofty and grandiose descriptions given in the Paradise Lost, that men, since the time when that poem came to be popular, have invested Satan with a kind of attributes never before assigned to him; and, as was natural to the increasing spirituality of religion, have more and more divested him of the notion of locality and form, till the Evil One of this age is become, in effect and conceit of men, the Evil Principle of the Magians.”
Arch bishop King, in his work on the Origin of Evil, finds what we may call a Dualism in the divine nature. He concludes thus: “From a competition, or, if we may allow the expression, a conflict of two infinities, i.e. Omnipotence and Goodness, evils necessarily arise. These attributes amicably conspire together, and yet restrain and limit each other. There is a kind of struggle and opposition between them, whereof the evils in nature bear the shadow and resemblance. Here, then, and nowhere else, may we find the primary and most certain rule and origin of evils, and here only must we look for that celebrated principle of the ancients, — The Pestilential Strife and Bloody Fight.”
The eternity of evil follows logically from this statement of the case, though it contains an element of truth which we hope to bring out in its place. Kindred to this is the very prevalent view, that the various attributes of God could not be known except by occasion of evil; especially that His justice and His mercy would be veiled glories, if they were not displayed in the punishment or the pardon of guilty creatures. The key-note of this necessitous optimism was struck in the sayings of one of the Fathers respecting the glory revealed in Christ: “Happy the sin which brought us such a Redeemer.”
Another form of the doctrine of God’s necessities, touching the execution of His justice, is sometimes stated in so palpable a dualism, that the Manichean notion would be almost a relief from it. Thus we have been told that “God was reduced to the unavoidable dilemma,” of either contending with men forever by threatening and punishments here on the earth, or else destroying them utterly, so far as it respects this world, and removing the scene of their torments to a future state.
Deferring for a moment a few modern dualistic passages, we should here consider the Manichaean relief from these difficulties that was offered by Bayle, at the beginning of the last century. His hypothesis was not only suited to his peculiar genius, his very acuteness causing him to waver between opposing plausible outcomes, but it was adapted to the age in which he lived. The startling paradox was needed to expose the shallowness of many a dogmatic solution of the deepest and most fearful problem. He was indeed a sceptic, but in the ancient and honourable sense of the term. Denying the fact of moral evil, he was properly a fatalist. But his general integrity is well attested.’
He regarded as “inexplicable and incomprehensible “the origin of any evil, more or less. But he inveighs most earnestly, not to say ably, against the derivation of eternal evil from any form of monotheism, of the Calvinist, exalting the divine power, he demands why a Being, freely creating the materials of a universe for His own glory, must allow so much evil. Of the Arminian, extolling the divine goodness, he asks why created free agents must be ever miserable in spite of that goodness. Of the Origenist, who subjected the freely acting creature, and through him the Creator, to an eternal vicissitude of evil, he asks if an alone supreme God must permit even this. “See, then,” he says, “how reason is compelled to acknowledge that two opposite causes, the one benign, the other malign, have determined the condition of created beings.” “This is the way, the Manichaean would conclude, that we exculpate the Good Principle; He has been crossed by the Evil Principle. Who- ever has a companion, has a master.”
Confessing the intrinsic absurdity of Manichaeism, and yet affirming that it was, as a hypothesis, preferable to any existing theology, Bayle found opponents on every side. Of the replies which were made to his argument, seven are here worthy of notice. Le Clerc, like Archelaus in debate with Manes, distinctly abandoned the defence of the eternity of evil, and for argument’s sake assumed that all men might finally be saved; adding in a way not designedly cool: “ If such an one can silence the Manichasan, what could not they do who should reason infinitely better than the disciples of Origen? “ But why, Bayle retorts, is the Origenist chosen for this argument? How is the orthodox opinion served by opposing one false scheme to another? Why not bring forward one of those who could reason infinitely better?
The most famous reply was that of Leibnitz, which has rendered classic the name he gave it — “Theodicy.” After the manner of Lactantius, he makes evil a condition of the highest good. “There are some disorders in the parts (of the universe) which marvellously heighten the beauty of the whole; as certain discords, skilfully employed, render the harmony more exquisite.” Yet he will not say that evil is either a divine object or a divine method. “Evil has come par concomitance. This is illustrated in our system; for we have shown that the evil which God has permitted was not an object of His will as end or as means, but only as condition, since it must be enveloped in the best system.” And of an infinite number of possible systems conceived by the divine mind, Leibnitz regards the world as it is, of which evil is an essential part, to be the best. This view is the optimism with which it is so difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the notion of guilt.
Leibnitz’s system was perhaps too ingenious. His earnestness has been doubted by able critics. These doubts, which were entertained by Des Maizeaux, Le Clerc, and Poiret, are supported by a letter of the chancellor Pfaff, a friend of Leibnitz, of whom he had inquired what he thought of his book. Pfaff suggested that as Le Clerc had endeavoured simply to silence the Manicha3an by an assumed argument, so Leibnitz had attempted a plausible reply which should offend no party. Leibnitz answered: “You have hit the nail on the head. And I wonder that no one heretofore has discovered my art. For it is not the part of philosophers to be ever in earnest; for as you well suggest, they try their skill in making hypotheses. You, who are a theologian, will act the theologian in refuting errors.” And the chancellor expresses his doubts whether Leibnitz did much respect the orthodox theology. Werdermann, discussing the question of Leibnitz’s seriousness, claims for him the absence of dogmatism, and the benefit of the mental reservations: “ with all respect to what is better,” and “ if any one understands more correctly.”
The real opinion of Leibnitz respecting future punishment is not easily determined. The following passage indicates a doctrine of purgatory: “The time of purgation,” he says, “is as long as the soul needs, to understand properly the evil of its original sin; wherefore that pain consists in the vision of sin, evil, and the Devil, as the joy of heaven consists in the vision of God and of good.” He held a theory of infinite guilt, of which hereafter. He held that the heathen who die not in mortal sin are sent neither to heaven nor hell, but by the grace of Christ are changed from enemies to friends of God.
“It is not Pelagian to say that they escape hell by their own powers, but only to say that they gain heaven thus.” The remarkable essay of Lessing entitled: “Leibnitz on eternal punishments,” * gives a view of the subject not unlike that of Swedenborg, which was perhaps Leibnitz’s own.
Second in fame of the replies to Bayle is that of William King, Archbishop of Dublin. His views of eternal misery appear in the following passage: “The matter is yet in debate whether it were better to be miserable than not to be at all, and there are arguments on both sides. It is manifest that those evils which overbalance the desire and happiness of life put an end to life itself, and that such objects as are hurtful to the sense at length destroy it. The same seems to hold good in thinking substances, viz. these things which affect the mind to a higher degree than it is able to bear, may in like manner put an end to it. For they may be supposed either to drive us to madness, or so far disorder the thinking faculty as to make us think of nothing at all. “ He goes on to speak of the lost as, perhaps, in a kind of frenzy, being in fact miserable, yet refusing to give up the cause of their woe, “being still wise in their own opinion, and as it were pleasing themselves in their misery.”
The most elaborate reply was that of Crousaz. He was a statesman as well as a philosopher, and his work shows, along with high moral feeling, more of good sense than most replies, if we except his approval of Le Clerc’s method. He insists much upon the utter unreasonableness and wickedness of the sinner, in preferring evil to infinite good. He says nothing of any use or advantage to accrue to the saints, from the woes of the lost. “God makes no account of them or of their evils.” And their sufferings are not inflicted, but they consist mainly of self-reproach in view of their eternal loss. But he reduces the number of the lost far below the common estimate; censuring as pitiless those doctors who reckon among them “an infinity of persons who would be such more by their misfortune than their fault;” and, replying to Bayle’s argument that Satan had a great victory in the deluge, he deems that the temporal evils and destructions of the antediluvians, and of the Hebrews who perished in the wilderness, are their punishment. They are not of Satan’s host.
In the Boyle Lecture, allusion is made to Bayle by Dr. John Clarke. He leaves the way clear for those who think there is no immortality in the second death.
Returning to Bayle’s own time, we find Jacquelot, who had been a Calvinist, pressed with the special difficulties of the fore- ordination of eternal evil, suspected of favouring Arminianism. He confesses that the thought of eternal punishments appals the imagination; and that one is not only embarrassed, but frightened by it. He supposes the lost will be the cause of their own torment, subsisting eternally deprived of the glory of the blessed.
And of all who replied to Bayle, so far as we know, Jurieu, “the Goliath of the Protestants,” alone stood firm; and he stood up more than straight. His absolutist views are most boldly stated in his “Judgment of the rigid and the lax methods of explaining Providence and Grace.” He says: “The idea of sovereign perfection excludes what are called velleities, — imperfect volitions, which are expressed by an: ‘I would.’ . . . I should put creatures in a sovereign dependence on God. But, it is said, you thus put the creature in a state of great imperfection. I confess it. But the idea of the infinitely perfect Being obliges me to make a sacrifice of all creatures.” As shadow depends upon substance, so the creature upon God. “It is He who made Absalom lay with his father’s concubines.
He commanded Shimei to curse David.” “Man is only an instrument in His hands.” “God is the only being properly so called. . . . God has over His creatures a power without bounds, and unlimited right, to make of them whatever seems to Him good. If God had not permitted sin. He would have manifested neither the infinite hatred which He has for sin, nor His justice, nor His mercy. There would have been in the world neither laws, nor penalties, nor rewards, nor Paradise, nor Hell. And it is certain that these things enter into the idea of a perfect world, which should contribute most to the glory of its Author.” By an argument which would make God the creator of nothing, Jurieu exculpates Him from the guilt of sin. “Since God has an infinite hatred for sin, and sin is not properly a being, but a nothing and a privation of being, God can not be the author of it, nor commit it.” (§§ 3, 4, 13, 15).
Which, as it agrees in other circumstances, so does it likewise in this, that it will be eternal. Which word we find used in Scripture in various senses, but especially in these two; either to signify the whole duration of the existence of any being or thing, in any particular state; or else to signify the whole state itself, in which that person or thing exists. Each of which may be applied to that punishment which is threatened to the wicked in a future state.” — Cause and Origin of Moral Evil, Boyle Lecture Sermons, III. 274 1 Conformity de la Raison avec la Foi, pp. 205, 215, 220.
Such were the methods of argument against Bayle. The doctrine of the final destruction of the wicked, which Clarke allowed with a perhaps, and which then bore the name of Socinianism, Bayle treats with his usual objections. Yet he says: “Annihilation is of all kinds of punishment that which seems most in accordance with the ideas of the wisdom of God. They give reasons for it which M. Jacquelot leaves without reply.”
The remark of Buddeus, a learned and able writer, concluding an account of the controversy, is significant. He says: “No one can deny that the very great difficulties which press the doctrine of the origin of evil and its reconciliation with the justice and goodness of God, could be more easily overcome if an end of hell-punishments is supposed, and not their eternity.” To which we may here add the later expression of Muller: “A purely theoretic solution of the problem of the world were possible, if the evil were not; — the evil, which does not resolve itself as a passing moment in the process of the development of the world, but is capable of being maintained, by the will of the personal creature persistently hardening itself, through endless ages.”
We are well aware are that the history and inherent difficulties of a bald Manichaeism make it apparently unworthy of notice at this day. We are told that “the world is not likely to see a revival of it.” But history has given at least a very large suffrage in its favour; and its difficulties as a theodicy, in which most important view it is the strongest, may yet be referred when the difficulties of other systems are more deeply felt.
These difficulties are even now pressing multitudes of the most thoughtful divines to Origenism. This well known tendency of Tholuck arises, we are told, “from peculiar objections which he has, in common with his evangelical countrymen, against a perpetual division, dissension (Zwiespalt) in the moral universe.” And Olshausen, speaking of the unprecedented extent of Universalism, says: “Although this may often be owing to a sickly and torpid state of the moral feelings, yet it is without doubt deeply rooted in noble minds; it is the longing of the soul after complete harmony in the universe.”
The reaction now is from an apparent Dualism to the error just named. But when this way of escape is cut off by appeal to the Scriptures, we know not how easily the tide may set the other way, and the philosophic become a personal Dualism, in the exaltation of the power of Satan or some other evil agency. We are advised by a most profound writer, in allusion to the speculations of a past age, that “the theological and philosophical character of the present time can only furnish us with a poor guarantee that perhaps the inclination to a dualistic consideration of the world will not extend itself in a similar manner as a few decennaries ago.” The more subtle and bold speculation, which inquires into the mode of divine existence, along with not a little Pantheism, has even now carried the philosophic Dualism to its utmost limit, and the world must subsist by contrasts. As if the Fall had made men subtle and ingenious, they are too fond of weaving evil and good as warp and woof for the intricate texture of the universe. Religious and devout men allow expressions that can mean scarcely less. Thus a late writer, opposing the doctrine of the extinction of the wicked, says: “An ‘eternal redemption’ we regard as involving an equally eternal enslavement. Heaven is only heaven while there exists a hell!”
In a most able recent critique upon the same doctrine, the Lactantian argument of the economy and eternity of evil largely enters. The Lactantian result — “Evil and good are God’s right hand and left,” graces the introduction of a very popular epic, which, however, confers on all the instruments of evil the final blessedness which they subserve. The French philosopher whose “Modern Systems of Theodicy” has received the prize of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, appears to optimize in the style of Leibnitz, making evil “ not absolute, since it contributes to the order of the universe.” In one form of reaction from such an economy of evil, sin appears as having gained a victory over God, existing with no manner of permission from Him. In some parts of our own country a doctrine of “Two Seeds,” not unlike the Persian notion of “ two souls,” related by Xenophon, and very similar to the Manichaean derivation of the human race, — is even now extensively prevalent, s And a very popular, because very eloquent, style of theology, aggrandizes the power of evil thus: —
“The power of an endless death! Amazing and infinitely dreadful expression! Yet thus hath eternal life its infinite and opposite extreme. Death! Its shadow covers the world, darkens it, and fills all hearts with gloomy fears and forebodings. All their lifetime, through fear of death, men are subject unto bondage. Its shadow is here, but its substance and its power are the power of an endless life, life in death, and death in life, conflicting forever. There is a tremendous emphasis in the declaration that sin, when it is finished, brings forth death. When sin is finished, the whole being is alive with it, in a living, positive, active death, perfect, unmingled, unalleviated. It is absolute evil, unbalanced, unmodified, unmitigated. Perfection in sin is the negation of all good, and the active despotism of all evil. Neither of these can be without the other.
As the happiness of heaven consists in the knowledge of good, so the misery of hell consists in the knowledge of evil. In both directions the measure is infinite. Approximation towards God, in his knowledge, likeness and love, is the rule in heaven; distance from Him, and enmity against Him, is the rule in hell. And there is no half¬way, but a perfection in both extremes. .. . There are tremendous images. The shock of furious armies, the crash of falling avalanches, mountains overwhelming cities, volcanoes in action, herds of wild beasts confined and roaring in the dungeons of the Coliseum, making the whole structure quake with their bellowing?, then all at once let loose, and with a fierce conflict of hunger and rage grappling with one another; the elements in wild affright and uproar; earthquakes, conflagrations, floods, pestilences, wars; — all these are dire images of terror, ruin, desolation, destruction. But all these, and even the stars dropping from heaven, as when a fig-tree castes her un- timely figs, and the whole universe beaten together in chaos, or shrivelling as a parched scroll, — all these come short of any representation of an eternal death; they all fail, they are mere transitory syllables. The moral death is unapproachable by any such representation.”
What more than this could the Adversary do or desire, if he were a God?
9. THE REACTION. AGONY OF FAITH.
The acquired sense of the term “Manichaean,” as denoting an inherent corruption of matter and the propriety of an ascetic life, is significant of the moral result of Dualism. It carries the conflict of the universe into the bosom of every man who would be saved, and makes the struggle between the flesh and the spirit an internecine warfare, in which the body is no longer regarded as a wayward servant, to be first subdued and then cherished, until it shall give place to a better; but as a natural enemy, under whose tyranny we are born, and from whom we must escape as best we may. The history of this form of Dual- ism would be not only the external history of asceticism, but the account of a thousand questionings, misgiving, and doubts, respecting the empire of God and the reason of this terrible necessity imposed upon the children of His kingdom.
We have noted a probable connection between the ascetic life, and the notion of a penal immortality, in the case of Tatian. And in our first chapter we have observed some trying results of the notion of an absolute immortality. We may now note a few instances of burdened and agonized faith, among those who accept the doctrine of eternal evil, regarding it as no part of God’s plan, and from whose theology we have deduced the principle of Dualism.
Our first example contains, if we mistake not, the very principle of asceticism; the sentiment, at least, would be so applied, in the monastery. “If,” says Moses Stuart, “parents, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, must see those dear as their own life perish at last, while they themselves are saved, heaven in mercy will either extinguish their social susceptibilities, or else give them such a sweet and overpowering sense of the justice and goodness of God, as shall not permit the joys of the blessed to be marred, nor the songs of the redeemed to be interrupted with sighs of sympathetic sorrow. How this will or can be done, we may never know in the present world; nay, we may have many a distressing hour, while inquiring how it can be done, unless our very nature itself is wholly changed.”
Another example is found in a late discussion of the Arminian scheme. To the objection that God “is liable to be defeated in all His designs, and to be as miserable as He is benevolent,” and that “this is infinitely the gloomiest idea that was ever thrown upon the world; it is gloomier than hell itself;” it is replied: “True, there might be a gloomier spectacle in the universe than hell itself; and for this very reason it is, as we have seen, that God has ordained hell itself, that such gloomier spectacle may never appear in the universe to darken its transcendent and eternal glories. It is on this principle that we reconcile the goodness of God with the awful spectacle of a world lying in ruins, and with the still more awful spectacle of an eternal hell beyond the grave.” Again: “We need not frighten ourselves with ‘gloomy ideas.’ There are gloomy facts enough in the universe to call forth all our fears. Indeed, if we should permit our minds to be directed, not by the reality of things, but by the relative gloominess of ideas, we .should altogether deny the eternity of future torments, and rejoice in the contemplation of the bright prospects of the universal holiness and happiness of created beings.”
The experience of John Foster has been very aptly employed in the arguments of the “Conflict of Ages.” We shall cite his language with some reluctance, on account of a prevalent notion that he was of a gloomy temper. If this were true, it should be considered that he might well be gloomy, whether himself persuaded, or surrounded by fellow creatures who were persuaded, that sin and woe must be eternal. But Foster, though pensive as men of genius are wont to be, was not gloomy; he was, in society and in his familiar letters, cheerful; and the growing appreciation of this fact will, we think, give full value to his sentiments on the problem of Evil.
Writing to Dr. Harris on receipt of a copy of his “Great Commission,” he says: “I hope, indeed may assume, that you are a man of cheerful temperament; but are you not sometimes invaded by the darkest visions and reflections while casting your view over the scene of human existence, from the beginning to this hour? To me it appears a most mysterious and awful economy, overspread by a lurid and dreadful shade. I pray for the piety to maintain a humble submission of thought and feeling to the wise and righteous Disposer of all existence.
And it would be a transcendently direful [contemplation] if I believed the doctrine of the eternity of future misery. It amazes me to imagine how thoughtful and benevolent men, believing that doctrine, can endure the sight of the present world and the history of the past. . . I am, without pretending to any extra- ordinary depth of feeling, amazed to conceive what they do with their sensibility, and in what manner they maintain a firm assurance of the Divine goodness and justice.” And in another letter, he says: “Under the light (or the darkness) of this doc- trine, how inconceivably mysterious and awful is the whole economy of this human world! The immensely greater number of the race hitherto, through all ages and regions, passing a short life under no illuminating, transforming influence of their Creator; ninety-nine in a hundred of them, perhaps, having never even received any authenticated message from Heaven; passing off the world in a state unfit for a spiritual, heavenly and happy kingdom elsewhere; and all destined to everlasting misery. The thoughtful spirit has a question silently suggested to it of a far more emphatic import that that of him who exclaimed, Hast thou made all men in vain?‘“
The experience of the author of the “Conflict of Ages” is most fully stated under the view of God as sovereign, but malevolent, and more aptly illustrates another part of our argument. But the following expressions may be cited here. He says: “For a time the system of this world rose before my mind, in the same manner, as far I can judge, as it did before the minds of Channing and Foster. I can, therefore, more fully appreciate their expression of their trials and emotions. But I was entirely unable to find relief as they did. The depravity of man, neither Christian experience, the Bible, nor history would permit me to deny. Nor did reason or Scripture afford me any satisfactory grounds whatever for anticipating the restoration of the lost to holiness in a future state. Hence, for a time, all was dark as night.”
One other instance of anguished faith will be specially apposite, as the subject of it is known not to cherish any of the doubts, or to accept any of the theories, of the persons hereto- fore named. He does not tell us what would he his feelings if he believed thus, nor of any escape from past conflict. Of marked strength and symmetry of character as a man and as a Christian divine, he stands as erect as the most implicit faith will sustain him, under the fairest pressure of the burden. And he says:
“That the immortal mind should be allowed to jeopardize its infinite welfare, and that trifles should be allowed to draw it away from God, and virtue, and heaven; that any should suffer forever, — lingering on in hopeless despair, and rolling amidst infinite torments without the possibility of alleviation, and without end; that since God can save men, and will save a part, he has not purposed to save all; that, on the supposition that the atonement is ample, and that the blood of Christ can cleanse from all and every sin, it is not in fact applied to all; that, in a word, a God who claims to be worthy of the confidence of the universe, and to be a being of infinite benevolence, should make such a world as this, full of sinners and sufferers; and that when an atonement had been made. He did not save all the race, and put an end to sin and woe for ever; —
“These, and kindred difficulties, meet the mind when we think on this great subject; and they meet us when we endeavour to urge our fellow sinners to be reconciled to God, and to put confidence in Him. On this ground they hesitate. These are real, not imaginary difficulties. They are probably felt by every mind that has ever reflected on the subject; and they are unexplained, unmitigated, unremoved. I confess, for one, that I feel them, and feel them more sensibly and powerfully the more I look at them, and the longer I live. I do not understand these facts; and I make no advances towards understanding them.
I do not know that I have a ray of light on this subject, which I had not when the subject first flashed across my soul I have read, to some extent, what wise and good men have written. I have looked at their theories and explanations. I have endeavoured to weigh their arguments; for my whole soul pants for light and relief on these questions. But I get neither; and in the distress and anguish of my own spirit, I confess that I see no light whatever. I see not one ray to disclose to me the reason why sin came into the world; why the earth is strewed with the dying and the dead; and why man must suffer to all eternity.
“I have never seen a j article of light thrown on these subjects, that has given a moment’s ease to my tortured mind; nor have I an explanation to offer, or a thought to suggest, that would be of relief to you. I trust other men — as they profess to do — understand this better than I do, and that they have not the anguish of spirit which I have; but I confess, when I look on a world of sinners and of sufferers; upon death-beds and grave-yards; upon the world of woe, filled with hosts to suffer for ever; when I see my friends, my parents, my family, my people, my fellow citizens; when I look upon a whole race, all involved in this sin and danger, and when I see the great mass of them wholly unconcerned, and when 1 feel that God only can save them, and yet He does not do it, — I am struck dumb. It is all dark, dark, dark to my soul, and I cannot disguise it.”
It is a sublime spectacle — that of such a man, and many such men, thus burdened, and yet confident in God that the light of another world will dispel the gloom, if it does not trans- mute the burden into a joy. The infinity may dwindle into insignificance, in that ever brightening day. “The Deity is infinitely greater than all duration, as He is infinitely greater than time.” Why not trustfully submit infinite problems, for His solution? We admire the faith that conceives of Him as so surpassingly infinite and glorious, that eternal Evil become a mote, like the spots upon the sun, invisible in His superlative brightness.
We cannot, however, admire the faith, if it seeks the infinite problem, like the knight-errant in quest of adventures; for it then becomes romantic. Much less, if it would impose the doc- trine of eternal Evil, as a term of Christian faith, upon other minds; it then becomes arrogant and despotic. And we tremble, as we gaze upon the lofty flight even of the sincere and earnest faith. The strong wing falters. The fervour is succeeded by the chill; the ecstasy subsides into pain. The faith is not joyous; many will ask if it is normal and healthy. Many more will ask if the burden must be borne; if the Evil is indeed to be eternal; and if so, is it real?
“The real, though often unavowed, ground of the doubts which are thus over clouding the spirits of so many of the nominal disciples of Christ, is the hopeless dejection with which they contemplate that part of the Christian scheme which is supposed to consign the vast majority of our race to a future state, in which woe, indescribable in amount, is also eternal in duration. From this doctrine the hearts of most men turn aside, not only with an instinctive horror, but with an invincible incredulity; and of those who believe that it really proceeded from the lips of Christ himself, many are sorely tempted by it either to doubt the divine authority of His words, or to destroy their meaning by conjectural evasions of their force.” — Sir James Stephen, Essays in Ecclesiastes Biographies, II. 495, Epilogue.
We may here cite the words of a deservedly popular writer, as justifying the doubts of one person already named, and suggesting a fact less known respecting another person. “If John Foster, or any man, deliberately and honestly conceive it irreconcilable with infinite love that God should condemn the wicked to everlasting punishment, we see not how he can accept the fact without blasphemy. If a man’s reason, gazing earnestly and reverently with lively consciousness of its own faint and glimmering vision, and full thought of the compass and weight of infinite love guiding infinite power, is yet unable, we say not to justify, but to believe in the possible justice of eternal torments, we see not how he can accept the doctrine. It is not lawful for any man, taking the sentence, ‘God is love,’ to use it as a fiery rod, though it were of celestial gold, where with to sear the eyeballs of his reason. One man, considering long, and searching Scripture, can, with no outrage on his moral being, embrace in one view the courts of eternal joy and the prison of eternal darkness, and believe unconstrainedly that the King who sits over both is love; such a one, we believe, was Jonathan Edwards. But another man cannot do so; and if he is as honest and reverent as the last, who is there on earth that can accuse him? “
Jonathan Edwards doubtless “believed unconstrainedly” as a divine; as almost any one may do in the way of speculation, saying that the Judge of all the earth will certainly do right, even if some of His creatures should suffer fo ever. But as a man, Edwards suffered intensely, under the burden of his faith; often walking his room for hours together with tears of grief, in view of the supposed destiny that awaited his fellow men yet out of Christ.
10. ABSOLUTISM
In this theology, evil is regarded as a vi of the divine plan. Sin is opposed to God’s command; but, as a means to an end, it accords with God’s desire. Behind His revealed will, there is a secret will designing and procuring the commission of that which He forbids, but which is supposed needful for the welfare of His creatures, or for display of His glory. His sovereignty is not only exalted above all; it is extended to all things — even to the acts of men that seem to oppose it.
In support of this view, justly styled “that horrible theory which asserts the double will of God,” various passages of Scripture which assert God’s permission and control of evil, are adduced as though they taught his complicity with it. “Shall there be evil in the city, and Jehovah hath not done it?”
“I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I, Jehovah, do all these things.” “Jehovah hath made all things for Himself; yea, even the wicked for the day of evil.” “The Scripture said of Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might show my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath He mercy on whom He will have mercy, and whom He will He hardens. Thou wilt say then unto me, ‘Why doth He yet find fault? For who hath resisted His will?” “He works all things after the counsel of His own will.” Such expressions of a language not the most flexible, designed to inspire confidence in Jehovah’s power, and some of them designed expressly to meet a dualistic or polytheistic tendency, — are taken as accurate exponents of a theological system. Sin is no longer the mystery, for it is God’s work; the difficulty is shifted from its origin to the justice of its punishment.
For the external history of this doctrine, which makes Might the fountain of Right, we naturally look to the old empires in which a despotic will was law. A decree issued by the king of Babylon was presumed to be just, because it was backed with power. And for the same reason, perhaps, the laws of the Medes and Persians were assumed to be infallible, and made changeless. By some Greek philosophers the true idea of right was timidly asserted; but so little was it understood at Rome, that her governor of a Judaean province, hearing from the Saviour of men respecting his own righteous kingdom, could ask in sheer ignorance of his meaning, “What is Truth?”
The notion of Power was thus deified. What man might do in a subordinate sphere, God might do in the most absolute manner. The perversion was complete, when secular and spiritual power were combined in the head of a corrupt Church, who might, in the name of God, oppose and exalt himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped. The corruption of theology was an inevitable result. We need not trace this in its early stages; but in the time of Abelard we find it boldly asserted: “God commits no injustice towards His creature, in whatever way He treats him, whether he assigns him to punishment or to life. In whatever way God may wish to treat His creature, He can be accused of no injustice; nor can anything be called evil in any w ay, if it is done according to His will. ‘Nov can we, in any other way, distinguish good from evil, except by noticing what is agreeable to His will. Wherefore even those things which in themselves appear most improper and therefore blameworthy, no one can censure when they are done by command of the Lord.”
The same doctrine is more explicitly taught by Ockham: “There is no act evil but as it is prohibited by God, and which cannot be made good if commanded by God. If God had commanded His creatures to hate Himself, the hatred of God would ever be the duty of man.” Of this deplorable theology we see traces in the assertion of the great Reformer, that “it is the highest degree of faith to believe that He is merciful who saves so few and reprobates so many; to believe Him just who of His own will makes us necessarily damnable; so that He should seem, as Erasmus says, to delight in the torments of the lost, and more worthy to be hated than to be loved.”
Which Luther endeavours to justify by saying: “If you are pleased when God crowns the undeserving, you ought not to be displeased though He should damn those who deserve it not.” The Jansenists, opposing the errors of the Jesuits, and affirming the irresistible grace of God, were condemned partly on the charge of similar views of God’s power. And, without citing further examples here, it may be safely said that a proneness to justify the divine acts simply in the divine sovereignty, still remains as an extreme opinion in the church of Christ.
That the Jesuits should oppose this view accords well with their doctrine of the human free-will, but not so clearly with their characteristic doctrine that the end sanctifies the means, and may transmute evil into good. The paradox is perhaps explained by the fact that the Augustinians have ever exalted the divine will and authority; the Jesuits, the human will and authority. The former have often gone too far; yet in reducing all men to littleness before God, they have found a basis of human equality and civil liberty. The latter have put man in the place of God, in the papal prerogative. The dispute was in fact respecting the higher and the lower law; the rights of conscience can be opposed only by the vox populi, vox .Dei, which matures in the one-man power, and the common subversion of morality and liberty.
The doctrine of the despot is the most frequent example of Absolutism. The same view is prevalent among the defenders of slavery. Thus it has been lately said: “I am ready to deny the great doctrine of eternal right and wrong. My ‘eternal right is eternal conformity to what God says; and my ‘eternal wrong’ is non-conformity. But I deny, absolutely, that there is an eternal right and wrong in the nature of things. This doctrine is atheism.”
We have spoken of Absolutism as a relief sought from the burden of Dualism. The reason is obvious; it is hard to think of God as pressed by necessity; very hard indeed, if the necessity is to be eternal. May He not make a virtue of it? May it not be His choice? May not the Adversary be a desirable servant of the Divine Majesty? The philosophic form of Dualism, as stated by Lactantius, was scarcely less than this. And even the Manicheans sometimes regarded the temptation and the transgression of our first parents as legitimate steps of human progress, well pleasing to God. The same view, which seems to make vice the school of virtue, and sin the
lesson of holiness, appears in conjunction with the denial of man’s free will, in various inquiries into the origin of evil. It is carried to a consistent result, we think, when the eternal suffering of the lost is sought to be justified as contributing to the eternal happiness of the saved.
11. THE REACTION. PROSTITUTION AND PROSTRATION OF FAITH.
The strong expression cited from Luther, may be taken as an instance of the Prostitution of Faith; but in his case formal and not real, vindicating as he did the distinctions of right and wrong against the indulgences and other corruptions of his age. The sovereignty which he strove to affirm, was that of God’s grace and power against man’s claim and arbitrary. The corruption of faith was more real in the views of those whom he op- posed. But the corruption is repeated whenever power is adored for no other reason than because it is power, — the very vice which Zoroaster censured in the worshippers of Ahriman. “Faith without reason,” says Dr. Arnold, “is not properly faith, but mere power worship; and power worship may be devil worship; for it is reason which entertains the idea of God, — an idea essentially made up of truth and goodness, no less than of power.”
To accept the doctrine of reprobation to eternal suffering, as an awful mystery, is one thing. To think one has solved the mystery and reconciled it with the divine goodness, is a very different thing. Here is the danger to man’s faith. When the endless woe of myriads is apprehended as good for the universe, the moral sense may suffer in two ways: 1st, by a palsying of the sensibilities, — a well-being largely diluted with evil, being taken as the highest good; 2d, by an ethical perversion, — evil being taken as the proper means of the highest good.
One may put evil for good, or he may do evil that good may come. In either case our faith in God and our love to man will be corrupted. “When,” says “Watts, “I hear men talk of the doctrine of reprobation with a special gust and relish, as a favourite article, I cannot but suspect their good temper, and question whether they love their neighbours as themselves.” But by the quality of our love to man will the nature of our theology and of our worship be largely determined.
The Prostitution of Faith is incident either to the possession of power, or to the enjoyment of its favours. And it is confined to no species of power, secular or spiritual. The king, who “ can do no wrong,” and the courtier v ho can do no wrong in his be- half, the oppressor and the extortionist, rejoicing in the fruit of other’s toil, the Jesuit of whatever name, “ lying for God,” and the persecutor, who “ thinks he is doing God service,” the deluded man who deems himself “elect” and a favourite of Heaven, while he is careless of other’s salvation, — are all examples of this corrupted faith. And they are so numerous, and so closely allied to some pretence of religion, that it has become a proverb that no monstrous wrong was ever committed but it was “for the glory of God.”
The victim of abused power, on the other hand, can hardly know what faith is. To him, there is no “open vision,” no manifest Providence. He knows no divine Goodness or Justice, if the evils he endures are to be not redressed. He may conceive a future retribution in which the tyrant and the slave shall change places; but the morbid, vengeful feeling would not be faith. Tell him of an eternity, in which men of the most opposite conditions in this life, may in various degrees suffer together, and that will not give him faith. As for himself, he feels sure that his present sufferings cannot be the beginning of endless pains Persuade him thus, and however good you may say that God is, your theology will be to him a divine Despotism, and his faith is prostrate.
We need hardly say that all prayer offered to God under a mere persuasion of infinite danger, might with equal propriety, often with the same feelings, be offered to a God of absolute power, but of no recognized goodness or justice.
12. PANTHEISM. THE ECLIPSE OF FAITH.
Better no God, than an evil God. Hence every theology which imposes evil as an eternal necessity, or introduces it s a divine plan, tends to the denial of the moral quality of sin, and of a personal Divine Being. Total darkness is preferred to the baleful light. Better no sun, frowning with lurid glare, than that the green earth, with myriads of people, should be scorched with deathless heat. A law of Nature, — an impersonal and un- thinking God inextricably enveloped in the folds of matter, and only to be discovered as a no- God, would be the most grateful religion to such a woe-worn world.
But men are not wont to rest in the doctrine of eternal evil, until it is proven past all gainsaying; and the belief of a personal God is almost as natural as the disbelief of eternal Evil. Hence the assertion of eternal suffering as a revealed doctrine, tends not so directly to Atheism as to a rejection of the Bible for some form of Deism. Of this the scepticism of the Earl of Shaftesbury, the friend and patron of Locke, is an example. “There is a tradition,” says Dr. Kippis, “that amongst other difficulties which occurred to him in regard to the truth of the Christian Revelation, he was startled at the idea of its containing the doc- trine of the eternity of hell-torments; that he consulted some eminent churchmen whether the New Testament positively asserted that doctrine; and that, upon being assured that it did, he declared himself incapable of assenting to a system of religion which maintained a tenet so repugnant to all his views of the great Government of the Universe.”
It will not do here to say that sceptics are bad men, rejecting the Scriptures not so much because they are supposed to reveal an eternal punishment, as because they do teach a future retribution. True it is that fallen man dislikes a God of justice. But when Christians overlook the difference between finite and infinite punishment, or rather, between infinite loss and endless pain, they may, instead of removing a stumbling block, only give new occasion of offence. Thinking men are loath to hear of a God who cannot punish at all but He must punish eternally. And so long as the doctrine of endless suffering is commonly regarded as essential to the Christian system, we must not wholly ignore it. If the sceptic need not believe it, let us frankly tell him so.
Deism, as a negative religion, is the most natural form of scepticism. But it does not solve the problem of Evil. That still remains, after the curtain has dropped between God and the world. Moral evil is then likely to be resolved into mere natural evil. For if the principles of moral duty are not only not created, but are not administered, by a divine Ruler of the world, they soon become a mere law of nature. The highest duty then is “to live according to nature;” a phrase that means much or little, according as one has learned to cherish spiritual or material interests. The delights of virtue, as inherently attractive and self-rewarding, may be extolled for a time, even to the just shame of those who regard duty as the creature of law, an appointed method of enjoyment, a means and not an end. But if Virtue has no divine Protector, and suffers many insults, she may all too soon submit to the customs of a rude and fatherless world; vice and its punishment shall then mean only imprudence and consequent suffering. Then all things are resolved into a blind course of Nature, and “by the magic-lantern of Pantheism all the colours of good and evil” are “mingled and both one and the other softened down into a dull grey.”
In many minds, this process will be arrested by retaining the notion of God as Goodness and Providence, after he has been dismissed as Ruler and Judge. The principle that all punishment is reformatory, love in disguise, not at all retributive, is pushed to a suicidal extreme. Justice never kills. The pains of guilt are the symptoms of returning health. All will be saved. The All-Providence will bring every moral being to its proper course, and its final welfare. Sin is not hazardous. Here the old logic is reapplied. Sin is not sinful. Man is not free. Evil is only natural, — a part of the system of things, — an imperfect good, — a first lesson in the divine life, — a heritage which the All-Father has bequeathed. With Him, it was either a necessity or a plan, — fate or choice. Thus the popular theology of universal salvation comes round to the old problems, to contribute in its turn to the forces of scepticism.
“We cannot better close this argument than with the words of an eminent writer before cited, who offers “the consideration that the generally received opinion regarding the endless duration of the state of punishment, is among the most effective of all the causes which are at present inducing amongst us that virtual abandonment of Christianity, which assigns a mythic sense to almost every part of the sacred oracles. Learnedly and wisely as that fallacy has been combated by many, their yet more serious attention might, perhaps, be advantageously given to the inquiry whether that opinion, which is to so large a number an insuperable rock of offence, might not be either retracted or qualified without any sacrifice of truth; and whether, if so, they would not contribute by such an acknowledgment, to reclaim the deserters to the camp much more effectually than by any assault on the positions in which they have openly entrenched themselves.”
“Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.”
1. THEODICY A DUTY. ABSOLUTISM.
While the doctrine of eternal suffering appears to give a choice of three unsatisfactory theories of the divine nature, it may yet be asked if it is not a method or a necessity of the divine justice. For if endless penal evil can be shown to be just, however hard it may seem to God or man, the vindication of the common theology is complete, and the difficulties we have set forth must vanish in the light of a clearer day. However greatly our faith may be burdened now, such a settlement of the question must be final; for the rigid application of a principle of justice can never be so disastrous as that there should be no justice in the world.
We not only admit the appeal, but we welcome it as a renunciation of the absolutist theology we have just examined. But as we prosecute the appeal to the higher court of Theodicy, we should tarry for a moment to show that an absolutist theodicy is self-contradictory and impossible, and that the distinctions of right and wrong cannot be created by the pure arbitrary ways of God.
Dr. Twisse, Prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly, says of the punishments of the lost: “These judgments of God are tremendous, I confess; but they are not to be brought before the tribunal of human wisdom and justice, nor examined and discussed by the rules of our reason and equity. Especially as it is lawful for God the Creator to treat a creature, however innocent, in whatever manner He pleases, whether it seem good to God to annihilate him, or to inflict upon him any torture what- ever.” And, making a distinction between justice ordained and justice absolute, he says: “There is no such thing in God as justice properly so called, in respect to his creatures; that is, by which He is bound to them. But that which is called the justice of God in respect to creatures is only His fidelity, which supposes a promise. I acknowledge no other justice in God than that by which He wisely orders all things to effect his own purposes.”
This statement implies and almost expresses the higher argument, that God has a right to do what He will because He is the Creator of all. But this is to appeal to a principle of justice in the nature of things; a principle older than any act of creation, and without which God could have no eternal right to reign. And what is called God’s “ordained justice,” and his obligation to fidelity, presupposes an uncreated and undecreed rule of justice, without which God could not be bound by his promise, but might break his oath as freely as he made it. God is bound to keep his covenant, not only because He makes it, but because the principles of truthfulness and justice are eternal. And we shall entertain the most exalted views of God, not by supposing that He is above character, and too great to be just, but by regarding Him as most truly representing and realizing all that is great and just and good. It is his perfection to love the right, not because it is his handiwork, but because it is indeed right. “ He doth not fondly love himself because He is himself, but because He is the highest and most absolute goodness; so that if there could be anything in the world better than God, he would love that better than himself. But because He is essentially the most perfect good, therefore He cannot but love his own goodness infinitely above all other things.”
To suppose that the qualities of justice and holiness are created by- God’s pure will is not only to leave the faith and worship of man without reason, but it blots out the sun behind the cloud, and leaves God himself without a reason for any of his doings.
But we should not overlook a plausible side of the argument from God’s sovereignty. Are not all things His by right of creation? and may He not do what He will with his own? Does not Paul silence an objector by saying: “Who art thou that replies against God? Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another to dishonour? “Very true; but Paul here appeals to the divine sovereignty to vindicate, not the justice of God’s punishments, but his right of election among his creatures to give eternal life to whom He will. They could establish no right to be created or to possess immortality. Their existence was from the first a gift; its continuance is a special grace. God may appoint to the dishonour of death — which even the heathen know to be the just judgment of the law — whom He will. He may assign the means and opportunities of salvation to whom he will. And though He does and must respect the characters they form, and give his final judgments accordingly, the rule of his original election may be not only a mystery to our reason, but as dependent on his pure will as the location or relative position of stars and systems of worlds in absolute space. God’s punishments must be just; but his gifts may be as free in respect to the subjects of them as the universe is large.
But if there are principles of justice, by virtue of which we are able to say that God is just, it follows that justice is one and uniform, the same in heaven and on earth. As the law of attraction is the same for atoms and for worlds, so justice changes not, whether applied to the relations of the finite or of the Infinite. We have no more occasion to say with the ancients that “ the gods have a justice of their own,” or to interpret the prophet’s appeal from man’s distrust to God’s pardoning love as if it had been said; “As the heavens are above the earth, so his ways are not our ways, nor his principles our principles.”
And as the appeal to mystery is not sustained by the use which Paul makes of the divine sovereignty, so neither is it often relied on by those who make it. A very few eminent theologians have accepted the doctrine of eternal suffering with no theory whatever to reconcile it with the justice of God; but while they accept it with most implicit confidence, their faith is most burdened by it. By far the greater number of those who have written on the subject have striven to vindicate the divine justice, and to transfer the dire problem from the domain of mystery to that of reason. Their theories are offered more or less confidently, either as triumphant vindications or as possible explanations that may silence objection; but they are arguments to support a trembling faith. And while the great number of different and even opposite theodicies indicates the doubtfulness of the doctrine itself, the prevailing resort to theodicy, and the distress of those who can find no theodicy, show that the doctrine was not designed for a mystery.
We might, then, at the outset, infer that the doctrine of eternal suffering is probably false, and that another doctrine of eternal punishment is both revealed and can be vindicated before the bar of man’s reason and conscience. But not to anticipate our argument, we may here affirm that Theodicy is a duty. We must not only believe that God is just, but in the fundamental principles of His government, we may know how He is just. The conviction that God is just would be a barren abstraction — an empty, though sublime, first truth of conscience — if we understood not some things which His justice requires. Conscience is other and better than superstitious fear, just be- cause it apprehends a reason for duty, and a reason for penalty.
Sovereignty and mystery may hide countless and fathomless details of the divine administration, where Faith shall have ample sphere and endless scope; but the eternal progress of the “sons of God” is in a “reasonable service,” where filial love and an enlightened moral sense are ever assimilating their feelings and thoughts to His own. In order to this progress, the many principles of common yet absolute and universal justice (which even bad men confess and understand, because they are men made after the likeness of God), must be our familiar thoughts; so that we may devoutly admire how completely God has fitted us to bear his image, and that the rational conviction of our many errors may lead us on from them to Him. It is only by knowing what is right, just, true, and good, that we can know what is God himself.
The appeal from mystery to reason and conscience is not only required by the consideration of our moral nature, and of the nature of justice, but it is sanctioned by the words of Christ: “Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?” And these words may preclude the objection to man’s judgment respecting the penalty of sin, that he is an interested party, and may be swayed by a partial self-love. True, man does fondly love himself; but this love, more than almost anything else, gives him the most lively fears respecting the future; we shall find it devising and urging several arguments for the doctrine of eternal suffering. And if the objection is pressed beyond the purpose of a caveat, it would prove too much, and we should have to accept the worst conceivable future punishment as just, since anything less might be a fond delusion of hope. But happily, conscience, as if it were the voice of God in the soul, is not silenced by the clamours of interested fear or hope. If that voice is ever hushed, the soul is lost, and all other appeal is forever in vain. If it is God’s appointed umpire, let us make our appeal, confident of the truest verdict.
2. SIN AGAINST GOD AS AN INFINITE BEING.
Since the mere supremacy or sovereignty of God fails to yield a Theodicy, this has been sought in His nature as an infinite Being, perfect in all divine attributes. The distinction here is not strictly between the natural and the moral attributes of God, but between His rank and His greatness. The last theory regards God as above all control; the present theory regards Him as beyond all limitation. It is thus stated by Hooker: “Sin hath two measures whereby the greatness thereof is judged, — the object, God against whom; and the subject, the creature in whom sin is. By the one measure all sin is infinite, because He is infinite whom sin offends; for which cause there is one eternal punishment due in justice unto all sinners. In so much that if it were possible for any creature to have been eternally with God, and co-eternally sinful, it stands with justice by this measure to have punished that creature from eternity past, no less than to punish it unto future eternity. And therefore the time which cometh between the birth and death of such as are to endure this punishment, is granted them by dispensation as it were, and toleration, at God’s hand. From that other measure, which is according to the subject of sin, there are in that eternity of punishment varieties, whereby may be gathered a rule much built upon in holy Scripture, — that degrees in wickedness have answerable degrees in the weight of their endless punishment.”
This statement guards against the common objection that infinity admits no differences of degree. This point is also finely illustrated by the elder Edwards, by the three dimensions of space, of which in a supposed case one may be infinite and the others finite and variable quantities. He likewise expands the argument very fully.
The argument admits four replies:
6. That the loss of eternal life is an infinite punishment.
7. That by parity of reasoning any punishment coming from God is infinite.
8. That by parity of reasoning obedience to God has infinite merit.
9. That the argument itself is faulty, as it deduces infinite qualities from the relations of finite things.
The first of these replies belongs to a subsequent argument. The second also, with the brief statement of it here in the words of Tillotson: “By the same reason that the least sin committed against God may be said to be infinite because of its Object, the least punishment that is inflicted by God may be said to be in- finite because of its Author.” This reply is in keeping with the lofty tone of the argument as a meditation of the greatness of God, which is its real merit, if it does not degenerate into a mathematical recreation, and lose its moral character. In this form it appears in the reply of Socrates, to a sophist arguing that if God is too great lo be profited by human worship, we need not praise or serve Him, — so much the more reason why we should adore Him. But obviously the greater majesty of God makes his frown the more terrible.
To the third reply it will be objected that the greatness of God enhances our obligation to obey, and thus at once diminishes the merit of obedience, and increases the guilt of sin. But if so, then toward God obedience has no merit whatever, and virtue is no longer a rewarding thing in the world; for all duties are due, directly or indirectly, to God. Now in truth virtue consists in love to a being, either as worthy or as needy; and the greater the love the greater the virtue. If God be its object, the effort of the virtuous man to comprehend and know God — by faith embracing Him — is his merit. And whatever be the object of holy love, God is as infinitely pleased with it as He can be displeased with any guilt or sin which is a feeling equally strong in the mind of the creature.
And this leads us to what we regard as the true refutation of the argument from God’s infinite nature. Infinity is something which cannot be imparted to any creature or to any of the creature’s acts. Man’s relation to God gives him no infinite quality, simply because he cannot comprehend and take in the whole of God. Man’s capacity is his measure, and the full measure, of his mightiest acts. His conscious relation to God, his conception of the idea of God perfect in all divine attributes, does indeed enlarge his capacity; but he does not therefore contain God, or become a god. “Canst thou by searching find out God? Can thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? Deeper than hell; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea.” Man’s relation to God is like that of the atom to the world; it is attracted by every other atom in the universe, but their united force does not give it infinite weight. And if there were but one created intelligence, upon whom all the thoughts of God’s heart were bestowed, he would be only as the little weight which might, by infinite contrivance, ‘be made to balance the world, — none the weightier for all the mechanism. Man is still a light thing, before God. His likeness to God, his power to love God, only resembles him to the needle that is drawn by the magnet; he acquires a new power, and a growing, but never an infinite life.
And here we may answer an argument from the comparison of various objects of duty. If to a created sovereign man is bound by a finite obligation, why not infinitely, to the sovereign King? We reply, all duty is imperative; yet the ride of duty, and the measure of duty, are different things. Objectively, it is regulated and determined by the relations we sustain. Our obligations maybe lower or higher, — one overruled by another; they may be temporary or permanent, relative or absolute. But subjectively, all duty is measured by the capacity of the moral agent. This is the first principle of the divine law, — love to the supreme object of duty, with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength. The law forbears to demand infinite love, not because God is unworthy, but because we are finite. He claims our hearts away from the bondage of earthly affections, as the stronger magnet draws away from the weaker; but His supremacy gives us no infinity.
For, in truth, the idea of infinity is, in a finite mind, simply negative. It is the denial of all bound and limit. Let the fancy exhaust itself in its largest conceptions, — there is ever something beyond; and this infinite beyond is just what man can never conceive. Pie knows it only as that which he can never know.
The argument from God’s infinity is sometimes urged with special reference to one or other of His attributes, particularly His holiness and justice. But what, we ask, is meant by infinite holiness? We can understand infinite power, as that which is not diminished by the creation of unnumbered worlds; and infinite wisdom as that which is perplexed by no difficulty, but can devise all possible things; and infinite goodness and love as that which is not exhausted making a universe blessed. But holiness refers to a standard. It is the purity, the glorious perfection of God. In its very nature it cannot be infinite because it cannot be more or less than perfect. The same is true of God’s justice. To do justly is to do that which is strictly right and correct. Justice is straightness, uprightness. It is the same thing in God, only in the administration of his government it has an infinite range of application. In each single application it refers necessarily to the finite. In its very nature it seeks out the limitations of things. To speak of infinite justice, or justness, is as absurd as to speak of a line as infinitely straight; of a circle as infinitely round; of a certain triangle as infinitely equiangular; or of a certain number as infinitely twenty op thirty. The plausibility of the argument from God’s infinity is, however, easily explained; the indiscriminate use of the term “infinite” gives it a vague atmosphere of indefiniteness that bewilders the mind. The mist is dispelled when one asks the proper meaning of the word.
It is obvious that this theodicy does not escape the charge of Dualism. Rather, it makes the very greatness of God the source of his weakness. His infinite being empowers the slightest evil to do Him infinite injury. His infinite dignity subjects Him to infinite insults without number. His infinity is transferred to every puny arm of finite creature, and becomes in every guilty hand a sceptre of dominion, demanding an eternity of vindictive concern in answer to an idle word of profane lips. The argument utterly perverts the sublime sentiment of Scripture: “If thou sins, what does thou against Him? or if thy transgressions be multiplied, what does thou unto Him?” “Will He reprove thee for fear of thee? Will He enter with thee into judgment? Is not thy wickedness great, and thine iniquities numberless?” (Job 35:6; 22:4, 5.) Where the sense seems to be: Your sins must have been exceedingly grievous or long continued, thus to provoke the notice of high Heaven.
3. SIN AGAINST GOD AS INFINITE LOVE?
But the language of Eliphaz to Job, just cited, is only half of the truth. God is not the impossible being of the Epicurean and the Hindu philosophy, wrapped up in a dignified, heart- less indifference respecting the world. As a God of love He must delight in those who obey Him, and He is equally grieved with those who sin against Him. “Behold,” says one, “sin is so hateful to God, and grieves Him so sore, that He would willingly suffer agony and death, if one man’s sins thereby might be washed out. And if He were asked whether He would rather live and that sin should remain, or die and destroy sin by his death. He would answer that He would a thousand times rather die. For to God one man’s sin is more hateful, and grieves Him worse than His own agony and death. Now if one man’s sin grieves God so sore, what must the sins of all men do? Hereby ye may consider, how greatly man grieves God with his sins.”
This attribute of God as a being of feelings and emotions, is wrought into a theodicy by the author of the “Conflict of Ages.” “If anything,” says he, “is prominent and not contradicted in the Bible, it is the great doctrine that the entrance of evil has involved a period of long-continued suffering to God. Indeed it is the grand characteristic of the present system, that all the glorious results to which God is conducting the universal system have been purchased at the expense of his own long continued and patiently-endured sufferings. In this He gives to the universe the highest possible proof of pure, disinterested, self-sacrificing love.” And afterwards, summing up the results of his theory, he says: “It alone leads to such an understanding of the doctrine of future eternal punishments as, connected with the previous suffering of God, shall properly throw the moral sympathies of all holy minds on the side of God, and put an end to that reaction which tends so fatally to destroy the true and indispensable power of that doctrine.”
It is not sufficient to reply to this, that the language is anthropopathic; for this is a scriptural mode of representation, as it is a necessity of all human thought and speech respecting God. Man can conceive of the infinite and the eternal only under limitations. He cannot apprehend God as a personal Being, except as also finite. All human theology is of necessity anthropomorphic. “I speak as a man,” said Paul, describing the feelings of God respecting the conduct of men. And such words as “repentance,” “grief,” “anger,” and “jealousy,” though they tell the wrong feelings as well as the right feelings of men, may, nevertheless, indicate divine truth that could not otherwise be told. And Dr. B. properly asks: “Does it exalt our ideas of God, and show the infinite difference between Him and a creature, to assert that He can put himself and all his plans fully into the mind of that creature? Or does it, on the other hand, most exalt God to say that He is so vast that no created mind can fully comprehend Him or his plans, and that it is beyond his power to destroy the infinite chasm that separates Creator and creature?” (p. 476.)
But is God indeed made infinitely unhappy by the sins of men? No one believes this, and for various reasons.
10. The moral perfection of God is not impaired by the existence of sin in the world. He is no party to its introduction; behind His abhorrence of it there was no secret purpose that it should exist; His relations to wrong are all right. If they were not, then might He suffer unmeasured sorrow. But His integrity is unsullied; the divine conscience is not concerned with human guilt; and thus far, at least. His blessedness is un- disturbed.
11. The limitations of human capacity are no cause of grief to God. We are told indeed of “the necessary liability of finite minds to unbelief and distrust of God, when exposed to the inevitable trials which pertain to an infinite system, such as befits God;” and of “finite capacities, and a consequent liability in the first generations of creatures to unbelief, distrust, and sin, involving a season of suffering in God.” But in itself, this finite nature is God’s work, with which He was well pleased, pronouncing it “very good.” It is not the cause of evil, but only renders sin possible. It gives one of the proximate solutions of the old problem. In one view, it makes the mystery of sin more profound. For the conscious weakness of the creature is the weightiest reason for trust and confidence in the Creator. The theodicy last considered sometimes takes just this form, — that the sin of creatures is infinitely heinous, because they, with- out having comprehended God, or weighed the Infinite in balances, have rejected and condemned Him as unworthy of their confidence. In fact, men are guilty, not because they under- stand so little of God, but because they know so much of Him. “If ye were blind, ye should have no sin; but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remains.”
There is indeed the sin of ignorance or of passion, and of presumption, — the pardonable and the unpardonable, — whence the problem of the origin of evil is two-fold; to explain the transition from faith to distrust, and from distrust to malignity. But in either form, man’s guilt cannot injure God; it is simply a rejection of his love. In so far as sin comes of weakness, God cannot be grieved, as the sage is not grieved with unlettered simplicity, though he may pity it. In so far as sin matures in hatred of God, it may, in the dramatic language of the Bible, provoke His indignation, or the smile that says He is infinitely beyond the reach of malice. His plans are not disconcerted, or his peace disturbed by the rebellion of mighty ones. “He that sits in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.” If He deigns to notice them it is not his necessity but his choice.
o. God’s love for all his creatures is free. It is a gift of His favour. The very pain and grief which it does occasion to God is disinterested; it is the earnestness, the fullness, the bounty of love. Disappointed, or unrequited, the divine love appears in the form of anger, like that of the parent toward the undutiful child. The very grief is an emotion of love, and cannot outlive it. The execution of divine justice is a painful thing to God, His “strange work,” because “God is Love;” and in this He differs from heartless Nature and relentless Fate.
The divine grief, then, is a gift. But whatever is truly given, cannot afterwards be charged as a debt. And here is the radical and enormous error of this theodicy. It represents Infinite Goodness as not only ceasing to love the creature, but revoking; the long-tried affection in the form of an account that can never through eternity be liquidated. What is generously given (and it must be generously or not at all) is given. But according to this theodicy, God’s own love is only granted as a loan, at an infinite rate of interest, the payment of which will be demanded through endless ages if the original love be not reciprocated. This vindication of divine justice consists in a ruinous draft upon the divine grace. The proper character of each is destroyed. The grace is no more grace, and the justice is no longer just.
The logical results of this theodicy are thus even fearful, as will further appear in subsequent discussions. We shall also meet with similar perversions of the idea of grace, and attempt, in the proper place, to give an explanation of them, as phenomena of man’s fallen estate.
The Dualism of the theodicy is also manifest. While it offers to restore the gift of divine love, as a lost treasure to its owner, it nevertheless exposes the divine heart, as a tender nerve, an open wound, to the smiting of every careless hand. It puts infinite blessedness at the mercy of every untrusting son of man, and makes infinite goodness the victim of millions of evil creatures. And the returned gift itself becomes a debt burdensome for collection by the eternal justice.
4. SIN AS AGAINST THE DIVINE GOVERNMENT.
The theodicies already examined are based upon various attributes of the divine nature. But with respect to God as a Ruler it is said that“ If temporal punishments are justified on the ground that they are necessary to meet the exigencies and uphold the interests of temporal governments, surely eternal punishments may be justified on the same ground in relation to an eternal government.” And sin, “as tending to infinite anarchy and mischief, must be infinite. All that is meant by calling sin infinite evil is, that it is deserving of endless punishment; and this can never be fairly objected to as an absurdity. If there be no absurdity in the immortality of a sinner’s existence, there is none in supposing him to deserve a punishment, be it in what degree it may, that shall run commensurate with it.”
Upon the face of it this argument is not so much a vindication of God’s justice as an assertion of his necessity. It is not claimed that sin is inherently deserving of endless woe, but that such a penalty is infinitely needful. The notion that the penalty is intrinsically just is formally abandoned by one of the assertors of it, thus: “What proportion ought to be appointed betwixt crimes and penalties is not so properly a consideration of justice as of prudence in the lawgiver.” Hence, “whatever the disproportion may be between temporary sins and eternal punishments, justice cannot be said to be concerned in it.” This is really an inversion of the old maxim, and we are now told, perhaps, that “injustice must be done, lest the heavens fall.“ Evil is allowed, to triumph, as a thing expedient. The theodicy is not only dualistic; it compels the Judge of all to be the author of eternal wrong. In a supposed emergency, it substitutes a police regulation for a principle of justice. But it is forgotten that the policy itself is suicidal; for punishment can have no restraining power, it cannot be exemplary, unless it is just. To suppose it just because exemplary, is, in the literal sense, preposterous.
The theory might be dismissed here. But it is in fact an expression of panic fear, which is not allayed by any considerations of justice. We must inquire into the supposed danger.
90. It cannot be the eternal sufferings of the lost, for that is the very thing to be proved. And such a punishment would be only another form of the danger.
91. It cannot be the defection of holy angels and glorified saints. For that is to charge them not only with imperfection, but with radical defect. It is to say that they serve God only in. terror; that they have no sincere love of God or of holiness; that their allegiance is either a hypocrisy or a delusion; that there is no moral perfection even among the blessed; and that the principles of virtue, even after having been once installed in a nominal kingdom of righteousness, cannot stand without the support of an eternal evil.
92. It cannot be the failure of all future races of probationary beings. For among the human race, with all the disadvantages of a fallen state, and ere the supposed exemplary punishment begins to be witnessed, multitudes are converted and saved; many of them, past ail doubt, unmoved by the terror of eternal suffering. Much more may it be expected that new orders of probationary beings will furnish hosts of perfected ones, without the aid of such a terror. The argument, it should here be noted, often assumes either that the creation is yet in its early stages, or that sin has recently entered the universe. These are questions to be elsewhere considered.
93. If it is feared that, without the terror of eternal suffering, too many either of the human race or of future races will fail of eternal life, then, justice aside, the problem becomes one of simple arithmetic and” calculation. Which is the greater evil, — that a great number should utterly perish, or that a small number should endure endless torment? that myriads should incur what some have pronounced to be hardly a punishment, or that hundreds should endure infinite evil? The question is not, how many beings shall be finally saved? For creative power is exhaustless and unwearied. He who can raise up from the stones children unto Abraham, is not impoverished by the loss of ten thousand worlds, or burdened in replacing them. Whether is better, then, — that a small fraction of a large number should be saved from death, and evil be temporary, or that a large fraction of a small number should be saved from sin and woe, which shall be the eternal portion of the remainder?
The theodicy, we have remarked, ignores the principle of justice. But this is not at all; it makes a draft upon the grace of God. For He is not bound to furnish the restraining terror which is claimed. It is due neither to Himself nor to those who are to be saved. Granting that they need it, they cannot demand it as a right. It would be, rather, the token of their moral bankruptcy. If vacancies in heaven must be filled from bankrupt worlds, it is God’s right to keep them vacant to all eternity, and no court in the universe will recognize a counter claim. If the terror supposed to be needful is granted at all, it must be a free gift, an undeserved gratuity.
5. UNIVERSAL DISTRUST.
A friend has furnished the following; “The first act of rebel- lion in the universe, when it became known, produced a universal shock. Every one became alarmed, felt insecure, and became suspicious and afraid of every other. The perfect quiet and peace of the world was gone, and gone forever, unless by some means a recurrence of the sin could be prevented, and confidence be restored. Eternal wrong had been done to every moral being in the universe. Eternal pain and displeasure would be felt by all who knew and remembered the fact, and a sense of fear and insecurity would be universal and eternal unless prevented by governmental interference.
“What penalty would be just and adequate is the question. That endless suffering, provided it were severe enough in degree, would be sufficient, all will admit. It would also appear the natural and appropriate penalty; since the injury done is endless.”
This theodicy might be derived by some minds from the nature of sin as utterly inexplicable and an essential mystery. If it originates causelessly, like a planet “rushing madly from its sphere,” it may be repeated — here — there — anywhere — and no one is safe. Panic terror must be quieted by a salutary fear.
But the theory makes no distinction between probationary and perfected beings. In respect to the proximate solutions of the origin of evil, it assumes that they apply to the highest orders of being as well as the lowest — the oldest equally with the youngest. It would be a consistent result of the argument, we think, if it should be feared that God himself might sin, and the moral universe crumble with the fall of its Ruler.
But if, as we believe, no perfected being, or “partaker of the divine nature,” ever has fallen, the occasion of this panic must be sought in the failure of creatures while on probation, and subject to ordeal. But such failure need not alarm the universe. The full of our first parents might be a sad event for man, when “Earth felt the shock; and Nature from her seat Sighing, through all her works, gave signs of woe That all was lost.”
But the event, though sad for man, and perplexing to angels, need not alarm them; for the frailty of all new created moral agency, the powers of untried free will, made it not only possible, but in a slight degree probable. The wonder would have been, if, in myriads of new worlds weakness and ignorance should never result in sin. Yet, even if the greater part should give way under temptation, and a remnant only be saved, that need not disturb the security of the glorified, or even of the saints militant. For “we know that whosoever is born of God sins not; but he that is begotten of God keeps himself, and that wicked one touches him not.”
Whether God is under necessity of creating beings so frail as man; or whether this is the bounty of His goodness and wisdom, — to raise out of dust heirs of glory, — is a question. If the latter be true, then the sins we deplore are indirectly a token of God’s power. The case of the fallen angels may seem more perplexing. But the Scriptures do not inform us that they were ever morally perfect; and their higher rank at their creation, probably subject to severer ordeal than man, might be only a slight elevation in the scale of creation, they sinking to motes in comparison with higher orders, and all to nothingness before the infinite God.
The destroyed confidence, fear, and pain, supposed in our theodicy, we infer, were no proper effect of sin. But if they were, the argument is still liable to objection. Must eternal evil be installed, to restore the lost confidence? Must the eternal peace and happiness of all beings depend on the co-eternal anguish of those who have begun to sin? Are the delights of Paradise and the “fullness of joy not sufficient to restrain the world from plunging into the abyss of annihilation? So far as human beings have lost confidence in God or creature, is it not more restored by the renewal of a single heart in the image of Christ, than by the supposed exposure of millions to eternal woe? How do earthly rulers restore the lost confidence of their subjects? Which is the stronger human government, — that in which the most dreadful punishments are inflicted, or that in which the mere loss of place or favour is so dire that infliction is not needed? And must God for ever afflict the guilty, that the innocent may learn to trust in Him? Admitting the gloomy fact which the theory assumes, it provides no remedy, but is
“An argument Of weakness, not of power.”
6. SIN AS AGAINST THE UNIVERSAL WELFARE.
Most of the preceding theories, or at least the more usual statements of them, are defective in that they build upon an infinity beyond the mind of the transgressor, an infinity beyond his power either to injure or to comprehend. An attempt is made to supply this defect, and to anchor infinity, as it were, within the reason and conscience, as a measure of guilt, in the following argument:
“1. Moral obligation is founded in the intrinsic value of those interests which moral agents are bound to seek as an end.
12. The degree of obligation is just equal to the apprehended intrinsic value of those interests which they are bound to choose.
13. The guilt of refusal to will those interests is in proportion, or is equal, to the amount of the obligation; and 5: Consequently the mind’s apprehension or judgment of the value of those interests which it refuses to will, is, and must be, the rule by which the degree of guilt involved in that refusal ought to be measured.” These interests are “the highest well being of God and the universe. This end the reason of every moral agent must affirm to be of infinite value, in the sense that its value is unlimited. ... If the idea of God and of the good of universal being be developed, which is implied in moral agency, there must be in the mind the idea or first truth, that the good of God and of the universe is infinitely valuable. Every refusal to will the highest well being of God and the universe involves infinite guilt.”
The consistency of different degrees of guilt with its infinity is illustrated in the same way as by Edwards. But it is founded in a distinction of modern psychology, between conceptions of the understanding, and ideas of the reason. “The ideas of the infinite, the eternal, the perfect, are ideas of the pure reason.”
It is not essential to this theodicy that man should have infinite power, so as to be responsible for the universal welfare or qualified to be its guardian. The argument puts the will for the deed; which is proper in judging of character. And it is said, though man can neither achieve nor destroy a happiness of all beings, he may desire and will the welfare of all; and if he does not, it is the same to him, and in the reckoning of his guilt, as if there were no universal welfare.
We will admit for argument’s sake that when a man is indifferent or hostile to the good of being, he is as guilty as though the heavens did actually fall. In this view, the prevalent theory of eternal punishment is insufficient. An immortality, even of ever augmented woe, will not punish the sinner. For he would have destroyed the eternal welfare, not of a single creature, but of innumerable beings. For an equal punishment he should not have mere immortality, but an expansion of his being, to an immensity equalling the created moral universe. And justice is but mocked if one of these things is done and not the other.
But this is not all. The sinner is guilty, not only of a single malevolent wish or traitorous thought, but of this cherished and repeated continually through long years of life. According to the argument, if he had had his wish the endless welfare of countless beings would have been destroyed over and over again a myriad times. For the purposes of retribution, his immortal immensity would not suffice. He must also suffer in ten thousand coordinate eternities.
Nor is this all; for it respects only the hostility of the sinner to created beings. But God, whose blessedness is also concerned in this argument, is at each moment infinitely greater than all His creation, and He alone is eternal. Here are demanded yet two other infinite factors of the punishment of a single guilty soul.
The necessities of justice are not yet told. They are multi- plied anew by the immense number of all the guilty. And if the common notion of their eternal wickedness is true, they are yet to be augmented by a new and most formidable factor, an infinite and ever expanding series.
Here, in the measure of human guilt, are as many infinite factors as all the dimensions of space and time united, and two immensities besides; guilt which all infinity and all eternity combined cannot begin to contain. Hence, if justice were done, so far from God ever becoming All and in all, every vestige of his kingdom must be swept far away from being, and the universe be filled to copious overflowing, with eternal remorse and woe. Thus the glorious perfections of God are transmuted, by the mighty attributes of certain “ideas of the pure reason,” to a deplorable omnipotence; and the designs of infinite goodness, radiating through the perverse minds of men, are, as by an awful magic lantern, thrown upon the sky in a lurid picture of triumphant Evil.
It is confessed by those who hold this theory, that retribution never can be executed.
And it might be urged that since it must fail in so many infinite factors, it might as well fail in all, and the universe be at some day rid of sin and woe. But the frightful results of the theory indicate that it may be radically defective, and v/e ought to show wherein.
All ideas of the pure reason are simply laws of thought. They pertain to the form of human thinking, not at all to its objects. Hence these ideas contain nothing. They may all be employed in the formulas of pure mathematics, where no actual substance or thing is conceived, but only the relations of things. Several of them are negative, or are stated and most clearly apprehended in the form of negations. Thus we have already remarked the idea of the infinite is that of no limit. The idea does not embrace the limitless, but draws a line and says: Thus far is the finite; the infinite is ever beyond. In no way and in no sense can the infinite itself ever be in the grasp of finite mind, or in the power of finite wish or will.
What, then, is the measure of human guilt? It must be sought, evidently, in the conceptions of the understanding. The more one comprehends or even suspects, of the greatness of the world and of God, the greater is his guilt if he does not fill up his conception with the feeling of benevolence. The heart must go as far as the intellect can reach, in prayer for the creature and adoration of the Creator. Further than this it can neither go nor be guilty. And this statement agrees with the fact that guilt may be greater or less, without respect to the real magnitude of its object, because the conceptions of that object may be endlessly varied. The child, for example, knowing more of its parents than of God, may be more guilty, and may justly feel more guilty, in disobeying them, than in disregarding what it knows of the Infinite Father.
But granting what the theodicy assumes, it may also, as an argument for eternal suffering, be employed to refute itself. The whole problem of the measure of penalty is to be solved by finding a connecting link between sin and suffering; and this link is the faculty of conscience. Conscience is the seat of remorse, and remorse is the only true punishment; there the “hiding of its power.” Pain does not become penalty until it reaches the conscience. Physical suffering is the outward form of punishment, its body; conscience, the sense of merited displeasure, is its soul. And the most dreadful punishment may be felt when the infliction is least. A reproving glance, that enters the conscience directly, is often the most terrible infliction.
How conscience pertains to the pure reason as well as to the understanding. It recognizes Duty, not as a question of gain or loss, of more or less, or as a measure of expediency; but as something right and proper; imperative; absolute; not overruled by any possible consideration of interest; and, so to speak, infinite. And in the conscience the pure reason can impart infinity to punishment, no less than to sin. One can feel infinite ill-desert just as much as one can he infinitely ill-deserving; and when such a feeling takes the form of remorse, it is infinite punishment, if any infinity is possible within the human mind. Eternity is no more requisite for punishment than for guilt. God has not, in the constitution of the rational creature, given power to commit a sin which He cannot also punish.
7. IN SUO INFINITO.
In judging of character, as before remarked, the will is good for the deed. The sinner is to be condemned, not for the evil he has accomplished, but for what he has wished to do, and would have been glad to do if he could. As he is not to be thanked, so neither is he to be acquitted, on the ground that God has pre- vented the evil he intended, or has overruled it for good.
Hence a theodicy similar to the last, and yet distinct from it. It is commonly stated so as to embrace the tendencies of sin toward infinite evil. We give it in the words of Hopkins: “The sinner does all he can to dethrone his Maker and render Him infinitely miserable, and ruin his kingdom forever. Every sin has a strong and mighty tendency to this, and no thanks to the sinner that this infinite evil has not been effected by his rebellion; and is his crime not so great because the evil is pre- vented by the infinite power and wisdom of God? He who will assert this must renounce all reason and common sense. David, inspired to imprecate punishment on the wicked, says: ‘Give them according to their deeds, and according to the wickedness of their endeavours; give them after the work of their hands; render to thein their desert.’ (Psalms 28: 4.) And God, in punishing the wicked forever, will do no more to them than they would have done to Him, had it been in their power; surely this is a just and equitable punishment, which they fully deserve if they deserve any at all.“
All that has been said in our examination of the previous theodicy, will apply to this. Whatever is peculiar here, is built upon an if. Infinite evil lies in the direction of the sinner’s thoughts; it is his aim, the tendency of his doings; he would accomplish it, if he could. But his very conceptions fall infinitely short of his aim.
The infinity with which he has to do is a name and not a thing. The sum infinitum is altogether sui generis, a mere fragment and figment of infinity. The fallacy lies in the illusion of the name.
The argument, we said, is built on a supposition; and this is apparent when it is stated in another equivalent form, thus: The sinner would abuse infinite power, if he possessed it. In this form the argument may be answered either by a doubt, or by an extension of it. Are we sure that the sinner would abuse in- finite power, and infinite sagacity, without which the power would be a brute nothing? Might he not be also wiser?
Could he be so much of God without a divine goodness? Is a monster Deity conceivable? For argument’s sake, grant it. Then we have only to make all the wildest possible suppositions to prove the sinner actually guilty of the four-fold infinity of evil we deduced from the last theodicy. If he were an eternal god, filling all the spheres he would not leave a point of space without its curse; therefore he is guilty of this. For, by the argument, he tends that way, power alone is wanting, and weakness is not innocence.
To measure the world’s guilt now, we should need new factors of infinite arithmetic; which we trust the actual limitation of man’s moral capacity will dispense with. The theodicy has a single element of truth. It expresses a just abhorrence of evil, and a corresponding horror of it as a mad fatuity that knows no law and brooks no restraint. But this only indicates its destiny. It is an old saying, “Whom the gods design to destroy, they first infatuate.”
8. THE IMPERATIVE NATURE OF DUTY.
We have found, we think, a common measure of guilt and punishment in the conscience, as a faculty of remorse. It thus becomes possible that sin should be punished strictly according to its ill-desert; or that there should be a final retribution ac- cording to the things done in the body. But this statement gives us only half of the truth. If it were the whole, it would follow that when equal punishment has been inflicted, the sinner is released from further claim of justice; his debt is paid; punishment is atonement and expiation; he is virtually innocent, and should be acquitted accordingly. But this we know is not true; and the error is corrected by a consideration which may be wrought into a theodicy.
Duty is imperative. Its language is not that of mere counsel and advice, but of command. Man is not told simply that it is for his interest to do right, but he ought to do right. His obligation is not to himself alone; if he has any right to forego his own pleasure or interest, he has no right to omit a single duty; and no amount of enjoyment to be secured, or of pain to be avoided, can give him such right. No possible consideration of expediency can make wrong right. No compromise is possible between duty and the neglect of it. Moral law holds no parley, makes no bargain, forms no treaty stipulations, with him who refuses to obey. It sets no price on transgression. Obedience is better than any sacrifice, however great. Though one should offer thousands of rams, or ten thousands of rivers of oil, or ten thousand worlds, — of wealth or of suffering, — the claim of duty would not be done away. No finite measure of penance can abrogate it. Above all bartering calculation of reward and penalty, conscience sits infinitely supreme, as the voice of God himself, telling us we have no right to lose the one, or to incur the other. Still less have we right to complain, if an undutiful curiosity respecting the measure of penalty has not been gratified, and we find it, at the last, greater than we can bear. What if it should be infinite?
Such is the theodicy. In reply it is granted that if moral law proposed so much suffering for so much guilt, and nothing more, the penalty would not be a sanction; law would be no longer binding; the very words “ law “ and “duty,” would lose their meaning. But this would be equally true, if the penalty were infinite. Thus, if man could be made into an infinite being, so that he could endure an infinite penalty in a moment of time, that would not restore him to innocence, or meet the demand of the law. Infinite penalty is no more a satisfaction than finite penalty. Hence we observe that the doctrine which makes Christ’s sufferings an infinite satisfaction paid to God for the sins of men, does not meet the difficulty which it proposes. It is still demanded that the hearts of men should be changed; otherwise they must themselves pay the penalty of God’s law over again. The reason is, penalty is not satisfaction in kind; and it cannot be made so by being increased by degree, even infinitely.
Penalty is sanction. Measured suffering is the mulct or fine which law imposes, which may also be warning and ad- monition; but it is not of the nature of payment, so that it should be any better infinite than finite. Nor does its character as a restraint of sin, constitute its proper nature; for neither the fear of eternal suffering, nor eternal suffering itself, are supposed always to restrain sin. And since suffering does not meet the ends of sanction, either as payment or as restraint, we can regard penal suffering only as an adjunct of something else which is the true penalty of law, and which, as a sanction, makes ft strictly imperative. Suffering may be the interest of a debt; accruing with the long forbearance of an indulgent Creditor.
The fallacy of the theodicy lies in the confusion of the absolute with the infinite. Duty is absolute; once determined, it can be annulled by no other consideration, for it belongs to another sphere. But it is not infinite; hence it is no more girded and supported by infinite penalty, than by finite.
This is not all. As an argument for eternal suffering, the theodicy involves the very difficulty which it seeks to avoid. For duty is not imperative, if in a state of punishment it may be eternally violated. Its language then is: “Obey and be happy, or — disobey and suffer.” Penalty is thus reduced to a tax upon sin, and is no longer a prohibition of it. It is so measured, too, according to the degree of guilt, that it does not exhaust endurance. Hence it may be, and often is, thought of, as consisting with a measure of happiness. By some it is doubted whether the “eternal punishment” is not a mere diminution of eternal joy, in a state of salvation. And with this agrees the “ethical theology” now so prevalent, of which hereafter. Whereas, the real mandate of Duty, — “Obey and live,” — in making death the penalty of sin, finds a sanction agreeing with its proper nature, cuts off the power of persistent transgression, and secures itself from eternal outrage.
9. HISTORICAL ETERNITY OF SIN.
The unchangeable nature of right has been wrought into various forms of theodicy. The divine Law is eternal. Human guilt is eternal, — historically, at least, if not in the evil effects of it. Hence we are told; “The criminality and the guilt of a crime must continue as long as the crime continues, or till it ceases to be a crime, or becomes an innocent action. But can murder, for instance, which is a crime in the very nature of things, ever become a virtue? Can time, or obedience, or sufferings, or even a divine declaration, alter its nature, and render it an innocent action? Virtue and vice, sin and holiness, are founded in the nature of things, and so must remain forever immutable. Hence that which was once virtuous will forever be virtuous; that which was once vicious will forever be vicious; .. . . and that which once deserved punishment will forever deserve punishment. Now if neither the nature of sin can be changed, nor the guilt of it be taken away, then the damned, who have once deserved punishment, will forever deserve it, and consequently God may, in point of justice, punish them to all eternity.” And again; “The extinction of the sinner would not be the extinction of his sin; that would live on, in some of its effects, forever, — an inextinguishable protest against the perfection of the divine government; while yet the sinner him- self, who first uttered the protest, is supposed to be placed forever, by an act of that government, beyond the reach of punishment. For, further, the extinction of being is an escape from punishment; so that here would be the singular anomaly, that while the dread of punishment is punishment, the infliction itself is the termination of all punishment.”
This theory should not be confounded with that of sinfulness as ever actual and persistent. So far as it contains truth, it is very similar to the theodicy just examined. It asserts the very principles which, as we have remarked, make a theodicy possible, against the notion that justice is a product of divine might. But the fallacy of its deductions is manifest: For
14. By parity of reasoning, a single act of virtue should be eternally rewarded. It never changes its nature, — never ceases to be a virtuous act. It remains through all eternity a tribute of praise to God. Its benign influences and effects may also be eternal. Hence he who has done a single right act, or cherished a right feeling, should be forever happy.
15. It follows that the pardon of guilt is unjust, or rather impossible. Not only does the bare remission of penalty not change the character of the sinner, but his actual change from sin to holiness does not annul the character of his past acts.
They survive this conversion, just as much as they would survive this destruction. No act of reformation, nor of reparation, no work of atonement, nor suffering of punishment though thrice infinite, no return of God’s favour, nor effort of Omnipotence, can ever expunge his sins from the history of the universe. They are graven there as with a pen of adamant, and along with their effects they must abide forever. According to the theory, repentance and sanctification must be forever nugatory; the forgiveness of sin is a disregard of the eternal record, and an eternal wrong.
16. When it is said that to be stricken from being would be an end of punishment, we reply that if this were true, then no penalty, of whatever kind, should ever begin to be inflicted. For the beginning of punishment is the infliction of a part thereof; and though that may have been punishment beforehand, in the dread of it, now that it is past it ceases to be punishment, and is lost. Whence all punishment should forever remain future, and should never begin. But with a strange forgetfulness the theory is here inconsistent with itself.
Punishment once inflicted can never be un-inflicted. It can never be revoked or blotted out from the history of things. Once done, it becomes eternal. And this is pre-eminently true of that penalty which blots the sinner out from being.
So much for the results of the theodicy. It originates in a confounding of the abstract with the concrete. As if one should say: Vice cannot become virtue; therefore the vicious man can never become virtuous. Guilt can never become innocence; therefore the guilty man must ever be abhorrent to God, and must ever subsist, too, lest the abomination should subside into a negative principle, — the loathsome substance into a shadow, eluding God’s indignation, and divine justice be defrauded by the abatement of a nuisance. Here is the beginning of that worst form of Dualism, that demands an object for God’s detestation, so that His attributes may be known.
The theory illustrates the fatuity of error. Setting out with the principle that sin is essentially wrong, and no divine decree or conjure or history can change its hateful nature, but taking a false direction, it concludes that sin must be forever incarnate and enshrined. That which ought not to be, must be forever. Departing from the true sense of the Scriptural anathema, the theodicy rejects what was true in the Roman conception of justice, and adopts all that was false in the Greek. It retains the rods of the ancient fasces, and immortalizes the criminal; it spares the axe, as striking too fatally, and depleting the government of its strength. It revives the errors of the old mythology, pursuing her victim with torment, but without power to destroy. The sword drops from the hand of Justice, as though its employ were suicidal.
10. SIN AS THE GREATEST EVIL.
It is often said that sin is the greatest possible evil, and therefore deserves the greatest possible punishment. This theodicy may be interpreted in three different ways.
17. If it is taken without explanation or comment, it is too rhetorical and indefinite to be of any value. Sins differ in the degree of their heinousness, as is admitted even by those who regard all sin as infinitely heinous. The greatest punishment is due to the greatest sin, and to no other.
But the greatest actual sin is not of course the greatest possible. The greatest possible punishment has not yet, perhaps, been deserved by any creature. And we do not know that it ever will be. For, to omnipotence, infinite punishment is possible; and the theory thus appears as an indefinite re-statement of the infinite ill-desert of sin.
18. If it is meant that sin is the worst kind of evil, we grant it. But what follows? Simply this, that it should be treated with the worst kind of pain, — that is, it should be punished. For punishment is the worst kind of pain. Many natural evils, such as the wayward temper of brutes and of children, must be corrected with pain that is not punishment. Chastening is tinged with penalty, as a correction of moral defect in those who are radically good. But retribution is incomparably worse. It is infliction matured in remorse. Pain assumes its most intolerable form, when it smites the conscience. “The spirit of a man sustains his infirmity; but a wounded spirit who can bear?“
The argument turns on the comparison between natural and moral evil, and assumes that moral evil is the greater. We certainly do not believe that it is the less. But whether it is the greater, or whether the two kinds of evil are at all commensurable, is a question. The subversion of Lisbon by an earthquake, with the crushing out of 60,000 lives, was a natural evil; the malice of a child toward a playmate, is a moral evil; which is the greater? Doubtless the malice would be wrong, though it should prevent the earthquake. And the seeming paradox may be explained by the fact that sin and pain are not to be compared in magnitude; as a pound is not really heavier than a league, for the same reason that the league is not longer than the pound. Even in the conscience they are, perhaps, not comparable as sin and pain; for literal or physical pain is not remorse, and there is remorse without infliction. On the other hand, our moral philosophy has not yet explained the relation of happiness to duty; whence not a few are ready to say that moral evil is such only because it produces or threatens natural evil.
19. If the theodicy contemplates the loss of the soul and of eternal life, as the greatest evil, then the inference of endless misery as the punishment of sin involves certain difficulties that are easily made apparent.
(1.) Endless misery cannot be that the incurring of which first makes sin the greatest evil; for that would be an assumption of the thing to be proved.- The argument must begin on lower ground; i.e., it must take the loss of eternal life in the literal sense, as the greatest evil to which man was originally exposed.
But sin as against one’s own soul would then be punished with an infinite loss; that which makes sin the greatest evil being in itself the greatest punishment.
(2.) If it be said that those who lead others to destruction are not fully punished in their own loss of eternal happiness, but they should also suffer eternal misery, — then we have the lost divided into two classes, and only a part of them should be immortalized for punishment. But by parity of reasoning, if eternal misery were the original penalty, those who lead others to sin should suffer a two-fold, or a manifold eternal misery. And since many may be guilty in common of the ruin of one soul, that should be avenged with as many eternities of woe. Hence we see that the difficulty is not that of our view alone, but of every case of aggravated wickedness.
The only solution of the difficulty is found in the principle already stated, that guilt is measured, not by the amount of good destroyed or evil done, but by the capacity and malignity of the transgressor.
It is proper here to remark, that, in any view of the divine penalty, the division of the lost into the two classes of murderers and murdered, and the punishment of the former by multiples of the original penalty, would extol the power of Evil. For the multiples of guilt would outnumber the souls destroyed, ten thousand fold, or rather infinitely, if we consider how closely each human being is bound to millions of others; how every man is a brother’s keeper to he knows not how many; and if we then apply the law of geometrical progression which is involved, the principle of retribution in question would burden the divine side of the equation between sin and penalty, and give to the Adversary a kingdom extended beyond measure, like the magic range of figures in the kaleidoscope.
11. SCIENTIA MEDIA DEI.
The hypothetical knowledge of God, or His fore-knowledge of what the sinner would do in a certain case, has been employed in a theodicy analogous to the in suo infinito, and which might be called the in sua ceternitate. It is thus stated by a famous divine of the sixth century: “It belongs to the Divine Justice that they should never be without punishment who in this life wished never to be without sin.” “It is objected that a sin that has had an end should not be punished endlessly. The omnipotent God is just, forsooth, and what was not of eternal perpetration should not be punished with eternal torment. It. might be so, if the just and rigorous Judge, at his coming, should weigh the deeds of men, and not their hearts. But the workers of iniquity have ceased to sin, simply because they have ceased to live; since they would have been glad to live forever that they might for ever sin. For they desire more to sin than to live, and wish to live always, just in order that they may sin always. Therefore, as God is just, they should never w ant for penalty, in whose heart it was in this life never to want for sin; and no limit of retribution is due to him who desired no limit of his guilt.
In other words, the sinner devotes an eternal existence to sin in reversion, and is guilty infinitely by anticipation. It is not essential to this theodicy that the sinner should be naturally immortal. If destruction were the original penalty of sin, it is overruled by the necessity of eternal being, in which to punish the desire of immortal guilt. The theory also assumes that the sinner would not, through eternity, change his purpose, though he had the power to do so. We reply:
20. This assumption, by which man arrogates to himself the divine knowledge of what the sinner would do, must be proven. Otherwise the theory is reduced to the consideration of the guilt of the sinner in this life, in hazarding an eternal sinfulness, and is the same with the in suo infinito already answered.
21. But this eternal sinfulness supposes an absolute immortality, an infinitum which is the sinner’s own; which is the thing to be proved. Or if it is said his guilt consists in the forfeiture of immortality, then eternal suffering includes the recovery of the forfeit, which is absurd.
8. The eternal suffering is either attended with eternal sinfulness, or it is not. In the one case, the sinner overreaches God, acquiring the power to sin against Him forever, because he has been willing to do so. In the other case, there is eternal punishment for sin never committed.
The theory is, happily, nearly out of date. Its atrocity belongs to the mind of Hildebrand who matured it, and to the darkening age in which he lived. But besides its mournful historic value, it is only too similar to theodicies still in vogue. And even in modern times it is applied to the race of man as fallen in Adam, and we are told that each human being is involved in the consequences of the first sin because God foresaw that he would have committed the same if he had stood in Adam’s place. But it follows even from the representations of some who hold this view, that the Redemption was due to the condemned race.
12. FREE WILL.
The free agency of man, one of the essential conditions of all theodicy, is sometimes relied on as constituting a theodicy in itself Thus the greatest of the Fathers says of eternal suffering: “Whoever thinks such a condemnation either unduly severe, or unjust, surely has not estimated the guilt of sinning Vv hen it was so easy not to sin. For, as a signal merit of obedience is ascribed to Abraham because so hard a duty was laid upon him as the slaying of his son, — so in Paradise the disobedience was as much greater as the duty required was less difficult. And as the obedience of the second Adam was the worthier because it was unto death, so the disobedience of the first Adam was more detestable because it was unto death. For when the threatened penalty of disobedience is great, and the requirement of our Maker is easy, who can tell how great a sin it is not to obey in so easy a matter, and in awe of so high an authority and so dreadful a doom?”
We think the theory thus stated merits the name we have given it, because the facility of obedience is the perfection of freedom. So far as the theory relies on the vastness of the motive to obedience, it becomes another theodicy, to be examined presently.
This theory is refuted by its consequences. By parity of reasoning the least sin might be visited with the heaviest penalty, because the sin was voluntary. The child need not steal a pin; the petty theft may require more effort than to desist from it. Why should the child complain of penalty at all? And if not at all, why complain of any penalty, though it be infinite? Indeed the theodicy sometimes takes this form, — the more trivial the duty God requires, the more excuseless the refusal to perform it, and the greater may be the penalty.
The fallacy is that which we have already indicated: a mistake of the condition of guilt for the producing cause of guilt. It is as if one should say an infinite penalty of law is just because the subject knows it to be the penalty. The knowledge of law and its penalty is an essential condition of its binding force; but the publication of a law assuredly does not make it just. Neither does the most perfect power to obey it, or to escape its penalty.
13. THE CHOICE OF TWO INFINITIES.
The theory just considered is often supplemented by the consideration of eternal happiness and misery as offset against each other, and offered to man’s choice. Thus a living writer, speaking of man as free, and a necessary holiness as impossible: “It was the bright and cheering light which this truth seemed to cast upon the dark places of the universe, that first inspired us with the thought and determination to produce a theodicy. And it is in the light of this truth, if we mistake not, that the infinite love of God may be seen beaming from the eye of hell, as well as from the bright regions of eternal blessedness. All that could be done in such a case was, for God to set life and death before us, accompanied by the greatest of all conceivable motives to pursue the one, and to fly from the other; and then say ‘choose ye;’ and all this God has actually done for the salvation of all men. Hence, though some should be finally lost, His infinite goodness will be clear.”
This theodicy is closely connected with the common notion of human dignity; and in this view it is, we think, already refuted. As an argument for the divine justice, we may reply to it in the words of Tillotson. After dismissing several theories, he says: “Here are two things which seem to bid fairly towards an answer. First, that the reward which God promises to our obedience is equal to the punishment which he threatens to our disobedience. But yet this, I doubt, will not reach the business; because though it be not contrary to justice to exceed in rewards, that being matter of mere favour, yet it may be so, to exceed in punishments. Secondly, it is further said, that the sinner in this case hath nothing to complain of, since he hath his own choice. This I confess is enough to silence the sinner, and to make him acknowledge that his destruction is of himself; but yet for all that it does not seem so clearly to satisfy the objection from the disproportion between the fault and the punishment.”
The theodicy fails, besides being dualistic in its very form. When it is asked why God should propose to man the choice of two infinities, the answer brings us to another form of the theory.
14. CHOICE OF PENALTIES.
Meanwhile we may notice a theodicy similar to the last, which seems to have been that of Baxter. He says: “I would ask you, do you not know that you and all men must die? And would you not be contented to suffer a terrible degree of misery everlastingly, rather than die? Whatsoever men may say, it is certain they would.
Though not to live to us is better than to live in hell, yet men would live in very great misery, rather than not live at all, if they had their choice. We see men that have lived, some in extreme poverty, some in great pain, for many years, that yet had rather continue in it than die. If, then, it be so great a misery to be turned again into nothing, that you would rather suffer everlasting pain in some measure, methinks you can discover a probability that God’s word should be true, which threatens yet a greater pain; for is it not likely that the judge will inflict more than the prisoner will choose or submit to?”
The statement is, doubtless, too general; only the nobler sort of men have spoken of eternal pain as better than the loss of being; and that inconsiderately, though sincerely.
The argument divides the eternal misery of the lost into two portions, — that highest measure which they would prefer to non- existence, and the over plus which they would not prefer, but which justice may inflict. It will readily appear that this over- plus alone can be penalty; the rest can hardly be vindicated as just — much less as penal.
For, why would so great a degree of eternal misery be preferred to annihilation? Certainly because immortality would be an honour and a blessing, in the pleasures of intellect at least, though not in the enjoyments of sense.
“For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
These thoughts that wander through eternity?”
They would be the solace and comfort that are to make the suffering preferable to annihilation. Without them who would not lose his being? But they would be a gift of God’s eternal goodness. And the attendant suffering which they are supposed to vindicate, would be a charge made for the gratuity. The pleasure would be no longer a grace of God, and the pain no longer of his justice.
15. INFINITE MOTIVES.
Salvation is too valuable to be exposed to any hazard of loss. Hence a very prevalent sentiment which has been expressed as follows: “There can be no kindness felt for the impenitent, in wishing any less influence to come upon them in their sins, to urge them to enter immediately upon that course in which their highest happiness lies, than what arises from the existence of an endless penalty. Nor can any kindness be felt for the penitent and pious on earth, in wishing any less influence to come upon them to bind them firmly and immovably to their Saviour, than what arises from the threatening of an endless penalty in case they apostatize. The desire of Universalists cannot be to have any motives addressed to men for carrying on the work of reformation on earth, higher and stronger than what arise from the doctrine they reject.
And as to God, they must acknowledge that He regards the holiness of his subjects as involving their highest good; and that He is pursuing this object in the demands and threatening of his government. Consequently there can be no kindness and respect felt for his character, in wishing any motive lessened which is to secure the obedience and veneration of his subjects.” “With this should be compared a translation of one of the early Fathers: “Allowing our tenets to be as false and groundless presumptions as you would have them, yet I must tell you they are presumptions the world can- not well be without. If they are follies, they are follies of great use, because the believers of them, what under the dread of eternal pain, and the hope of everlasting pleasure, are under the strongest obligations to become the best of men.”
It is a frequent cavil of the sceptic that the Christian practices virtue for the hope of an eternal reward, for the fear of an eternal pain, or for both reasons; not at all for the love of virtue.
The cavil is certainly not silenced by this theodicy. In one of the above statements its principle is identical with that of the pious fraud; and we need not wonder that an eminent writer, after having said that penalty is a matter of prudence in the law- giver, in which justice is not concerned, should add, that “after all, He that threatens hath still the power of execution in his own hands;” and should intimate that the threatening may be designed for effect and not for execution.
And too consistently. For the argument sets out from the divine goodness, and deduces eternal suffering in behalf of human salvation. But for whose benefit, and when for their benefit? Certainly not for the lost; it can do them no good. Nor for the saved; the threatening is supposed to have accomplished its work for them.
It is good only for the living; its blessing ceases with death. Its justice must then be made out, no longer from the goodness of God, but from his veracity.
In the last resort, then, the theodicy fails, since even the veracity of God can not bind him to what is not intrinsically just. But it fails primarily, for another reason. The threatening itself is not due to the welfare of men. They have no claim on God for an infinite inducement to be saved. Even the glorious attractions of eternal bliss are a gift of His goodness. Much more would be a second infinite motive, in the terror of an endless misery. That new encouragement would be an unmerited favour, an undeserved blessing, a free donation of God. Hence, perhaps, we may understand why it has been granted to some nations of men, and not to others; and hence the missionary appeal in behalf of this gospel. But if the threatening is itself a gratuity, the execution of it is also a gratuity; and we must conclude that damnation, no less than salvation, is of divine grace.
The weakness and poverty of man, which appears in his in- sensibility to the motive of eternal happiness, of course gives him no claim to the other motive. If he needs it, this is his guilt and not his merit. And if it were not the token of man’s ill desert, it would be an impeachment of God’s power or wisdom, and an argument of his infinite necessity.
16. THE REDEMPTION.
To vindicate God’s justice, the heaviest drafts have been made upon His grace in that most signal act which should be most sacredly guarded from such violation. The subsidizing of the Redemption as something due to the human race, is found in its mildest form in Watson. Speaking of an objection against the imputation of Adam’s sin, he says, it “springs from regarding the legal part of the whole transaction which affected our first parents and their posterity separately from the evangelical ‘provision of mercy which was concurrent with it, and which included, in like manner, both them and their whole race. The redemption of men by Christ was not certainly an after-thought, brought in upon man’s apostasy; it was a provision, and when man fell, he found justice hand-in-hand with mercy.” Again: “Had no method of forgiveness and restoration been established with respect to human offenders, the penalty of death must have been forthwith executed upon them; and with them, and in them, the human race must have utterly perished.”
We call this a mild statement of the theodicy, because it was connected with the question respecting the case of those dying in infancy; and in itself it includes an optimist consideration, which is foreign to the point at issue. It seems to concede, however, that without a Redemption, the sin of our first parents would have involved no eternal misery. A later statement is more significant. “We are not told,” says Bledsoe, “and we do not know, what it would have been consistent with the justice of God to do in relation to the world, if there had been no remedy provided for its restoration. Perhaps it might never have been created at all. We do not know that even the justice of God would have created man, and permitted him to fall, wandering everlastingly amid the horrors of death, without hope and without remedy. We find nothing of the kind in the word of God, and in our nature it meets with no response except a wail of unutterable horror.”
We reply, this is the precise question of all theodicy, — What is the just penalty of God’s law, without respect to His grace? And of course we must ask what “would have been,” and what “might be;” it is not enough to know “what is.” Is the impending penalty incurred simply by transgression of the Law, or by rejection of the Grace? To say that it is incurred, but that we do not know’ if it was due without the grace, is to say that we do not know justice from injustice, and that a theodicy is impossible.
The redemption is so intimately connected with the other doctrines of the Christian system, that it is easy to miss the point on which the draft thereupon turns. Let us grant, then, that the human race was continued, after the sin of Adam, because salvation was still possible by a method of grace; that the sin of Adam was not imputed as guilt to his posterity, but that the final displeasure of God is incurred only by personal disobedience; i.e. by actual sin, and not by birth sin. The question still remains: Would Adam, or any other human being, suffer eternal misery, if there were no forgiveness in the name of a Redeemer? And the theodicy in hand consists in offering the work of Christ as a vindication of God’s justice, if any at last suffer forever. The complexion of it appears in the following remark upon the difficulties set forth in the “Conflict of Ages.” “Must the great compensatory fact which shall harmonize these conflicting elements be sought in either a past or a future state of being? May it not be in the present? Is it not furnished in the great fact of Redemption, or an economy of grace and recovery co-extensive with the facts of sin and depravity? Not that all men will infallibly be saved, but that salvation is for all, and possible to all; that the plan of Redemption is designed for and includes the whole race in its design and end and provisions; and that none will now be lost but those who will not be saved.
This theodicy is very prominent in the history of Theology. It is not confined to Arminian divines, to whom it has been most attributed in the defence of Calvinism as truly asserting the doctrines of grace; but many who decline the Arminian system have embraced it. It is also involved in the opinion so often avowed, that the immortality of all men is the gift of Christ, without whom the being of man would have utterly perished.
Its absurdity is easily illustrated. It is as if a person charged with crime and condemned for it, should be offered a pardon; refusing which, his sentence is executed, not on the ground of his original guilt, but for the new crime of rejecting the pardon. Or as if a prisoner should be permitted to escape if he wished, and then be told his condemnation would be unjust if he had no such opportunity. Eternal life is offered a second time to those who have once proved unworthy of it; and they are then told that for their original rebellion they did not deserve death; but if they now choose to die, they merit endless woe. In this view the theory is identical with that which gives man the choice of infinite good and evil, with this difference: the one condemns for the first wrong choice, the other for a second wrong choice. In either case the free gift is charged as an infinite debt.
In another view the theodicy is unspeakably dreadful. It follows, that it would have been infinitely better for fallen man if justice had taken its course. He might then have only died; but the offer of rescue exposes him to the danger of eternal misery. In other words, he is punished infinitely worse by the grace of God than he would have been by his justice!
But it is asked: Is not man’s guilt aggravated by the rejection of an offered Saviour? Undoubtedly. Man cannot despise divine goodness and long-suffering without treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath. But this is something infinitely different from the free grace of God justifying endless penal suffering. If that is not merited by man’s original guilt, it cannot be merited by ten thousand aggravations of it. In no period less than eternity can finite guilt be heaped up to infinity.
The practical bearings of the theodicy should be noted. The gratuitous nature of the Redemption lies at the foundation of the religion of a fallen race. It may have been “provided” in the counsels of eternity, — it is still gratuitous; the advancing ages have not made it fall due. It may be true that God would not be just to himself, if He were not more than just to us; still his infinite goodness is nothing that we can claim. And there can be no “compensation” for severe penalties incurred in the administration of Him who is eternally just. But if the Redemption was a vindication of his justice, man may withhold his confession of moral bankruptcy, and forbear thanksgiving for divine mercy and grace.
Hence a living writer, equally profound and devout, has truly remarked, “how cautiously the remark often heard in our time, — the true Theodicy is the Redemption, — is to be conceived of, if it is not to lead to a great error, radically perverting the Christian scheme of salvation. If the plan of Redemption is essentially an act of the righteousness of God, it had been unjust, and a violation of a claim justifiable on the part of man, to leave him without redemption. But it can only so appear to him who denies that man is himself guilty in his sins and their consequences.”
17. PRE-EXISTENCE.
We need not press any of the objections which have been so rife against the theodicy offered in the “Conflict of Ages.” The doctrine of man’s pre-existence has a history which may yet command respect, though we think it has not been relied upon as a vindication of the eternity of future suffering until recently. As an ancient theodicy it had reference simply to the evils of man’s present state.
The sentiment which underlies the argument of the “Conflict of Ages,” appears in the following expression: “In this wide universe no thought is so affecting as to exist for eternity, and to be called on, in a relatively brief space of time, to decide the character of that eternity” (p. 481). This life, so short and so full of weakness and ignorance and trouble, seems an unequal probation for an immortal destiny; and it is held that each member of the human race has deserved eternal suffering, by deliberate transgression, in a probation with the best advantages, continued for we know not how long a period. Men are supposed to have been not unlike the angels in their first estate, but more favoured than the fallen angels in the grant of a new trial for the eternal state.
The value of the theodicy turns on the value of the supposed original probation. Were its advantages such that it might justly decide and fix a character for eternity? Now the very idea of a new trial suggests that those advantages were not such as to determine an unalterable character; or at least, that if the formation of an immutable character was then possible, it did not become /«c in the case of the present human beings.
For if so, why are we here? Just as a new trial of one charged with crime supposes a remaining doubt in the question of his guilt, so a new probation of beings once fallen assumes that they were not fallen beyond hope of recovery.
They were not utterly desperate and callous against all good influences. They were not immutably wicked. Their sin had not the quality of eternal endurance. The abused privileges of the previous state might, indeed, advance one far towards a just condemnation as hopelessly and helplessly depraved, as certain to sin on eternally in spite of all that God could do to change his purpose. But progress toward this state, and the actual attainment of it, are different things, and they may be infinitely different.
The theodicy fails, therefore, upon the face of it, to vindicate eternal suffering for the immutability of a preexistent sinfulness; it assumes the contrary. Can it rely, then, upon the heinousness of the sins of a previous state? This would be a resort to one or other of the theories already examined; and it is plain no theory of infinite heinousness is tenable, until it appears that the sinner is an infinite and divine being.
Is the supposed condemnation justified, then, by the number, or the long continuance, of sins in the previous state? The answer is, no finite or temporary sinfulness can merit eternal suffering. An indefinite, unmeasured, immense duration of guilt still falls infinitely ‘short of infinity. If the sins of one year, or of three score years and ten, deserve not eternal misery, then no multiple of them, and no mere aggravation of them, can justify it. The sins of an eternal pre-existence alone can justify it.
The theory may be illustrated architecturally. It is proposed to support an inflexible beam, projecting infinitely. For this, it must have limitless strength of material. No brace work is allowed; but it is either inserted in a mortice work of eternal adamant; or it is balanced by an infinite super-incumbent weight; or by a projection infinitely in the opposite direction. Either of these things, changeless character, infinite guilt, or guilt from eternity, are supposable only
“If our substance be indeed divine, And cannot cease to be.”
18. ETERNAL SINFULNESS.
But the notion of a sinful character that shall never in fact be changed is a distinct theodicy; or rather it gives rise to two, according as the character is supposed to be ever voluntary, or to become a destiny. The first is thus stated by Dwight: “God may punish sin so long as it exists. He who sins through this life may evidently sin through another such period; and another, and another, without end. That, while we continue to sin, God may justly punish us, if he can justly punish at all, is equally evident. The Scriptures teach us that sinners who die in impenitence will not cease to sin throughout eternity. The supposition that their sufferings in the future world will be complete, involves in it as a consequence, that they will continue to sin. If they were to become penitent and virtuous, they would of course possess many enjoyments, and those of a very important nature.”
The element of freedom is more distinctly stated by Olshausen: “ The punishment here spoken of is not arbitrary or positive; the punishment of lovelessness is association with the loveless alone, in that state of discord in the external as well as the internal life, which constantly proceeds from the absence of love.” And by Nitzsch: “The idea of eternal damnation and punishment is so far a necessary one, inasmuch as there cannot be in eternity any forced holiness of the personal being, or any blessed unholiness.” Its advantages are urged by Chalmers: “We hold that it would purge theology of many of its errors, and that it would guide and enlighten the practical Christianity of many honest enquirers, if the moral character both of heaven and hell were more distinctly recognized, and held a more prominent place in the regards and contemplations of men.”
This theodicy is founded on the distinction between natural inability and moral inability, as it is made by theologian of the new school. When the unconverted sinner pleads that he cannot repent, it is held, and we think truly, that his supposed disability is a deep-seated disinclination, a will not, for which he is at the moment accountable; and his utter dependence on God for help leaves it still his duty to help himself. And it is now argued that this moral inability will form the eternal character of the lost, without passing into a natural inability.
Consistently with this view, the “ eternal condemnation “is sometimes represented as being not “theoretical” or positive and absolute, but hypothetical or conditional; actual, not by virtue of any irrevocable sentence, but by reason of a persistent wickedness; i.e. the lost suffer forever, not because they must, but because they will.
The apparent advantages of this theory are the following:
94. It aims to address the conscience, as well as the fears of men; and to a right-minded man the thought of eternal sinfulness is more horrible than of eternal suffering.
95. It seeks to relieve the doctrine of an eternal infliction.
96. It is sufficient as a vindication of God’s justice, if the fact it assumes be admitted. No one doubts that a man should be miserable as long as he is sinful, though it be forever.
But these advantages, if we mistake not, are purchased at a ruinous cost.
For, (1.) the appeal to the conscience is singularly ineffective. Men are not apt to be afraid of becoming wicked; much less of becoming fiends. If they have not lost integrity, they think that is impossible. And utter, eternal abandonment seems to them the more incredible, if they are to retain an eternal freedom. If on the other hand they are already corrupt, an eternal career of wickedness has lost its terror. It acquires a certain dignity, as we have already shown, and they glory in their future shame.
We speak of eternal freedom, because that is essential to the theory. To deny it, is to shift the ground of the argument. But this freedom is admitted, not only in numerous statements of the theodicy, but in the Restorationism which appears in all history as its natural result. If through eternity the lost soul is not compelled to cherish its guilt, the suffering of penalty may effect its reform. It was just this notion of an inalienable power of amendment, that was carried to its consistent result by Origen, in the belief that the lost might repent and be saved, and that the saved might sin again and fall. Thus, instead of an eternal necessity, evil appeared as an eternal vicissitude, which no divine wisdom or creature perfection could prevent. And though this early causeway between heaven and hell is now broken up from its place in theology, we shall see that a broader platform, so wide that it is not often measured, has taken its place.
(2.) The supposed advantage respecting the mode of divine punishment is only apparent. The notion of remorse of con- science, instead of literal fire and physical torture, is an advantage so far as it suggests that the penalty is self-inflicted or may be inherently just. But this is an indirect argument of the hazardous freedom we have just named; and, while it pleases a philosophic taste, its tendency is to remove the hand of God away from future punishment, so it shall no longer appear as His judgment. It is then an easy thing to deny His right to inflict penalty, and in a kind of Naturalism He is theorized away from the scene of final judgment.
(1.) Though the theodicy would suffice, it is unproven. It is undermined by the element of freedom which it assumes. For while a perfect holiness may be ever maintained without destroying freedom, the blessed being supposed to meet with every sup- port and encouragement of virtue, — eternally persistent sin in suffering is hardly to be looked for, if it be not a necessity fatal to the idea of sin. Hence it is significant of the weakness of the argument, when Dr. Schaff, perhaps its ablest defender, reduces the freedom of the lost to a minimum, thus: “The element of freedom must here indeed be very limited. For the habitual sinner is already the slave of sin (John 8:34), and incapable, unless by the divine redeeming grace still present to him, to escape from its dominion. Accordingly, the thraldom of the blasphemer must be of the highest degree, and he can have only that seeming-freedom (Scheinfreiheit), that almost flickering spark of freedom which is quite necessary to the conception of personality, which he still retains even in his most hideous deformity.”
We have remarked that the theory makes no account of inflicted punishments. But if we allow the slightest pressure from such a source, the least trace of the freedom assumed will prove fatal to the theory. Bellarmine was of opinion that one glimpse of hell-fire were sufficient to make the most flagitious sinner turn Christian; nay, live as an hermit, a most strict mortified life. Would not the sense of pain, along with a rational freedom, drive the anguished soul at once to a God who is regarded as not implacable, — to a heaven which is left open by the supposition that the lost might “possess many advantages, and these of a very important nature?”
But in fact the freedom of the lost seems to be denied, not only by Augustine, when he says: “The first death drives the reluctant soul out of the body; the second death holds the reluctant soul in the body; they are alike in this, that the soul suffers from the body what it wills not; “but also by the numerous passages of Scripture which represent the lost as driven away to their punishment, willing to be saved but it is too late, and the very possibility of salvation finally cut off. And the only passage supposed to suggest an eternal sinfulness (Revelation 22:11) will be shown, in the proper place, to apply not to a future state of punishment, but to the scenes of time.
But this is not all. The principle of this theodicy is that of the “ethical theology” now so prevalent, which so utterly ignores all that is peculiar to the religion of Christ. According to this theology, reward and punishment are not only just, but natural and inevitable; they are dispensed by the proper and indestructible faculties of man’s being. Virtue is the highest health of the soul; sin is hardly a disease; it is only irregular or perverse action, and its penalty, unrest. There is no crisis, of Fall or of Redemption, as there is to be none of life or death. The judgment is not a crisis; for it decides nothing for the future. It fixes no destiny beyond the omnipotence of immortal free agency. And as there is no judgment, there can be no grace. Christ is not a Saviour. He may be a helper; but he delivers from no evil which the undying vigour of the soul might not, in the light of eternity, discover and repair. There is no forgiveness; what we call by that blessed name is only the remission of sins after they have been put away.
The mind is its own place; and, creating its own character, it can break the strongest bonds of sin, and make the prison of despair radiant with heavenly light. Thus, with an unimpaired immortality, man becomes his own saviour, and the Gospel of Christ an offence.
As the theodicy has been stated thus far, there has been no denial of God’s power or right to put an end to the supposed on- going sinfulness by the extinction of the sinner. But this denial is made frequently, and recently. Thus it is said: “If in his impenitent state the punished offender is adding perpetually to his sin, does not each moment of that penal woe claim the moment next following, also, as due to retribution? And this must be the case immortally with a soul immortally sinning. Ever persisting guilt will require ever persisting punishment; and thus justice may for ever forbid its escape into naught. The only escape from this eternal necessity of justice binding it to existence, would seem to be in making justice contemporary with crime, or in inflicting it on souls bereft of moral consciousness, and thus incapable of continued sin; both of which expedients would seem to be foreign to the idea of punishment, and certainly unsupported by the analogies of the present life.”
Arc there no analogies in nature, or in human governments, to support God’s right of release from an endless struggle with those who rebel against Him? Must the officer of justice not disarm or restrain the culprit, in order to enforce the law that condemns him? Must he hazard the murderous stroke of the bowie knife, or death by the revolver, for some scruple respecting the right to disarm a man? May human justice employ prisons and strait¬jackets? And may not divine justice withdraw one, and not another, of the abused faculties which divine goodness gain? May not God, with a touch or a glance, palsy the rebellious, will, leaving the conscience with full power of remorse, but powerless to sin? Is the human soul, though it has made itself accursed, still so sacred a thing that God does wrong to impair it? Or, to waive this prescription of methods to God, can his swift and unimpaired justice in no way overtake the puny culprit, or strike him down in death? Is not the restraint of guilt a primary object of punishment; insomuch that these two things were both denoted by the same word in the classic Greek? And are we now told that the punished sinner, in his inmost power of guilt, must not be restrained at all? Shall we thus reduce Omnipotent Wisdom to the predicament of the unskilful conjurer, who has evoked an evil spirit not knowing by what spell he is put down again, and who must contend with him henceforth as best he can!
We have remarked that the doctrine of eternal sinfulness finds no support in the Bible. The theodicy is given up, in a significant manner, by Hopkins, as neither scriptural nor rational. Having said that unless sin is an infinite evil, “it must be acknowledged that no reason can be offered why God should punish the sinner forever,” he adds: “The Scripture represents sinners to be sentenced to this punishment for the sins which they did commit when in the body, in this world.” And “there does not appear to be any justice in sentencing a sinner to a punishment which he does not already deserve for what he has done.”
Here it is easy to see that the theodicy (which as stated by some of its adherents makes the future judgment “hypothetical” is equivalent and very similar to that of the scientia media Dei, Thus the most popular theory is most closely allied to that which none will now acknowledge, though we have seen it almost expressed by a living writer. The difference between them is made by the latent sentiment we have noticed, that the final judgment is not a crisis, and may not be a finality.
19. A LAW OF NATURE.
Besides the inseparable connection between all sin and misery, a law of nature is sometimes asserted for the eternity of future misery. Thus Arch bishop King: “Whatever is perpetual must have a natural and perpetual cause; for a perpetual miracle is not to be expected. If therefore the punishment of the wicked be eternal, it seems necessary for these punishments to arise from the laws and constitution of nature. For it is scarce conceivable how a state of violence should be perpetual.“
And Bishop Burnet: “If any difficulty arises in our minds that this punishment is said to be everlasting, as seeming inconsistent with the goodness and justice of God to punish finite sins with everlasting sufferings, we may consider, First, That this suffering is founded in the nature of things, and is not properly an act of God, but the natural effect of a natural cause. And when this suffering is threatened by God as a punishment, it is really nothing more than a forewarning of sinners of what will be the consequence of their folly, and what their sins will naturally bring upon them.”‘
And Dr. J. Young: “In the world beyond the grave shall there be found perished minds! Lost spirits! In which intellect, conscience, soul, have become dead? Immortal wrecks! Fires gone out, that might have glowed with undying brightness! Lights that might have sparkled forever in the glorious firmament, quenched in the blackness of everlasting night?
In all the horror of this conception, and should it ever be realized, at least we are sure that it is no doing of the Holy One, no ordination of his, no punishment which He has appointed, and which his hand inflicts. It lies in the nature of things, and is the proper, necessary working out of crime itself; and crime, with all its tremendous consequences, is that which the Almighty only hates eternally, which He is forever resisting, and which it is the design of every department of his Providence, and of the entire plan of Providence, to exterminate.”
This theodicy is sometimes illustrated by the case of a man who maims and disables himself; and we are asked if his evil case, beginning in guilt, can end in innocence?
In reply to the whole argument we remark that the freedom of will, which in the last theodicy was reduced to a minimum, here disappears altogether. That which began in freedom, ends in fate; for a law of nature is essentially a chain of causes and effects, whose links can be sundered only by being destroyed. The man who is really disabled, by whatever guilt of his own, incurs no new guilt for continuing disabled. He cannot be blamed for not doing what he cannot do. If then he suffers eternally, this will be either for an infinite guilt of his original sin, or by a fatality which God himself can neither prevent or overrule. The former supposition implies theories which we have found untenable. The latter makes Fate stronger than God. And t the best, the theodicy is an attempt to erect a rampart between God and eternal woe, under a fair name that shall seem to save His character. We have only to ask, Is not He the Author of Nature?
20. PHRENSY.
There are certain forms of the last theodicy in which the notion of freedom is explicitly abandoned. Thus Coleridge remarks, by way of supposition: “Why need we talk of a fiery hell? If the will, which is the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel, from the anarchy of our powers. It would be a conscious madness — a horrid thought!” And Martineau: “In many a hospital of mental disease (as it is called) you have doubtless seen a melancholy being pacing to and fro with rapid strides, and lost to everything around, wringing his hands in incommunicable suffering, and letting fall a low mutter, rising quickly into a shrill cry; his features cut with the graver of sharp anguish; his eyelids drooping, (for he never sleeps,) and showering ever scalding tears. It is the maniac of remorse, possibly indeed made wretched by merely imaginary crimes; but just as possibly maddened by too true a recollection, and what the world would esteem too scrupulous a conscience. Listen to him and you will often be surprised into fresh pity, to find how seemingly slight are the offences, injuries perhaps of mere unripened thought, which feed the fires, find whirl the lash of this incipient woe. He is the dread type of Hell.”
The following fearful picture is drawn by McCosh: “Tied, like Mazeppa, on a courser over which he has no control, he would feel a kind of ecstasy in the very wildness of his careering. Not only so, but acquiring courage from despair, he may proceed the length of making war with the judge. Since he cannot flee from him, he will perhaps affect to condemn him, or impugn the authority of his law.
“Souls who dare look the omnipotent tyrant in
His everlasting face, and tell him that His evil is not good.”
— Byron’s Cain.
“But this is by no means so easy a work, for meanwhile God has a witness in every man’s bosom. There must be some way of deluding this witness before so bold a step can be taken. The spirit will now try to make the conscience condemn the judge as being harsh and relentless. Strange and paradoxical as it may appear, it will, to some extent, be successful. It will picture to the conscience condemnation as a dark deed of tyranny and revenge committed by God; and believing, or trying to believe, that God is malignant, it will view Him with the feelings
which malignity should inspire. And now the soul will not only be angry with God, but will feel as if it did right to be angry, and the war which it carries on will not only be that of the passions, but of an evil conscience. The war, too, will now be incessant. If it were merely that of the passions, there might be cessations, and gaps, and intervals; but being that of a troubled conscience, as well as of a disordered heart, it becomes a constant and ever- lasting warfare, without respite and without end.”
If we consider this theory simply as making the condition of the lost a destiny, the criticism of John Foster is pertinent and adequate: “The allegation (of eternal sinfulness) is of no avail in vindication of the doctrine, because the first consignment to the dreadful state necessitates a continuance of the criminality; the doctrine teaching that it is of the essence, and is an awful aggravation, of the original consignment, — that it dooms the condemned to maintain the criminal spirit unchanged for ever.
The doom to sin as well as to suffer, and, according to the argument, to sin in order to suffer, is inflicted as the punishment of the sin committed in the mortal state. Virtually, therefore, the eternal punishment is the punishment of the sins of time.”
But, we may add, in each of these representations the “law of nature” which underlies the argument, and which is supposed to be a law of human nature, appears as undermining and deranging that nature. The beings here described have ceased not only to be responsible, but to be human. They are maniacs. And in whatever faculty of the soul the “law of nature” is supposed to work eternal retribution, it will be found to have changed humanity into a monstrosity. According to this view the door of mercy is shut against the lost, absolutely and forever. The final judgment is strictly an irrevocable sentence against them. If they should repent, they would still be utterly and hopelessly lost. The theory thus avoids the difficulties that encounter the doctrine of eternal voluntary sinfulness. But it shifts the burden without removing it. For with freedom, character also ceases; since voluntary purpose — no less voluntary because it may be a cherished and settled habit — is the soul of character. And the subject of the eternal punishment here described is no longer a responsible being; is not a person, but a thing. And if the justice of the doom cannot be made out by some infinitude of guilt in this life, then the blasphemy of the terrible epic just quoted, is not blasphemy. If on the other hand the guilt of a creature which does not end in innocence, cannot end in death, then we have a necessity which God himself must ever deplore, and the wail of the world of despair is echoed back from the dwelling-place of the Most High.
21. RESTRAINT.
A theory has been recently stated, and supported by the following passages from Swedenborg: “They [the unrepentant] are cast into hell, where they are compelled by punishments not to do evil; but punishments do not take away the will, the intention, and consequent thought of evil; they only take away the act.” Again: “Those who had punished and tormented others are in their turn punished and tormented by others; and this continues until at length their desire abates from the fear of punishment.” Again: “He, after death, will be chastised and punished; which will be continued until, through fear of punishment, he commit evil no longer, although even then he can never be induced to do good from the love of good.”
The theory offered “is simply the reduction of the hells to such external order as amounts to universal and particular obedience; or such obedience as is final and eternal, never more to break out into open rebellion. But this obedience is from a selfish motive, viz. — the tiresomeness of sin from its consequences, and the love of happiness from such outward obedience.” “In this sense sin is finished, and all enemies subdued. But, in the heavens, the internals are cleansed, as well as the externals reduced to order; they are hence obedient from the love of God and truth itself. In one reigns the love of the Lord and the neighbour; in the other the love of self and the world. Outwardly, they may, in a very advanced state of progression, far off in the depths of eternity, look somewhat alike. They will all be engaged in the performance of uses. But as their motives are different, even opposite, they would, if seen by a spiritual eye in their respective forms, appear directly opposite to each other; ‘Like two men treading against each other, feet to feet.’ And this opposite relation they may retain forever. Thus, Heaven and Hell are both eternal; and at the same time universal obedience is rendered to the Lord of Hosts, from all worlds and all dominions.”
The chief merit of this theory is the broad distinction it makes between the outward and the inward — the deed and the will — the acting of virtue and the hearty love of it. This distinction is made to explain an eternal difference between heaven and hell, while it is remarked that in an eternal progression, as the constant law of the universe, “to what a height, in the far distant eternity, may the hells eventually attain! They may, in some far off stage of their progress, get to exceed, in mere external quietness and peace, many good people’s present idea of heaven;” though “to the heavens they would forever look black and ugly” (page 19).
It is also a signal merit of this view, that it conceives a state of blessedness so exalted — a heaven so high — that a seeming heaven may be a hell beside it.
But, can the theodicy be consistently maintained? Does it not, on the one hand, annex the outward reward of virtue to the love of vice? Beneath a superimposed happiness, may not the distinctions of good and evil, right and wrong, be concealed from the view of the lost? For ever acting virtue, as in a stage play, would they not be hypocrites at first, to be self-deceived at last, seeing the curtain never drops? And, in an eternal restraint, what becomes of their practical freedom? Is it not lost? And if they suspect or feel themselves restrained, then, on the other hand, is not even their poor and empty happiness at an end? And thus is it not a refutation beforehand of the theory, when it is said that “the evil are happier, when reduced to a state of entire conformity with their ruling love, than while they are living in a hypocritical, assumed appearance of goods and truths which they have not interiorly.
From those who are in evils, goods will be taken away; and from those who are in false truths will be taken away. All will be reduced to speak. as they think, and to act as they will; and not, as they do in this world, to speak one thing and think another, and will one thing and act another” (p. 9).
22. TWILIGHT.
Between the two last named theories lies a field of confused speculation respecting the state of the lost. Confused, we call it, because it asserts no active malignity, nor intense suffering — neither hazardous freedom nor terrible bondage of the lost soul; yet interesting, as betraying the unrest of the human mind on this subject, and as sometimes leaning toward what we regard as the true theodicy.
97. It is often said that to be banished from the presence of God, with no other suffering than the sense of an eternal loss, will be a sufficient woe; and a merciful God will condemn to nothing worse. This is a common sentiment among Christians who have lost impenitent friends. It was perhaps also what Bunyan conceived when he said that if he should lose heaven at last, he could still adore God in the world of despair; this per- suasion was the assurance of his hope. And, as is well known, a similar religious experience has often been asked of those first making profession of their faith.
98. Religious melancholy often depicts a lost condition with a certain mixture of pious feeling. Many who have deemed them- selves reprobate, have thought of their future selves as among fiends, but not of them. They would fain dissuade them from cursing and blasphemy, and engage them at least in prayer, though praise be too high for them.
99. The fatuity of the lost often takes the form of pleasure in evil, or of happy delusion. In uneasy and unenviable joys, their condition may be hideous and detestable, but not otherwise fearful. To low and vulgar minds this is the same that an eternal career of splendid wickedness is to minds of a loftier make. In the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg this view of the condition of the lost is somewhat prominent. It is stated by an earlier writer thus:“ The divine goodness is not to be charged with cruelty for letting them continue in that existence, though it be very miserable, when they themselves will not have it removed; or for not altering their condition, which they utterly refuse to have altered. It is better for them, indeed, not to be than to be; but only in the opinion of wise men, to which they do not assent.”
100. It is sometimes thought that the inflicted sufferings of the future state may be at times remitted, or ever moderate and endurable. Augustine himself once allowed the expression that “the punishments of the damned are mitigated, at certain intervals; since the wrath of God might still be said to abide upon them.” And a form of theodicy sometimes mooted is this — that the sufferings of the lost are so reduced in degree, that, though eternal in duration, they are still finite in their sum.
101. The eternal progress of the lost in knowledge and capacity is sometimes denied. Thus we are told: “An assumption which adds nothing to the plain scriptural doctrine of retribution, is that the wicked will go on indefinitely increasing in capacities and in degrees of suffering, on a scale not unlike that of the righteous. The Scriptures do not expressly teach such doctrine. Sin does not, like holiness, enlarge the capacities of the soul. It has no tendencies that way, — punishment has none.”
To all this indistinct theodicy, we need not reply in detail. In some of its statements the lost appear as half dead; showing few signs of immortal vigour. In others, their deportment is un- worthy of an immortal existence. And in all, the Final retribution makes slow progress.
The conceptions are all in twilight, both as they picture a condition between the glaring light of God’s eternal frown, and the blackness of darkness for ever; and as they indicate the feeble hold the human mind has on the ideas of the Eternal and the Infinite.
This mixed theodicy of life and death as we think, untenable. The living human soul cannot be stationary. Nothing else than a habit of unceasing oblivion could subject it to eternal illusions; and an eternal power of thinking must give it increase of knowledge; and knowledge, experience; and the notion of experience is fatal to each form of the argument. The prisoners whom it would hold must either come out into the light of day, or sink in eternal night. In a word, they must either live or die. Besides being in itself an unrest of the Christian intellect, and a burden to the Christian faith, the argument, we think, encumbers the divine administration with a sloth of justice, and the universe with a mass of useless being.
EVIL TEMPORARY.
“What if God, willing to show His wrath, and to make His power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath, fitted to destruction?”
We have now shown that the doctrine of eternal evil resulting from an event in time is dualistic, and that Theodicy does not relieve this limitation of the divine power. Before we proceed to the scriptural argument, we will offer some reasons to show that evil is temporary, and thus consists with a true Theism.
1. EVIL NOT NEEDFUL.
Besides the theodicies we have examined, various arguments are adduced to show either an eternal necessity or an eternal economy of evil. These may be classified as the epidictic, eudemonic, and disciplinary theories.
A
The epidictic theory supposes evil needful in order to display some divine attribute. E.g.:
1. The Divine Power. — Thus we are often told that the destruction of revolted subjects could only be a dernier resort of the Sovereign Ruler, and proof of His weakness. “Why,” it is asked, “should God strike them from existence, unless because it is impossible to uphold and rule them forever in revolt, in a manner worthy of his perfections, and compatibly with the safety of his government over his other subjects? But an inability to reign over them in such a manner would be an imperfection; and to annihilate a vast crowd of creatures because of such an inability would be a public acknowledgment and demonstration of that imperfection. It would form an indisputable proof that He was unequal to his station; that He had called beings into existence whom lie was unable to uphold and rule conformably to their character, in such a manner as not to defeat the ends for which He created them.” Such a destruction, we are told, would furnish Satan with an excuse for rebellion, and a boast of triumph over God.
The reply is two-fold.
(1.) What are “the ends for which God created” his rebellious subjects? Certainly the end of government is obedience, and not the mere display of statesman- ship. Hence it may be doubted whether God can rule rebels “forever in; revolt, in a manner worthy of his perfections.” But, waiving this limitation of the divine power, the transparent fallacy of the argument is
(2.) An assumption that what God can do, He must do. Who ever doubted that the Omnipotent can manage his creatures, in some way, so long as He keeps them in being? He can do this eternally, if any sceptic should ask such proof of his power. But He is able also not to do this. As true courage fears not the cry of cowardice, so God may contemn the charge of weakness, though in so doing He should remind us of his power to create by un-creating the worthless. But, by the argument in hand, God’s capacities are made divine necessities. If He can conserve the rebellious. He must do so, lest Satan should deride Him, and all the people distrust Him. He is therefore bound hand and foot, by the green withes of our theology, until the trumpet shall sound: “The Eternities be upon thee, O Lord!” Until then, the bands, we doubt not, will strengthen some sort of faith.
B
The display of Divine Justice. — We have already shown that eternal suffering is not to be claimed as the right of God’s justice. But it is urged that such endless punishment is wanted, to exhibit this eternal attribute of God. “Sin and its power in the world could not be missing, because that contrast of the two divine attributes, of punitive justice on the one hand, and mercy on the other, quite dualistically exhibited, required objects in which to reveal itself.”
Here the reply is also two-fold.
(1.) If this divine attribute needed an eternal suffering not strictly its due, the deplorable want might be supplied
from an eternal succession of the sinning and perishing. But
(2.) We deny the impoverishing need. The law of God asks obedience, to be rewarded with blessing. The recompense of reward is the display of justice which God desires. He needs nothing which He forbids. All penal suffering is the necessity not of God’s infinite fullness, but of man’s wickedness and weakness.
This is to suppose that the holiness of God, of which the Shekinah was the sacred symbol, cannot shine brightly enough by its own light, but needs the hideous deformity and blackness of sin for its illustration. God needs that which it is his very nature to detest, — and it must be a feature of the eternal world if not a part of his plan, — that his abhorrence of it may appear! The whole theory is a contradiction, which reminds one of the supposed wisdom of keeping up the fire upon the altar of the temple of Ephesus, by digging down the coal foundations on which it rested. It justifies the remark of Mohler upon the theory of Beza just named: “It was thus the part of the Deity to call forth somehow an evil sentiment, in order to attain his ends; that is to say. He must annihilate his sanctity, in order on its ruins to attain to compassion and justice.”
22. The display of God’s Mercy. — This theory is suggested in some of the passages already cited. By one writer it is stated as the Church doctrine, as contained in the old expression:
“Happy the guilt, which did invite such a Redeemer and so great!”
It is specially favoured by a supra-lapsarian theology, which supposes the work of Redemption, as the richest possible display of divine love, to be an essential if not the main feature of the plan of creation. In this view, man’s failure was the necessary prelude of God’s success. That is, the creation would have been a failure if man had not fallen!
Besides a few passages of Scripture that seem to represent the plan of g race as the choice work of God, and the subjects of it as special favourites of Heaven, this theory finds an apparent support in the devout gratitude which becomes the redeemed. All the blessings we receive are a pure mercy and gratuity; the wealth of divine goodness to man is a grant of God’s compassion. And all the genuine goodness or love which man has toward God, is wrought by His undeserved love and pity in the gift of his Son as our Saviour. And since Redemption is everything to man, and the work of salvation is crowned with shoutings of Grace! Grace! Unto it, — it is easy for man to think of grace as the best of all possible things, and that the universe would be poor if sin had not given occasion for display of its riches.
But while the tender and blessed sense of sins forgiven, of pangs relieved, of sorrows assuaged, and of poverty enriched, suggest the thought that guilt is a happy thing in the world, — the moral sense, the conscience, remonstrates. What parent, shedding tears of joy over a wayward child, subdued and improved by chastening or sickness, would not experience a strange revulsion of feeling, if the child should congratulate its past waywardness as the occasion of its amendment, and repeat the saying: Felix culpa!
As sin is in its very idea that which ought not to be, so it is implied in sorrow for it that the penitent shall ever wish he had not sinned. The most wondrous display of God’s undeserved love can only inspire the more ardent wish that one had not abused that love. It has been well said, by one who even holds that infinite evil may be for infinite good: “Throughout eternity man’s state must imply and refer to his past disobedience, and his corrupt state of sin and death, and the suffering of Christ himself, which no redeemed soul can for an instant forget, or remember without sorrow.”
And the passages of Scripture that may seem to support this notion of the economy of evil, will hardly sustain it. When we are told of the “joy in heaven over one sinner that repents, more than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance,” allusion is made, probably, not to those who were truly righteous, but to the self-righteous. The style of thought is the same as when Christ says: “The whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick.” Heaven rejoices more in the humble publican, than in the proud Pharisee. And though Paul shows that where sin did abound, grace did superabound, yet, to the suggestion that men should sin that grace may abound, he instantly replies, as though it were a blasphemy: “whose condemnation is just.”
The whole theory of sin as the happy occasion of mercy also forgets that God’s infinite love might have bestowed perhaps greater blessings on men than they can now receive, with their faculties impaired by the Fall.
And when we are told of the condescension of Christ, in humbling himself to suffering and death for our sake, it is forgotten that Christ might have been incarnate, as our Elder Brother, leading us on more rapidly in an eternal progress, if our guilt had not crowned him with thorns, and bidden him to enter the grave for our rescue.
But it is asked, did not God from eternity provide a Redemption for man? Doubtless. Yet it by no means follows that our need of Redemption was his choice; for then we might ask: “Who hath resisted his w ill?” It pertains to the divine integrity that all God’s plans should be against evil, and not for it. The remedy of evils is the most active desire that they had not been, whether in the heart of God or man. “Who will call Aeneas pious,” says Seneca, “if he wished the city of Troy might be taken, that he might rescue his father out of captivity? Or the young Sicilians, if, in order to set their children a good example, they wished that Aeneas would throw out an uncommon torrent of fire, to give them opportunity of showing their filial duty by snatching their parents out of the fire? Rome owes nothing to Scipio, if he prolonged the Carthaginian war to have the honour of putting an end to it; nor to the Decii for dying to save their country, if they had first wished that an extreme necessity of affairs might give them an opportunity of bravely devoting themselves. Nothing can be more infamous in a physician than to make himself work.” And may the Great Physician, or the King who indeed cannot do wrong, desire the leprosy of sin and the abomination of guilt as occasions for displaying any of His attributes?
C
By the eudaimonic theory we mean that which supposes suffering to be useful by increasing the sense of happiness. It gives zest, we are told, to human delights. It is the seasoning of our enjoyments. The last theory regards evil as a means of revealing God; the present regards evil as quickening the perceptions of man. There are two forms of it, according as suffering is supposed to be remembered in one’s own experience, or witnessed in the experience of others.
23. It is a common remark that we know not the value of our blessings until we have lost them. Health is most prized and enjoyed after sickness. Whence the sentiment in the beautiful, though amorous poem of Gresset:
“O the bliss of convalescence!”
And yet who desires sickness for the sake of the happy recovery from it? Who pants (or pain, in order to enjoy the release from it? Who desires any complex experience of pangs and rescues to be repeated? Who can reconcile the paradox that evil is “ever mournful and wrong when Wis to happen, but often good when it has happened?” And what Christian, tried by suffering and loss, does not reproach himself as naturally too insensible of, and ungrateful for, God’s constant blessings? What may we infer from this dread of anguish and this conviction that we ought not to need it, but that it is not needful for perfect beings, and may be a token of our fallen state?
And an analysis of the theory may lead us to the same conclusion. Admitting the fact that blessings brighten by the side of curses, it does not follow that they derive value from them. It is not the contrast between joy and sorrow that creates joy. If it were so, then the more intense anguish, piercing to the depths of one’s own soul, would produce the higher joy. Cold does not create heat; nor death, life. It is not the winter that quickens the growing fruits of summer. The highest forms of vegetable life are those that know no winter, but held budding blossom and ripening fruit together through the year. So the Tree of Life, bearing twelve-fold fruits, from month to month. Darkness does not enlighten the day; in the Heavenly Jerusalem there is no night. Is not the evil of suffering that we need now, the scourge of indifference and dullness?
24. There cannot be a greater occasion of scandal to religion, than the notion that the bliss of the saved is enhanced by consideration of the woes of the damned. The doctrine appears in its boldest form, among the Schoolmen. Thus Aquinas: “That the bliss of the saved may please them more, and they render more abundant thanks to God for it, they are permitted to gaze upon the punishment of the wicked.” And Peter Lombard:
“The elect will come forth to behold the torments of the un- godly, and at this spectacle they will not be smitten with sorrow; on the contrary, while they see the unspeakable sufferings of the ungodly, they, intoxicated with joy, will thank God for their own salvation.” All sympathy with the lost is denied by Quenstedt. The difficulties on this score are admitted by another writer, who says: “Yet under another, a nearer, and much more affecting consideration, viz. that all this is the misery which they themselves were exposed to, and were in imminent danger of incurring, — in this view why may not the sense of their own escape so far overcome the sense of another’s ruin, as quite to extinguish the pain that usually attends the idea of it, and even render it productive of some real happiness?” The same view is combined with the previous theories by Hopkins, thus:
“The smoke of their torment shall ascend up in the sight of the blessed forever and ever, and serve, as a most clear glass always before their eyes, to give them a constant, bright, and most affecting view. This display of the divine character and glory will be in favour of the redeemed, and most entertaining, and give the highest pleasure to those who love God, and raise their happiness to ineffable heights.” Should this eternal punishment “cease, and this fire be extinguished, 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.”
To this theory we need not reply with analytic argument. It may be safely left to die under the pity of a humane theology. Even the Rabbles, who interpret the last verse of Isaiah’s prophecy of temporary suffering in Gehenna, speak of the righteous as saying: “It is enough.” We admire the amiable Lavater even for his unwarranted prayer, when he says: “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 to God with the warmest wishes that He would have mercy upon all. “ The notion of heavenly joy in the eternal sufferings of the lost is indeed too consistent with that doctrine; but it has no place in the heart of many who hold it; and with a hopeful inconsistency many now suppose the blessed ignore the woes of the lost; hence they seem useless, and might as well not be. We trust the theory may not revive, now that the author of a Prize Essay dares commend the strong reprobation of it.
D
By the disciplinary theory we mean that which supposes evil needful as a trial and exercise of virtue. Thus Lactantius tells us: “Virtue is firm and unyielding patience in enduring evils; whence it follows that where an adversary is wanting, there is no virtue.” And according to a modern writer there must be an adversary within the heart, or there can be no virtue. “Virtue rests simply and only upon moral corruption.” In support of which startling paradox we are asked what virtue in temperance, without the appetite that makes a drunkard? Or in self-possession, without strong desire, anger, impatience? Or in love, placableness, pity, if all men were good, upright, happy? What virtue in loving those who love us?
Is the same writer consistent in concluding that evil is unripe good, the work of God, and therefore good? AVe think he is; though we should then conclude with the ancients that necessity, which so mingles the cup of virtue and bliss, is the only evil.
Let no one suppose that we deny or undervalue the patient virtues, which are the glory of Christianity. The redemption of a fallen race must begin with them; and, in contrast with the sins of men and in their power to overcome evil with good, they are peculiarly resplendent. God himself has exemplified them in his own long-suffering, pity, and condescension; visiting sick humanity; watching beside our bed of pain; assuaging our distress; ministering to our comfort; enduring much from our fretfulness; trying many a grievous conflict with our madness and rage; rewarded with much ingratitude; yet freely forgiving all. Having given such an example in our behalf, He may well ask us to exercise these virtues in behalf of one another.
But, must the possible virtues have been lacking in number, or inferior in quality, without these sad occasions? What is virtue, if it be not the free action of our powers according to their proper laws? The struggle with evil is only one exercise of these powers, — life, wrestling with disease and death, gaining strength, if not victory. Yet in all this our faculties are diverted from their legitimate use. It is like the sympathy of the body with an injured limb, turning aside its energies to repair the lesion. It is the painful effort to remove obstructions that ought not to be. And every virtue thus developed, so far as it is peculiar, is a special unfitness for the original duties of our being. The strength thus gained must be re-instructed, ere it can be applied in the creation of positive good. The bravery of the warrior must be disciplined anew for the hardy enterprises of peace. The special skill of the physician is almost useless when health prevails. The habits formed in opposing evils must be changed when evils cease. And how many bad habits are formed and bad feelings engendered in man’s best warfare against the powers of darkness, how much he must first unlearn in the higher discipline of heaven, — none but the Master can tell. And if the universe were absolutely without evil, what right have we to assume that it might not furnish fit and ample material for the exercise of all created faculties, so their sharpness need not be turned to their own destruction? or that Infinite Wisdom could not find for immortal beings duties sufficiently hard and manifold, for the most perfect tempering, and for the richest luxuriance, of virtue?
But virtue is emotional as well as energetic. And we are told that man can learn a lively abhorrence of evil and an earnest cleaving to that which is good, only by conflict with suffering and wrong; that experience, though a severe, is a needful instructor. If so, we reply, then God has not endowed man with faculties for knowing that which most concerns him; or if man has them, they can be developed only by that which should not be. But is man made so poor that evil must be part of his goods?
To say nothing of the perceptive faculties, that reveal to him all this fair world, and that may in due time explore the heavens where God dwells, what is Imagination, that tells us in myriad ways what and how things might be? and Conscience, telling us what we and all men should be? The minds of men are teeming with fairy visions, beautiful day-dreams which it seems cruel to disturb. The world can hardly contain the books of fiction that are written; and boundless space could not contain the air- castles that are built, — realms of delight which it is sad to think are unreal. And what countless evils do men shudder at, what vices do they detest, what crimes abhor, that exist only as things conceived? Must they, then, confront the hideous visage of actual sin, to know how fair is virtue? Even granting that fallen men, half dead, need to be rudely shocked into physical and moral sensibility, dare we say that perfected saints and holy angels need such stimulus to their ecstasy of sacred bliss? For them, might not the remotest thought of the sins we commit, and of the pains we feel, be terrible enough to clench their hold on good? Or, if worse fancies were needed for their virtue, shall we try to guess what frightful horrors they might not paint before their minds, to startle paradise with a salutary shudder?
Finally, the theory of evil as necessary to good is a denial of the integrity and reality of virtue. A moral being must be stronger than his necessities, in order to make them virtues. The power to bring good out of evil is weak, if it needs the evil for its occasion. As God, able to manage evil beings forever, can also dispense with them, so the virtue of a finite creature can dispense with temporary evils, or it is worthless. If men can never come out of that dear school, experience, they will never be wise. Is there “no higher virtue than that which is gained by conflict? No virtue, which, like the fruits of nature, grows by an organic, productive energy? Are there only hearts from which the oil is mechanically pressed? None from which it flows spontaneously? “So far from being pure and disinterested, virtue is ever imperfect and false, if even in the glorified state it must be constrained by the sight or the knowledge of evil. In this view, Heaven itself becomes a prison, guarded round not by the shadowy “hydras, gorgons and chimeras dire” of a fertile, fearless fancy, but by actual grim forms that Necessity imposes as the eternal law and limit of the kingdom of light.
We reject, then, the whole theory. Yet it may be accounted for. The human race are but little advanced beyond nothingness; the regenerate are in the infancy of their eternal life. We have seen and felt much evil; in relief from it, many joys. Most of our happiness has had suffering for its precursor, or its neighbour. What marvel, if we should mistake the common fact for a general law, and, wondering at the power of God and of good, should subsidize the evil they subdue as their servant forever? We do not reflect that it then loses its proper nature as fierce and malignant, and that if we strive to retain the theory, the distinction of good and evil ceases.
But, Ave trust, when we have attained spiritual manhood, the contrasts and alternations that occasion our childish errors will be passed. We might then, but for our pardoned sins with which God does not upbraid us, forget the evils from which we are saved, in the glorious duties for which we are saved. The antagonism between a little good and real evil will be merged in a higher antagonism between absolute good and relative evil. The contest against wrong will give place to happier struggles with difficulties where no evil lurks, — hard problems of thought and work which Eternal Wisdom knows how to propose. The manna of blessing, that cloys now if it be not spiced, will be our wonted food when we shall hunger and thirst after righteousness,
‘From seeming evil still educing good,
And better thence, and better still,
In infinite progression.’
2. THE FRAILTY OF EVIL.
What is sin, or moral evil, but a voluntary estrangement from God? As the holiness, or highest goodness, and the true welfare of the creature are found in love toward God, and in being loved of Him, is not evil, primarily, a turning away from God, — a denial of Him as the true good? And may not the manifold forms of sin, — ingratitude, pride, selfishness, lawless desire, envy, enmity, malignity, — be traced to a wilful alienation from God, as their common, excuseless and inexplicable cause?
But God cannot be rejected as the Archetype and Fountain of all good without being disliked or even denied as the source of being. The revolted creature finds a quarrel with the sense of his utter dependence. What was before a happy reliance is now an unwelcome sense of weakness. He would prefer to subsist by himself, and for himself He would fain be a central being, and other forms of being must be subservient to him. All his love is changed to selfish passion; he cherishes other forms of being, not for their good, or as a divine handiwork, but for his own use and belief. They must exist for him. That which will not serve his turn provokes his enmity; and that which yields to him is wasted upon him. His departure from the true and imperishable Good makes him of necessity a consumer and a destroyer.
But his warfare with the true welfare of others, and with the power that preserves him, is also a warfare upon himself. The laws of his own being are as much infringed upon as the principles of the common good. The passions he has kindled are palled with satiety, or they prey upon and derange his own powers and capacities. And unless we assume that all evil, or at least all the effects of evil, are only physical, we must recognize a disease of the soul; in the way of analogy, though not of resemblance, the weakness and the strength of the revolted soul may be the weakness and the strength of its fever. We do not deny any principle of the divine judgments when we say the words of Wisdom may be strictly true: “He that sins against me wrongs his own soul; all they that hate me love death.”
So much for the nature of evil in its worst form, as sin. And what is physical evil, or pain, but the anguish of a created life whose law is violated or its strength impaired — the wail of mortality — the cry of warning or the despairing shriek that notes our subjection to decay and death? It is an old saying that what is imperishable is impossible. This is true, with a single qualification. The divine nature suffers grief for man, freely, as a gift of love. The pang is not a violence from without; it is the throbbing of the heart of God. The very affection which moves to pity is one of the highest forms of life; it more than heals the wound it makes. And if saints and angels share the divine sorrows over erring creatures, they also share the divine nature; for God is Love; this emotion that “never fails” may be more than anything else the sign of their exemption from decay. But the pain that comes not from love, finds no sup- port. It is the token of frailty, the herald of death.
But not only the nature of evil shows its weakness — it has no substance. It subsists only by its connection with good, and as a warfare against it. It is not an entity. It has no independent being. And no creature was originally bad. Even the Persians knew how to say that “evil, according to the oracle, is more frail than non-entity.” And many of the old philosophers and of the early Fathers regarded evil and being as naturally opposite. Plato speaks of God as the essential Being, who truly is; and of matter, as that which is not;’ chiefly, indeed, because it is subject to change and decay, as Cicero remarks; but probably also because it was with him the principle of evil. And accordingly Proclus, one of the later Platonists, says: “Evil effects something, indeed, among beings; but the effective power of evil is evident from this, that it is corruptive of everything. For that evil is this is demonstrated by Socrates in the Republic, who very properly says that the good of everything is that which is preservative of everything, on which account all things desire good; for existence to all things is thence derived; just as non-existence and corruption are on account of the nature of evil.“
And again: “It is impossible for that which does not desire good, to rank among beings. For on account of this desire all beings are produced and exist, and from this derive their salvation [preservation].” Again, speaking of the dependence of evil: “All life is essentially power; but evil, being produced through a power which is not its own, is contrary to good, employing its own power for the purpose of resisting good. And the greater, indeed, the inherent power is, the greater are the energies and the works of evil; but they are less when the power is less.” To the same purpose says Epictetus: “As the line is not drawn [in the race-course] in order that those who run should depart from it, so evil nowhere exists as a proper nature.”
Athanasius says: “Those things are, which are good; those things are not, which are evil. And good things have being, because their patterns are in God, who truly is; but evil things have not being, because, nothing in themselves, they are the fictions of men.” “As a substance, and in its own nature, evil is nothing; the Creator hath made all things.” Again: “Evil thin are not entities; but good things are entities, since they are of God, who truly is.” And Basil: “Evil is no real thing, but a mere negation.” Gregory Nyssen uses very similar language.
And Augustine, replying to the Manicheans, says: “Who is so blind as not to see that evil is that which is opposed to the nature of a thing? And by this principle is your heresy refuted; for evil, as opposed to nature, is not a nature. But you say that evil is a certain nature and substance. But what is opposed to nature, struggles against it and would destroy it. So that which exists tends to make non-existence. For nature itself is only what is understood, after its kind, to be something. Hence as we speak of the being of anything as its essence and substance, so the ancients, wanting these term, used the word nature. If then you will consider the matter, evil consists in this very thing — a defection from being, and a tendency to non-being.”
Again: “How can that which you regard as the principle of evil be opposed to nature and substance, if it be itself a nature and a substance? It could thus only destroy its own being; and if it should accomplish this, it would indeed attain the supremacy of evil. But this can hardly be; for you say it not only is, but is eternal. But so long as it exists, it cannot be the supreme evil.”
Again: “Things are corrupted (or wasted) by being deprived of good. But if deprived of all good, they will not be at all. For if they shall be, and cannot be corrupted, they will be better, because they will remain incorruptible. Hence all things that are good. The evil, then, of which I was seeking the origin, is not a substance; for if it were, it would be a good.” And even in the terrible imagery of Gregory the Great we discover lingering the same sentiment: “He [the lost sinner] dies, and at the same time lives; he tends toward nothingness, and yet subsists; he is ever coming to an end, yet is never extinct.”
This notion of Evil as the antithesis not only of Good but also of Being, is contained in the scholastic phrase: “All being is essentially good.” The notion may indeed be easily perverted from its true application, as when it is affirmed that evil is only negative, physical, or consists in mere imperfection. It still remains true that he who says to Evil: “Be thou my good,” may find a fearful penalty of guilt in the transition from the glorious light of being, to the eternal darkness in which there is no being.
These views may be sustained by a few passages from modern Christian writers. Says Dr. Goodwin: “The whole creation is built upon a quagmire of nothing, and is continually ready to sink into it and to be swallowed up by it; which makes the whole, or any part of it, to shake and quiver when God is angry. The foundation of the creature’s changeability to sin (when as at first made near to holy) is by our divines put upon this: that we being made out of nothing, are apt to verge and sink into nothing, and so fall towards it in sinning. And truly, sin is a great leap, or fall rather, and tottering towards it; and we may view our own nothingness most by it; and did not God, in the just act of our reeling towards sinning, put a stop and uphold our beings, We should fall to nothing.”
And Nitzsch, on the penalty of death, remarks: “Original principles are in themselves free from mortality. It is only sinners who have, as it were, invited, incited, and importuned death. However dark these doctrines are, still it is certain that the question does not merely concern spiritual death, but turns on the bias of evil for non-being, and the desire to frustrate and violate all existence.”
Again: “If the soul, being dependent on its Creator, does not possess absolute immortality, this at least is certain, that it has been created and constituted to participate in eternal life; and if it must lose its true self-life in proportion as it is deserted by truth, love, and blessedness, it follows that as sin increases, the soul faces destruction in hell or its death (Matthew 10:28; Revelation 20:15.) Truly,” says Dr. Muller, “sin is nothingness (as the Hebrew term expresses it) and misery; but it does not immediately manifest itself, as such, at every point of human existence, in its earthly development; but only in its result is this first of all fully seen. But the divine judgment removes the result to the end of the world’s history.” Again: “Evil is not merely at variance with the good, but also with itself; if the good has one enemy, the evil has two, the good and the evil.
This contradiction of the evil against itself has, besides the exhibited ethical psychological signification, still a peculiar metaphysical moment [import]. If there belongs to the evil no existence independent of God, of the absolute good, it nevertheless incessantly strives after the same, and we have seen that the evil is just nothing else than this turning away from God, this languishing after separate independency. In the abandonment of the creature to evil, it factually [practically] denies its being created by God; it will not have the ground of its existence in God, but it will live, act, and enjoy itself as if it had existence in itself, and were its own lord. How now if God should allow it to succeed in this endeavour, if He should separate himself from it, just as it does from Him? The moment of such an emancipation of the creature from God were equally that of its sinking into non-entity; for it is not able for a single moment otherwise to exist than in the hand of God, than his mancipium, be its will moreover good or bad. Thus a parasitic plant strives to suck out all the juices from the organic body, in order to draw them into its own perverted, poisonous process of development; but just as it attains the end of its endeavour, it has also found its own death.”
3. THE PERMISSION OF EVIL.
It will here be asked: If Evil is both needless and frail, why- does it exist at all? Various objections will be urged to the distinction we allege, between temporary and eternal evil; as also between the permission and the ordination of it. Thus Whately: “The main difficulty is not the amount of evil that exists, but the existence of any at all. Any, even the smallest portion of evil, is quite unaccountable, supposing the same amount of good can be obtained without that evil; and why it is not so attainable, is more than we are able to explain. And if there be some reason we cannot understand why a small amount of evil is unavoidable, there may be, for aught we know, the same reason for a greater amount. I will undertake to explain to any one the eternal punishment of the wicked, if he will explain to me the existence of the wicked; — if he will explain why God does not cause all those to die in the cradle, of whom He foresees that when they grow up they will lead a sinful life.
The thing cannot be explained; and it is better to rest satisfied with knowing as much as God has thought fit to teach us, than to try our strength against mysteries which but deride our weakness.” Another writer says: “This moment, as much as millions of years hence, is part of the infinite government of one and the same God. And where it cannot be made evident that a present law or fact or mode of divine government has anything transient or mutable about it, but it appears on the other hand to rest on the essential nature of things, then we properly infer perpetuity.”
Confessing that evil is a proper mystery, we have already endeavoured to show that the notion of eternal evil throws a burden upon human faith, which that of temporary evil does not. And to the witnesses before cited, we may here add Lactantius himself, who reasons thus: “Wisdom stands or falls with a liability to evil, else there could be no trace of virtue in man, which essentially consists in bearing and overcoming the bitterness of evil. Thus, by the removal of a small amount of evil, we might lose the greatest, the true and only good.” And in like manner the language of Paul seems to suggest a real distinction between temporary and eternal evil: “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” And when he adds that “the things which are seen are temporal,” we may at least entertain the supposition that such is Evil.
Yet the distinction of evil as much or little, lasting or fleeting, will be almost worthless if it can be derived from no principle. Evil is essentially that which ought not to be. How, then, can its actual temporary existence be wrong, and its eternal existence forbidden? This brings us to the question whether God permits evil? If so, how, and why?
The permission of it is often altogether denied. Plutarch thinks it a thousand times better to deny the power of God than to regard Him as permitting evil. A late writer says that God’s creatures have chosen evil “without consent or sufferance of His, in opposition to his nature. His will, and His express command, infinitely in opposition to Him. He did not passively suffer it to be so, when He could and might have prevented it.” “Moral evil is altogether and only abomination to Him. He cannot approach it, cannot ‘permit it, in any sense, cannot even recognize its existence, except for ever to resist and repel it.” And another: “It is not by His warrant, or prescription, or permission.” And another: “God does not permit sin. He chooses it not, and He permits it not, as an essential part of the best possible universe. God is in earnest, infinitely and immutably in earnest, in the purpose to root out and destroy the odious thing, that it may have no place amid the glory of His dominions.”
But this is supposed impossible, because “although God is infinitely willing to secure the existence of universal holiness, to the exclusion of all sin, yet such a thing is not an object of power, and therefore cannot be produced by omnipotence itself.”
Thus is the divine permission of sin denied on the one hand, by those who justly repudiate it as no part of God’s plan. By others, who probably deny that sin is an intruder, the distinction between its permission and its ordination is not allowed. Thus Kant, in his essay on the “Failure of all the philosophical investigations in Theodicy.” And Schleiermacher, who admits “no distinction between the causes which belong to the sphere of freedom and those which belong to the necessity of nature. If now sin is an act, and as such proceeding from the highest activity of causality in time, from freedom, it is also appointed by the absolute producing will of God.” The admission of a finite free cause that may act counter to God’s command, he regards as Manichaeism. But it is well known that Schleiermacher, with all his devoutness, favoured the Pantheism of Spinoza.
These opposite parties agree in declining the distinction we have named. And if on the one side, Absolutism is consistently avowed, we see not why Dualism should not be confessed on the other side. It seems to us an evasion when Bledsoe tells us: “We choose to impale ourselves upon neither horn of the dilemma. We are content to leave M. Bayle upon the one and M. Voltaire upon the other, while we bestow our company elsewhere. In plain English, we neither reply [that God is] unwilling nor unable [to prevent sin].” This plea, we think, is vain; for if sin exists, and long subsists, despite not only of God’s prohibition, but of His power to prevent it, it gains a proper victory over Him. He suffers the humiliation of a defeat, so long as evil intrudes and holds its place. Though its triumph be little and mean, it is real, and the divine sovereignty is at an end.
We think it better, with Werdermann, who seems a man of sense and is bound to no system, to allow a permission of evil which does not compromise the divine integrity; a permission, not moral and denoting God’s complacence or sanction, but physical. God freely grants the power to perform what He earnestly deprecates and absolutely forbids. The distinction is not only commonly recognized, but often practical.
An upright and kind father, whose wayward son is fully resolved to defy his authority and quit the paternal roof, may furnish him with means; which the boy may take as a sanction of his course, though in fact they betoken the father’s authority no less than his concern and love. So God’s permission, without sanction, of sin, denotes His power. Just because sin is an abandonment of the Lord of life, incurs death, and is an essential frailty, the physical permission of it indicates its moral prohibition. “Obey and live, sin and die,” are equivalent expressions both of God’s holiness and love.
And sin not only exists, but subsists, under delay of penalty, strictly by divine sufferance; not because it is mightier than God’s power, or more cunning than His wisdom, but by His forbearance. He is neither invidious, nor fearful. His love is not needy, that He should suffer loss by the revolt of His creatures; it is earnest, yet free. He can afford that they should quit his home, if they can afford it. His universe is wide enough, and His eternity long enough, so He need not hasten their doom. They may waste their strength in protracted rebellion, receiving God’s gifts and enjoying His free sunshine, and He shall be rich and mighty as ever. Meanwhile He can turn the evil they do to good account, or turn them from it. Yet because he hates them not, their sin is a grief, which His love both creates and freely endures. Both halves of the truth are contained in Paul’s statement, “What if God, willing to show His wrath, and to make His power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath, fitted to destruction?”
The penalty of death might have been instantly executed upon sin, so it should have had not even a temporary subsistence, but should have perished in its very inception. Creative power might easily have replaced all that sin thus destroyed. But power is shown no less in the tolerance of evil; in bringing good out of it; in allowing- it to come to its height, and to spread itself like a green bay-tree, to perish in its full-blown frailty. And because God is love, and desires not the death of any, but readily gives to the sinner a space for repentance. He may display his power even more signally in a method of recovery than it would appear in bare acts of re-creation. A modern writer has well said: “The highest power only becomes the more perfect, from the fact that instead of acting with all-subduing violence, it operates in a determinate mode, as a spirit of holiness and love. On the other hand, this higher power may safely leave man free, for the very reason that it is omnipotent; for it is the character of strength not to fear freedom; and it is precisely because Omnipotence governs the world, that no infringement of universal order is to be apprehended from the personal self-subsistence of finite spirits.”
For “self-subsistence” we would say rather, as pertinent to our argument, revolt. And the reader at once perceives that our doctrine of the permission of sin looks to the denial of its eternity resulting from an event in time. If it could begin only at the hazard of an eternal continuance, its admission must involve the eternal counsels. It could not then exist merely by divine sufferance. It would then be established and permanent. It must then be invested, as a part of God’s wealth, and our theological arithmetic will be viciously employed in reckoning the eternal interest that shall accrue there from. Even those who repudiate it, as no part of God’s system, and who would fain eliminate or ignore it, will be painfully compelled to recognize it, and, though at a minimum valuation, to make the best of it. Thus Dr. Young, asking whether Eternity shall be “ be gloomed with evil for ever unconquered, unconquerable?” —
Says: “The Universe shall contain a type of sin in its last results, — an image of the doom which is condensed in that tremendous word, perdition. The thought is unutterably affecting. Far, far without — not beyond the range of celestial vision, but not obtruding upon it — there may be a dim and dark and mysterious phantasm; the only speck in a universe of light, and too remote withal to cast upon it even the faintest shadow.” Thus God’s supposed necessity is reduced to the smallest possible measure, so it may be tolerated as part of His plan. The theology of evil, indeed, seems to die hard. With a marvellous inconsistency the notion is still retained, that sin, which is too hateful to exist, insomuch that many deny its reality, must somehow exist in order to be hated. Its character changes at once; it ceases to be abhorred as fit only to die; it acquires dignity as reduced to a divine service; if it is evil, it is also good.
Not so if it is limited and temporary. “We may then say truly that it inheres in no principle, and finds no sanction. It is neither God’s choice, nor His necessity. It is only an incident of His majestic forbearance. It lingers between life and death, being and not-being. It is transient, because transitional, and pertaining to no system. It is not of the Creator, but of the creature; not of the Infinite, but of the finite; not of the Eternal, — how can it attain to eternity? Its inception and furtherance are with the creature. It is the scheme of finite beings; they alone are its sponsors; its fortunes and destiny are with them. Let them, in the perhaps ironical language of Scripture, receive it to their “everlasting habitations.” “Its perpetuation is not of the strategy of the Eternal. “Sin and wrong are the method of other agents than God, whom He in the best time and way will reduce, and recover, or destroy.”
4. IS EVIL ONLY NOW?
But if Evil is strictly temporary, how does it happen that we, poor children if Adam, with a few fallen angels for sad company, have fallen upon the evil time? Was sin unknown in the eternal past, until lately Satan became the Adversary of God and man? And will the eternal future be a stranger to evil, save in the history of the now passing centuries? Does Eternity culminate, soon, by the restitution of this world from a solitary ingress and brief period of sin and woe? Such questions are proposed, and with reason. “Are we sure,” asks one, “this relation of evil as an efficient or incident of good is of limited date? Are we sure w e are especially fallen on that cycle in eternity when this relation is subsistent?
That a relation which has continued from we know not what awful date in the past eternity till now, is by some means to be within our own period of trial eternally cut off!” And a very common conception of the Youth of the Universe is stated thus: “The supposition is plausible, if not probable, in the absence of all opposing evidence, that the present time is the dawn of the moral creation; that the great work of peopling the material universe, if not the creation of the material universe itself, has but just commenced; and that God is now laying, as it were, the foundation stones of that vast moral structure, which, in the coming ages of eternity, shall be magnificent beyond conception.”
If all this were true, the strangeness of our happening upon the crisis is no argument for the eternity of evil. If it is a solitary ulcer, distressing the whole creation of God, what signifies it that it comes to a head Here and Now, not Then and There? The common theology of evil as begun and eternized not far nor long hence, is quite as answerable for our “bad eminence” in the eternal record, as any doctrine of temporary evil can be. Grant, for argument’s sake, that the universe is just at the turning period of youth; to conserve the ills of its childhood, for the benefit of its eternal manhood, is too obvious a Dualism to need refutation.
Or has sin, after ages of unbroken peace with God, been thought of only just now, or attempted just here? The puny experiment is too successful, if it lives on as the witness of an improved economy of the universe, of which itself shall have been the occasion. Is our earth a hospital, or a penitentiary, appointed to relieve the accumulating ills of a few past cycles? Why should the sick be immortal, if they are not healed? Or the vicious, if they are not reformed? The common theories here are condemned as dualistic, by their own arithmetic, whether political or moral. From the guilt of one age they deduce a calamity for all ages, and startle us by their precocious aptness in the infinitudes.
But with God for the enemy of evil, and the patron of good, we ought not to fear infinitudes. And, to give our own view of the destiny of evil the least advantage, we will allow that sin has occurred in a thousand worlds, and will recur in a thousand worlds yet to be. “We will not confine its ravages to our own solar system, to any nebula, or cycle of aeons. And on the other hand we shall only ask the concession, that sin’s ravages are confined to creatures on probation, to those who have not attained moral perfectness; that only new created beings do fall, and that from their “first estate;” never from an exalted or glorified state.
So far as the present argument is concerned, there may have been a thousand redemptive acts, scattered through the starry world and through the eternity in which God dwells — wonders of divine love which the angels of other systems desire to look into. Such a view will not vitiate our doctrine of the divine grace, if we do not generalize it into a law of nature. It is a part of our ignorance on this whole subject, not to know how many of the new created families of beings do fall, or how many of those who fall are redeemed. All that we shall insist upon here is that Evil, though it may have infected a myriad of worlds, shall not appear to have trespassed where righteousness has been once established; that it shall not appear as a self-subsistent power, an ever recurring danger in the same field of God’s work, tantalizing the divine wisdom and love; that it shall appear only as incidental to the trial of new-created beings, and in every place as an exotic, and transient. Let it appear thus, even for ever, as a vagabond without a home in the universe, and for our argument we are content.
Is it said, then, that we have here a new doctrine of eternal Evil? If, in ever succeeding periods, there is no security against it in the trial of created beings, does it not become a necessity or a vicissitude, dogging forever the progress of the universal welfare? Does it not become an infinity, acquiring the very attribute by which it rivals the Divine Nature?
Let it be thus infinite. There is an infinitely infinite, to be offset against it. If there were but one world, from which many perished and a choice few attained eternal life, the ratio of evil to good would be that of finite to infinite. To multiply each term through eternity does not change the ratio. The endless succession of temporary evils marks the endless inauguration of eternal beatitudes.
The eternity of the one is of no moment, compared with the compound infinity of the other. Before this infinity of the second order, the evil, ever fugitive and never advancing, dwindles to an infinitesimal, and may be disregarded in the computations of the celestial kingdom.
And the nature of such evil shows it unworthy of the name of eternal. It has no continuity; it is disjointed and fragmentary. If it exists, it never subsists. Ever beginning, it never abides. The Adversary may be impersonated as a lion, roaring for hunger as much as for prowess, walking up and down the advancing creation, seeking what he may devour; he can touch nothing upon which God has set His mark, — only the over plus of His productive energy; and as he devours, he dies. His every weapon pierces himself. The serpent cannot bruise the heel of the frailest creature, but he crushes his own head. His dominion of darkness can reach but a little way on this side Chaos, beclouding the dawn of some new creation with misty vapour, and cheating the faithless out of life. But the Sun of Righteousness shall melt the clouds away, the morning stars sing again together, and all the sons of God shout for eternal joy.
In such a scheme, the supposed evil would only make display of its frailty, — never truly being, but eternally perishing.
5. THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH.
It lies in the very idea of Faith, that man should be subject to trial. An ordeal implies hardship, or, at least, effort. Virtue that costs nothing is worth nothing. Hence, though we know no primary reason why pain should exist, it may be well employed as discipline, if it does exist. We may even “glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation works patience, and patience experience, and experience hope.” “The trial of faith is much more precious than of silver and gold that perishes, though it be tried with fire, that it may be found unto praise, and honour, and glory, at Christ’s appearing.”
But it equally lies in the very idea of sin, that it ought not to exist; though it be permitted as a mode of discipline, he who wars against it must wish it would end. If the example of a dreadful penalty of sin is needed now, one must wish to out- grow the sad necessity. If we are told that “ to breed the requisite horror and fear of sin, it may be that nothing else will suffice than the spectacle of its final, complete, and everlasting perdition — nothing less than the frightful exemplar of an immortal soul in immortal ruin,” — we answer: Faith can only suffer eternal agony, if such an exhibition is indispensable. And if we say that the saints can endure, and profit by, the exhibition, that is simply a romance of faith; true victory there is none.
There can be no triumph of faith if evil is unconquerable; and it is unconquerable, if its extirpation would impair the welfare of the world, or bedim the glory of God. Goodness may be mighty enough, and faith may be strong enough, for an immortal battle; but the strength that needs eternal provocation, is weakness. And to Omnipotence alone can eternal warfare — and only to Him a warfare with dependent creatures — be matter of unconcern; not even to Him, as a God of love. To all faith of finite beings, warfare must be transient, that they may have rest. In an immortal life, they may achieve many victories, and celebrate many triumphs; loftier triumphs as the conquered evil shall be less actual, and the contest nearer the great white throne. But each contest must be terminable, and one of the earliest victories — perhaps the very first real one, by which one becomes an heir of the kingdom — must ensure all that remain. There must be such a triumph, over fighting without and fears within, else there can be no “full assurance of faith;” else one can never say, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, the crown is laid up for me.”
It is thus essential to the very idea of a Triumph of Faith, that time should be measured off from eternity, as a period of its trial. And without this there can be no Hope. These are both transitional virtues; there is a greater, — the bond of perfectness, — the Love that courts not ever changing evil, but whose home is eternity.
We need scarcely add that if our doctrine of Evil be true, it gives us a valid Theism. But are not we romancing? The Law and the Testimony must answer. But we may introduce that argument with the following passage from one of our most considerate writers:
“When once this weighty question of the afterlife has been opened, and when it shall have come into the hands of well- informed biblical interpreters.) a controversy will ensue, in the progress of which it will be discovered that, with unobservant eyes, we and our predecessors have been so walking up and down, and running hither and thither, among dim notices and indications of the future destinies of the human family, as to have failed to gather up or to regard much that has lain upon the pages of the Bible, open and free to our use.
Those who, through a course of years, have been used to read the Scriptures unshackled by systems, and bound to no conventional modes of belief, such readers must have felt an impatience in waiting — not for the arrival of a new revelation from Heaven, but of an ample and unfettered interpretation of that which has so long been in our hands.
“Thus the future Methodism, as we assume, will feel the need of, and will acquire for itself, under pressure of the most urgent motives, an incontrovertible exposition of the Scripture doctrine of the future administration of justice; but then it will not make this acquisition as if it could be held as an insulated dogma; for whatever is further ascertained on this ground, will come to stand in its true relationship to much beside, which, in the course of the same argument, will have started to view, as the genuine sense of the inspired books. The doctrine of future punishment, as a belief drawn from Scripture, and so drawn as to dissipate prevalent illusions, and to spread on all sides a salutary and effective alarm — such a belief will take its place in the midst of an expanded prospect of the compass and intention of the Christian system.
“The past Methodism was far from being a message of wrath, proclaimed by men of fierce and fanatical tempers: — it was a message of joy, hope, and love; and it made its conquests as such, notwithstanding those bold and unmeasured denunciations against sin which it so often uttered. And so it will be with the future Methodism; and although it will rest itself upon a laboriously obtained belief concerning the “wrath to come” — a belief that will heave the human mind with a deep convulsive dread, yet, and notwithstanding this preliminary, the renovation which we look for will come in as the splendour of day comes in the tropics — it will be a sudden brightness that makes all things glad!”
THE SCRIPTURAL ARGUMENT
“You search the Scriptures, because ye think that in them ye have eternal life;
and they are they which testify of me.”
It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that the question which we raise is not respecting the duration of future punishment, but respecting its nature. We are to show that exclusion from all life is a punishment, and that this is the revealed punishment of the lost. If it be so, then we may at once admit the words “eternal,” “everlasting,” and similar phrases, used to indicate the duration of the final doom, as denoting an absolute eternity; we shall waste no time in efforts to reduce their significance in the least.
Nor shall we offer any new principles of interpretation. We hold, indeed, that the obvious sense of words h prima facie their true sense; though the rule is worth little, since time and opinion may change even the obvious meaning of the plainest words. And we are far from being rigid literalists, as will appear in our reliance upon one or two rhetorical figures — tropes that may appear new to some readers because they are in fact so old and almost forgotten. The attempt to reinstate these methods of interpretation is part of the only system which we are willing to profess, — that of seeking the historical sense of the inspired words.
1. IS IT ASSUMED IN THE BIBLE?
What is the “everlasting life” revealed to mankind in the Gospel? And what is the “death,” from which that life is an eternal salvation? Here, at the threshold of this discussion, we are told that the soul’s immortality is assumed in the Bible, and that all the language of Scripture must be understood accordingly. “The immortality of the soul,” says one, r is rather supposed, or taken for granted, than expressly revealed in the Bible.” The words in question are therefore referred m man’s physical destiny, or they are taken to denote happiness or misery in an immortal destiny. The literal sense is commonly allowed in the Old Testament, and is supposed to be there exhausted in the account of temporal deliverances and destructions. The metaphorical sense is supposed to predominate in the New Testament. In either case the Word of Life is no message of eternal existence, — for man did not need that, — but simply of eternal well-being to those who believe in Christ.
The silence of the Scriptures respecting man’s natural immortality is commonly admitted, and converted into an implicative argument. The fact is denied by one late writer, who thinks it is expressly asserted of all mankind, in at least one passage, that “they cannot die anymore.” But he ii Lust then allow that the lost — the children of the Wicked one — are in the same passage said to “be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead,” to be “equal unto he angels,” and to be “the children of God.” This last resort to find a distinct statement of man’s immortality in the Scriptures will only make their silence more obvious. For none, we think, but the Universalist, will accept the writer’s exposition.
To divest the argument of its appendages, we should here say, the question is not respecting the after existence of the unsaved soul until the second death; much less does it touch the immortality of the righteous. Nor has it to do with the passages sup- posed to intimate, or to imply, the immortality of all men in general, or of bad men in particular; but simply with the acknowledged fact, that such immortality is nowhere in the Bible stated, mentioned, spoken of, or alluded to, in proper terms. It never appears as a plastic element, in the language of the Scriptures. Neither such expressions as “to live forever,” “to exist for ever,” “never to die,” “to be immortal,” nor any equivalent expressions, are ever applied to the nature of the soul, or to the destiny of the lost. They are only applied to the destiny of the righteous. Our business is with the common view, that the immortality in question is silently assumed and taken for granted in the volume of Revelation.
For argument’s sake we will admit this; and we will compare the scriptural treatment of this supposed implicit doctrine, with the scriptural treatment of another doctrine — that of the divine existence — which is undoubtedly taken for granted in the Bible, and with which the doctrine in question is often associated as one of the main pillars of religious truth.
If, now, these two are the cardinal truths of religion, we should expect them to receive similar treatment, in the Revelation of the divine character and of human destiny.
If one of these doctrines is stated explicitly and categorically, we should expect the same of the other. If one of them is not directly stated, but is explicitly assumed, with frequent mention or allusion, we should expect the same of the other. If one is assumed implicitly and silently, — taken for granted as a doctrine clear past all doubt and all need of mention, we should expect the same of the other.
What are the facts? The divine existence is, indeed, never asserted categorically, or stated as a proposition. It is assumed as too clear for argument, — a first truth of the religious consciousness, to prove which would be preposterous. The Bible never goes into debate with the atheist. His error is not to be treated with logic; he may be the fool, who says in his heart: There is no God. But so far from being tacitly assumed, the divine existence is named, and alluded to, and involved in various forms of speech, continually. It stands out, in bold relief, on almost every page of the Bible. It meets the reader at every turn. The silence of two short books respecting it has been deemed perplexing, impeaching their inspiration, unless it can be explained by special circumstances, and the exception prove the rule. One of these — the book of Esther — is a historical episode; the other — the Song of Solomon — is an allegory; as such, they hold their places in the sacred canon. In every other book, the doctrine of God’s existence is the apple of gold in the picture of silver. It is the Mountain of Light that illumines the volume. It is the central truth, that makes the Bible a Discourse of God — the Word of God.
It is the Shekinah that imparts sacredness to the Book, so that even sceptics have approached it with awe, as standing on holy ground. And lest this one great truth should weary the devout reader with monotony, it appears in endlessly varying forms, in manifold names of the Divine Being and of His glorious attributes. And to arrest the attention and invite the study of reluctant men, the Bible yields a thousand expressions of the power, wisdom, and goodness, of God. If we strike out from the record all those passages which tell of His being and His works, we reduce the dimensions of the volume almost by half, we make it a book without sense or meaning, we exchange its radiant light for mid- night darkness.
But if we expunge from the same book all those passages in which the immortality of the soul is mentioned or expressly assumed, we leave the volume unchanged; it remains as it was.
It might have been written just as we have it, and the Revelation would have been just as complete as it is, if the sacred writers had conspired, with uniform consent, to avoid all reference or allusion to that form of doctrine which is sometimes called one of the two cardinal truths of all religion.
Whence this contrast in the scriptural treatment of these ideas? Will it be said that the immortality of the soul is sufficiently clear to man’s unaided reason? But that important truth ought to be surpassingly clear to human reason, which need not he named in a Revelation. And if we suppose the more obvious truth to be named less frequently because more obvious, then the soul’s immortality should be a thousand fold clearer than the existence of God, nay, clearer beyond all comparison, as any large number is incomparably greater than zero.
That the soul’s immortality is so clear past all shadow or dream of doubt, will hardly be claimed. But granting, for argument’s sake, that it is too clear to need explicit mention in the Bible, we only encounter a new difficulty. The Revelation which God should make to man, is of necessity given in man’s language, — not only in the single words of human language, but also in the current phrases and forms of human speech, so far as these are not false, or such as should be corrected or modified by the Revelation. But if the soul’s immortality were so marvellously clear a postulate of human reason, it must be a most cherished sentiment, and must give rise to many common expressions — household words of natural theology. In fact, whenever and wherever this doctrine has obtained, it has created various modes of expression that reveal the sentiment.
Why, then, are these expressions altogether avoided or ignored in the Bible? Why should the Holy Spirit — so ready to catch the language of the mortals who were to be taught the way of life — have failed to conform to their style of thought in this most important item of their own immortal nature? Why, if God has told men that they must enjoy or suffer forever, has he never urged his invitation or his warning in the name of the immortality he has given them? Such a gift, surely, would be pre-eminently worthy of mention, to those who think and say so much of their supposed possession of the boon. Did He not desire them to be grateful for that which would so liken them to Him- self?
Such are our difficulties, on the supposition that the soul’s immortality is too clear to need mention in a Revelation. We meet only a new difficulty when we turn to facts, and consider the anxious doubts of men for thousands of years on this very subject. Because man was made for immortality, we find in the ruins of his fallen nature, through all history, some sentiment of the birthright he had lost.
He finds himself subject to death; but he also finds, or thinks he finds, some remnant within him of that which is too good to die. Hence that Question of Ages, “If a man die, shall he live again?”
But when this question came to be answered, and life and immortality were brought to light by One who did gain a signal victory over death, there was not a word uttered of that immortal nature respecting which there had been so much talk. He who had “the words of eternal life,” never said that all men were to live, or to exist, forever. He never spoke of the life which he gave, as an attribute or quality of some other essential life which they already possessed.
It becomes, then, at least a fair question, whether the “taking for granted” of man’s immortality is not extra-scriptural, — an assumption out of the Bible, and foreign to it.
2. IS THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL IN SCRIPTURE?
The inferential argument for immortality divides itself into two parts, — general and special: 1st, That which deduces the immortality of all human souls, from two or three expressions of Scripture; 2d, That which infers the immortality of the wicked from the passages that speak of their eternal punishment. We now consider the first.
1. The creation of man in the divine image (Genesis 1:26, 27), which is afterwards made the solemn sanction of the law against murder (Genesis 9:6), is taken to denote his exalted nature, in an immortal destiny. So likewise the expression, “man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). This view is supported by a common translation of the passage in one of the Apocryphal Books (Wisdom, 2:23): “For God made man incorruptible, and to the image of his own eternity made he him;” also by the form of the Hebrew oath: “As the Lord lives, and as thy soul lives” (1 Samuel 20:3).
To all this we reply
(3.) The creation in the divine likeness no more proves man’s absolute immortality, than it proves his eternal pre-existence, his omniscience, or his possession of any other divine attribute. And as for the value of his existence, which makes murder the greatest of crimes, we think we have shown that is not enhanced by the contingency of eternal sorrow. The true sense of the passage in the book of Wisdom also favours this view: “God made man for immortality, and to the image of his own nature made he him. But by the envy of the devil death came into the world.”
(4.) The phrase “a living soul” is put in express contrast with “a quickening [life-giving] spirit,” in 1 Corinthians 15:45. The same Hebrew phrase also in Genesis 1:20, 30, and a still stronger phrase in Genesis 7:22, is applied to brute animals. It manifestly denotes simply a “living creature.”
(5.) The asseveration, “As the Lord lives and as my soul lives,” denotes rather man’s capacity and hope of life, than his destiny thereto. It indeed ratifies a covenant; but from Genesis to Malachi, Life is the main subject of contract between God and man; forfeited by man in every engagement, and at length given as a gratuity, by Him who alone is to be trusted, or can render others trustworthy, in an act of Redemption.
2. From the fact that man did not die at once when he had incurred the threatened penalty: “In the day that thou eats thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17), it has been inferred that the term “death” is not to be taken in a literal sense, and does not forbid, but rather implies, an endless existence. For “nothing is deadlier than death; “and if that does not kill, what does? In support of this view it is thought that the expressions in Deuteronomy (30:15, 19), where life and death are called “good and evil,” “blessing and cursing,” denote that death and pain are synonymous. It agrees with this view that physical death is now commonly regarded as a debt of nature; though this a plain departure from the language of nearly all the symbols of the Church.
This argument, though derived from the threatened penalty of sin, is of generic application, and deserves notice here; the more so as it involves the general tenor of scripture language on the subject.
The turning point of the argument is that man did not literally die on the very day of his transgression; and God’s veracity must be saved. But the tri-partite division of death as temporal, spiritual, and eternal, will hardly save God’s veracity. For neither temporal nor eternal death were inflicted on that day; and spiritual death cannot be strictly a penalty of sin.
Man’s insensibility respecting his fallen condition makes him even hap- pier in his carnal enjoyments. His continuing to sin cannot be his punishment. And if spiritual death denote the loss of higher good, a loss not felt, or a lost capacity for good, what is that but the beginning of a real death?
There are two interpretations of the phrase, “in the day,” that require passing notice. (1.) It is compared with the expression in 2 Peter 3: 8, 9, and is thus extended to cover the thousand years within which man did actually die. The chief merit of this view is its recognition of God’s long-suffering, whereby he delays without falsifying his judgments. (2.) “In the day” is supposed to mean “in the case;” q. d. “If thou eats, thou shalt die.” This sense is perhaps admissible; yet we think it not proven, nor required.
The most natural and best sustained interpretation is, we think, that which supposes Adam to have been judicially and virtually dead, in the day that he sinned. He was then under sentence of death, — a subject, an heir, a son of death. Life was forfeit. If he should live on for a day or even for an hour, it was a respite under condemnation, a delay of the execution. If he should live on forever, that must be by a rescue, a redemption, an act of amnesty, a divine gratuity. Short of this, the debt incurred must be paid; he must, at some time, die; whether soul and body together, or by instalments of a first and second death, it signified little. Death loves to take usury, as well as victims; why should he demand instant payment, now that he was secure of his prey?
This interpretation is no novelty. In rhetoric, it might be called a prolepsis, an anticipation of the future as already present. It is one of the commonest figures of speech. Thus, when one is falling from a precipice, or has taken deadly poison, or has provoked a mortal enemy, or has committed a capital crime, we say: “He is a dead man! “ nor do we take back our words, though he should happen to live on yet many days. Just so said the affrighted Egyptians, when the angel of death had smitten their first-born: “We be all dead men;” and the trembling Israelites, when the troop of Korah was destroyed: “Behold, we die; we perish; we all perish.” And God himself employs similar language in addressing the presumptuous Abimelech: “Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman which thou hast taken.”
And a very similar phrase occurs in two parallel passages. Thus Pharaoh says to Moses: “Get thee from me; take heed to thyself, see my face no more; for in that day thou sees my face, thou shalt die” (Exodus 10:28). Yet no Egyptian would think the king faithless to his threatening, if Moses, incurring the penalty, had, under sentence, long waited for death. Still more in point is the passage in 1 Kings 2:36, 37, where Solomon gives charge to Shimei respecting the tenure of his once forfeited life: “ It shall be that on the day thou goes out, and passes over the brook Kidron, thou shalt know for certain that thou shalt surely die.” Who supposes that Shimei, forfeiting his life anew in pursuit of two fugitive servants, flying from Jerusalem to Gath and from Gath to Achish, must be arrested, tried, and executed, all on the very day of his trespass, to make good the threat of Solomon? His last words tell his evident meaning: “Thy blood shall be upon thine own head.” And the famous tautology, “dying thou shalt die,” which so many take to mean “dying thou shalt not die,” is here shown to signify the certainty of death and not its vitality.
And the early versions of the Bible, and many comments upon it, also support this exegesis. The Greek of Symmachus renders the phrase: “Thou shalt be mortal.” Likewise the Syriac, which is approved by Jerome and Grotius. The Arabic renders it: “Thou shalt deserve to die.” The Targum of Jonathan: “Thou shalt be subject to death.” Others understand it of immediate death, which was averted by repentance.’ And others still: “The phrase. Thou shalt die, does not signify the fact of dying, but its necessity and desert.” Vatablus says:
“Thou shalt be subject to death, both of body and soul.” And Fagius adds that the Hebrews deny not this two¬fold death. Tirinus remarks: “Say rather that Adam then began to die; that is, by a lingering death of inward wasting and decay.” And the sense we have given is sanctioned by Dr. Muller, in his able work on the Christian Doctrine of Sin, Volume 2, pages 319, 320.
The figure of prolepsis is of too common occurrence in the Bible to be overlooked. It will be further considered when we have done with the passage in hand. There are two remaining reasons why this threat of death cannot imply man’s immortality. Did Adam not know of their mortality, when he was told that he might die? And if he did, must he not understand by death just such an expiring and decay as he saw among the brutes around him?
Or even if he had learned to distinguish between soul and body, how could he infer the immortality of the former, when the sentence came to be pronounced upon him: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return?” Was he fairly treated, if that was only the prelude of death, and if, with- out a word of express warning, he was still liable to endless woe? May we not well say with John Locke: “It seems a strange way of understanding a law, which requires the plainest and direct words, that by ‘death’ should be meant eternal life in misery.”
2. The execution of the sentence indicates anything rather than man’s immortality. “And now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” (Genesis 3:22). How can we think that this exclusion from life is exhausted in the death of the body, when the description of paradise regained, which forms the last chapter of Revelation, tells us once more of the “tree of life” whose leaves are “for the healing of the nations?”
We need not here enter into the controversy whether man would have had physical immortality if he had not sinned. It is all one to our argument whether the fruit of the tree of life had ambrosial virtue to sustain immortal life, or was only the sacrament of peace between God and man. We prefer to believe that the sinless man would have suffered no dissolution, but would have exchanged the psychical for the spiritual body by a developing process of his unimpaired nature.
Equally good for our exegetical argument are the concessions adduced in our examination of the theodicies, that, if there had been no Redemption, Adam would have utterly perished. To the same purpose also will apply the frequent remark, that “God in compassion provided that he who was to be wretched should not be forever wretched.” This is commonly said with respect to the bodily death of Adam; but the argument is just as good a reason why the soul should not subsist in eternal misery.
3. THE GENERAL TENOR OF SCRIPTURE
Before we examine the special argument for the immortality of the wicked, we shall consider the meaning of that whole class of expressions which refers to the destiny of the righteous and the wicked respectively. Are “life” and “death,” and other like terms, to be taken in a metaphorical sense whenever they look beyond the veil that divides time from eternity, or do they retain their common meaning?
It is not denied that these terms are sometimes used in a tropical sense; for what human words are not? Language would not be a buoyant, living vehicle of thought, if its words did not sometimes burst the bonds of their literal sense. Yet language would be mere cloudland, a baseless fabric of visions, if its commonest words did not commonly hold their literal sense. This is the very root from which words derive their life; sundered from it, they perish. Like the kite that soars heavenward because it is held earthward, they must confess their origin in matter, or return to the dust whence they were taken.
At the outset of this examination we notice the fact that “life” and “death” are the terms most frequently used to represent the respective destinies of men. Life, as the condition of all blessing, is the greatest good; death, as the privation of all good, is the greatest evil. Hence in the Old Testament, and before immortality is brought to light, long life is oftenest named as the portion of the righteous. The fifth precept of the Decalogue, “the first commandment with promise,” enjoins filial piety, “that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God gives thee.” The book of Proverbs speaks continually of life, as though “length of days” were a material part of it. “My son, forget not my law; but let thy heart keep my commandments; for length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee.” “Happy is the man that finds wisdom. Length of days is in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and honour. She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her.” And in the most important passage of the Old Testament supposed to prove an after existence, the destiny of the righteous is simply called “everlasting life” (Daniel 12:2).
And in the New Testament, we find little said of eternal “happiness” or “blessedness.” That whole class of phrases by which ancient philosophers and modern Christians have designated the destiny of the good, is almost unknown in the Gospel. It was enough for Christ and the Apostles to talk about life. He who was the “Resurrection and the Life” was dangerously literal in his style of speech, if he simply meant that he came to give happiness to immortal beings.
“I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die.” “Not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead; he that eats of this bread, shall live forever.” And though Christ explained the “hard saying” so far as to say it was the spirit and not the flesh that quickened, and that his words were spirit and life, yet even this could hardly encourage the notion of immortality in those who “ had no life in them.” A slight obscurity in the argument here, disappears when we turn to the original Greek, which emphasizes, not “the words,” but the name of him who uttered them. He who came to make known the way of life here says: “The words that I speak unto you are spirit and life.” And this explains what was said by Peter, when many were offended and allowed no more with him; “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”
Now to say that “eternal life” is the peculiar gospel phrase for “endless felicity,” is to beg the whole question. This would be an assumption precisely like that already examined, that the Bible “takes for granted” the immortality of the soul. But we are aware that argument is offered to sustain this view, in a few passages that seem to require a tropical sense of the words “life” and “death,” and we proceed to examine them.
25. “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.” (John 17:3). Here the knowledge of God, or true piety, is commonly taken as meaning the same thing with eternal life; i.e. the passage is made a definition of that in which life consists. But it is more natural to take the language as a statement of the way of life. This view is supported by frequent expressions in the book of Proverbs and by ancient and modern comment. It also accords with the general tenor of the Gospel as a revelation of life in Christ. “In him was life, as the life was the light of
men.” Christ speaks of himself as “the Resurrection and the Life;” as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” “God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.” The knowledge of God through Christ is that which leads to everlasting life.
A similar passage, sometimes adduced as containing an ethical definition of eternal life, occurs in 1 John 5:20: “And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an under- standing, that we may know Him that is true; and we are in Him that is true, [even] in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.” But the pronoun “this” evidently refers to God, as the author or giver of life. The meaning is: “He is the true God, and eternal life.” Hence “the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son, hath life; and he that hath not the Son, hath not life” (verses 11, 12). With this com- pare the parable of the Good Shepherd, where Christ, after having spoken of life in an undeniably literal sense, — “the good shepherd gives his life for the sheep,” “I lay down my life for the sheep,” — says: “And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish; neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.” And this safety of those who believe in Christ manifestly refers to the Resurrection as the consummation of their life: “ This is the Father’s will, that of all which He hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day.”
Another passage, — “To be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace” (Romans 8:6), will hardly be claimed as giving a definition of the terms “life” and “death,” when it is compared with the parallel passage: “He that sows to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that sows to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting” (Galatians 6: 8).
26. The frequent allusion in the Scriptures to the Resurrection, as the completing fact of eternal life, explains one or two other expressions often supposed to define a moral or spiritual death, and also a whole class of passages respecting man’s destiny. “And you hath He quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1; compare Colossians 2:13). The context, we think, shows that, by the figure we have already named, the future life is anticipated, as already present. Without that life which is due to Christ’s resurrection, and which is perfected in our own resurrection, we are under sentence of death, past all hope, dead, by reason of trespasses and sins.”
But God, who is rich in mercy, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” This is certainly not accomplished yet, unless in a metaphorical sense no more natural than the prolepsis which we assume. We shall yet be raised up and shall sit together, in the heavenly; and the inheritance which God gives us, is as surely ours as if we already possessed it. And in the passage in Colossians, the allusion to Christ’s resurrection, and to the glorified estate which awaits the Christian, confirms the same view: “Ye also are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. Even you, being dead in your sins and the un-circumcision of your flesh, hath He quickened together with him [Christ being the first fruits, the interval of time making no difference] having forgiven you all trespasses. If then ye be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sits on the right hand of God. For ye are dead [certainly not now in a moral sense, but subject to Death, in that he will yet have the body], but your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory.”
Is it objected that the ungodly life of the unbeliever, and the godly life of the believer, are named in the context? Very true; but this by no means precludes the literal sense of the terms life and death. The connection of the two is perfectly natural. As if it were said: You are redeemed from death; you are, then, “dead with Christ” from the rudiments of the world; mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth.
Or as it is said in Romans, chapter 6, where the same contrast is made between death and the resurrection, and between the old man and the new man: “Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. For in that he died, he died unto sin once; but in that he lives, he lives unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
“Likewise alive unto God.” This cannot denote mere life from a spiritual death; for Christ, the example of it, never was spiritually dead. It is, rather, an anticipation of the completion of life in the resurrection, and hence an argument for the resurrection. Just as Christ silenced the Sadducees by reminding them that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was the God, not of the dead, but of the living; “for they all live unto Him.” That is, they shall yet live, and therefore God may be called their God. Manifestly, if Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were then alive, the proof of the resurrection came to naught.
But we are forgetting the passage we set out to explain. Is it insisted that the phrase “dead in trespasses and sins” denotes a moral deadness? If so, then Paul charges the Corinthian Christians with being impenitent men, when he says: “If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.” But he evidently meant, that if there were no resurrection they were still subject to death, as the consequence of sin; there was no future life for them. In a similar way, if we mistake not, Christ would exclude the unbelieving Jews from the eternal life: “Ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sins.” And when he said to one who wished to bury his father, ere he became his disciple: “Let the dead bury their dead,” he simply characterized those who had no part in him as the subjects of death. They were dead, because they had no future life. The rhetorical figure is the same which the Hebrew doctors have allowed in the original sentence of death, and which one of the most learned Rabbis has stated thus: “The wicked in their life time are called dead, and their soul is to be destroyed with the ignominy of the body, and will not have immortality or eternity.” And if there should still remain a doubt in favour of the sense of spiritual death, it wholly disappears when we consider that the Greek word here rendered “dead” always denotes literal death, and commonly signifies corpses. If spiritual death were intended, it would be more naturally expressed by another word, since it bears the more general sense of death.
We conclude that Isaac Watts is justified in saying: “There is not one place of Scripture that occurs to me, where the word death, as it was first threatened in the law of innocence, necessarily signifies a certain miserable immortality of the soul, either to Adam the actual sinner, or to his posterity.”
If now we have shown that the literal sense of the terms “life” and “death” is not wanting in the scriptural use of them, we are prepared to consider the various expressions commonly applied to the destiny of the lost. One of the most significant of these is
A. The Second Death.
This phrase occurs four times, in the Apocalypse, 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8. In all these instances the contrasted “crown of life,” “resurrection,” “book of life,” and “water of life” indicate a literal sense of the term “death.” But the phrase is most important historically. For it was cur- rent among the Jews, and shows (1.) that they made the distinction between judgment in this world, and in the world to come, which is not often made in the Old Testament; and (2.) that they understood by this death, exclusion from life.
The following examples of its use are found in the early Jewish books: “Every idolater, who says that there is another God besides me, I will slay with the second death, from which no man can come to life again.” “In this place (Exodus 19:12) two deaths are spoken of, as also in Genesis 30:1, that is, the second death.” “Every thief, or robber of his neighbour’s goods, shall fall by his iniquities, that he may die the second death.” “We learn from this place, (Numbers 14:37) that they died the second death.” “Because he [Cain] was doubly guilty, he was slain with a two-fold death — the latter far more severe than the former.” “Let Reuben live, and not die the second death, by which the ungodly die in the world to come.” “This hath been decreed by the Lord, that this sin shall not be forgiven them, until they die the second death.” “Behold, this is writ- ten before me, I will not give them long life, until I have taken vengeance for their sins; and I will give their glory [soul] to the second death.” “They shall die the second death, and shall not live in the world to come, said the Lord.” “They shall die the second death, so as not to enter into the world to come.”
These examples plainly warrant the remark of Hammond on the phrase “second death,” that it seems to be taken from the Jews, who use it proverbially for final, utter, irreversible destruction. It seems to denote such a death from which there is no release. And according to this notion of it, as it reflects fitly on the first death, (which is a destruction, but such as is reparable by a reviving or resurrection, but this past hopes and exclusive of that, so will all the several places wherein it is used be clearly interpreted. [The doctor goes on to give an ecclesiastical turn to this exposition:
So chapter 21:8, the lake that burns with fire, etc., is called the “second death,” into which they are said to go that are never to appear in the church again; but he adds: “And though in these different matters some difference there must needs be in the significations, yet in all of them the notion of utter destruction, final, irreparable excision, may very properly be retained, and applied to each of them.”
The similar phrase in Jude, verse 12, “twice dead,” if explained by the following words, “plucked up by the roots,” clearly denotes an utter destruction. The tree that has been cut down, may grow again; the tree that has been uprooted, never.
B.
The phrase “shall be cut off” is often used in the Old Testament to denote the end of the wicked. Many of the Hebrew doctors regard it as a punishment by the hand of God. And Maimonides interprets the expression: “That soul shall be cut off from his people” (Genesis 17:14), of the utter destruction of soul and body. It was the “greater excommunication,” and that could be nothing less than death. Says Gesenius, “It is never the punishment of exile, as supposed by J. D. Michaelis.” The familiarity of the Jews with the notion of the second death, indicates that the meaning of this phrase can hardly be restricted to the death of the body. The formula used in the ratifying of covenants may favour the extended sense of the phrase. The sacrifice of a victim was an imprecation: “May I thus die, if I be not faithful to this engagement.” Hence the phrase “to make a covenant,” might imply the penalty of which the Jews often spoke, — the being “cut off from the life of the world to come.” The only instance in which the extended sense of the phrase involves any difficulty, is in Daniel 9:26: “The Messiah shall be cut off.” But the difficulty here is created by the mystery of the incarnation. The manifest exception cannot do away the rule.
This view is confirmed by the phrase in Psalms 37:38, “The end of the wicked shall be cut off,” compared with Proverbs 24:14, 20. The Hebrew word in here rendered “end” and “reward,” is the same which commonly denotes “after time,” “the future,” “the last days,” “latter state,” “final lot.” It might be not inaptly rendered hereafter, thus: “The hereafter of the wicked shall be cut off.” “Then shall there be a here-after [to thee], and thy expectation shall not be cut off.” “There shall be no hereafter to the wicked man.” But the sense is perhaps more aptly given by a Jewish Rabbi, speaking of a cessation of existence, thus: “There shall be no residuum to the wicked man; the light of the ungodly shall be extinguished.”
A.
This word occurs six times in the New Testament, viz. Acts 23:14; Romans 9: 3; 1 Corinthians 12:3; 16:22; Galatians 1:8, 9. It also frequently occurs in the Septuagint, as the equivalent of the Hebrew cherem. A few examples will indicate its proper sense. “No devoted thing shall be redeemed, but shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 27:29; compare Deuteronomy 7:26; 13:17; Joshua 6:17, 18; 1 Chronicles 2:7; Zechariah 14:11). In Judges 1:17, some copies give, instead “utter destruction.” In Numbers 21:2; Deuteronomy 20:17; Judges 21:11; and Kings. 15:3, and other places, the verb is used to denote utter subversion and destruction.
These examples clearly sustain the following definitions of Schleusner, in his N. T. Lexicon: “1. Anything set apart from common use; victim, sacrifice. 2. Whatever is destined to destruction; what is given to perish (perditur), is blotted out, cut off. 3. One devoted to a miserable fate, to be sacrificed in expiation; one who is an abomination, to be detested and removed from the sight of men; an abominable thing, to be removed from the sight of God and men.” Compare Wahl, Bretschneider, and Robinson. Was the Greek word of the N. T. an immortal thing, or a thing to be conserved in eternal being?
In a single instance (1 Corinthians 16: 22) the word “Maranatha” is added. If this means “the Lord cometh,” as many think, the passage is parallel with that in 2 Thessalonians 1:8, 9; where we shall find that the proper destruction of the wricked is foretold.
B. Destruction, or Perdition.
The latter of these terms is not used in our version of the Old Testament, though it is used in the New Testament instead of the term “destruction,” and in rendering the same Greek word. This and its cognate, with the corresponding verbs, are used about ninety times in the New Testament. This number includes the cases in which is translated by “waste” (Matthew 26:8; Mark 14:4), “damnation,” or “ damnable” (2 Peter 2: 1, 3), and the verb by “lose,” or “lost” (Matthew 10:6, 39; 15:24; 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke i10:24, 25; 17:33; John 12: 25), and excludes those in which other Greek words are employed.
A glance at the passages thus reduced to a class, shows that the literal sense of the terms in question is manifestly the true one in most instances. Two or three of them seem to forbid any other sense.
In Matthew 10:28, we read of “Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” If the body is not destroyed by a deathless torment, why the soul? In Acts 3: 23, the prediction of Moses, — “every soul which will not hear that Prophet shall be utterly destroyed from among the people,” is cited without the remotest hint of a destruction that does not kill. But the metaphorical sense is supposed to hold in two or three cases which should be examined.
27. It is thought the “loss of the soul” cannot denote its proper destruction, but is something far more terrible. But in Matthew 10:39; 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24; 17:33; John 12:25, where the term is used in connexion with this noun is rendered, not “soul,” but “life.” In Matthew 16:26, and Mark 8:36, where it is rendered “soul,” the verb is rightly rendered “shall suffer loss” in 1 Corinthians 3:15, where the loss of unapproved work, “hay, wood, and stubble,” is spoken of. And in Luke 9:25, the phrase is “lose himself, or be cast away.”
28. In 2 Peter 3: 6, the world which was before the flood is said to have “perished,” though it was not annihilated. May not the soul perish likewise?
The question here raised is not one of geology. In that court we might prove that the “new heavens and the new earth” will be identical with those which now subsist; or that though they be changed as garments (Hebrews 1:11, 12), they will perish never. But to the mind of the inspired writer, the earth, purged and changed by the deluge, was to all intents and purposes a new thing; and he might properly speak of “ the world that then was,” and “the heavens and the earth which are now,” as two different things. Things are destroyed variously, by change of form, or by loss of being, according to their nature. Hence the early doctrine of the last things: “The clay of the Lord cometh, in which everything that is seen shall be dissolved, and the wicked shall be destroyed with it.”
29. In 1 Corinthians 5:5, Paul directs the incestuous person to be given over to Satan “for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.” Could he mean that this person should suffer death?
Granting that Paul simply advised excommunication, his language may have been a Jewish formula for the “greater excommunication,” requiring the principal witness or accuser to cast the first stone. If so, the phrase, and not the word, would be the metaphor.
But the literal sense of the passage is sanctioned by good authority. Thus Bloomfield: “That the Apostles had the power and were authorized to punish notorious offenders with disease and death in a supernatural manner, few will deny. See John 20:23; Acts 13:11, and 1 Corinthians 11:20.” And Lightfoot, remarking that the offender“ deserved death, two or three times over,” says: “ we are led to be of their opinion who interpret the place of a miraculous action, namely, of the real delivery of this person into the hands and power of Satan, to be scourged by him, and tormented by him with diseases, tortures and affrightments.”
E. Corruption.
The Greek verb and its derivatives, often rendered “destroy” and “destruction,” occur thirty-five times in the
New Testament. In a few instances the word is used in its modern ethical sense; e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:33; 2 Corinthians 11:3; 1 Timothy 6:5; 2 Timothy 3:8. But a comparison of passages will show that this sense is the exception and not the rule. Thus “He that sows to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption,” Galatians 6: 8). With this compare the saying in Ecclesiasticus 10:11: “When a man shall die, he shall inherit serpents, and beasts, and worms;” and chapter 19:3: “He that joins himself to harlots, will be reckless. Rottenness and worms shall inherit him; and he shall be lifted up for a greater example; and his soul shall be taken away out of the number.” The comparison made in 2 Peter 2:12, indicates a literal destruction of the wicked: “But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, shall utterly perish in their own corruption” (compare 1 Corinthians 3:17; Revelation 11:18). On the other hand “in-corruption,” or an incorruptible portion, is made the inheritance of the righteous, in 1 Corinthians 15:42, 50, 53, 54; 1 Peter 1: 23.
We shall meet the literal sense of the word in the writings of the early Christians. To assume its modern sense in the interpretation of Scripture, is to read history backward. And even granting the metaphorical sense were predominant, we should hardly infer the immortality of the vicious; for, in every analogy, corruption is a method of death and not of life.
F. Other expressions.
The wicked are often spoken of as “consumed,” “devoured,” “burned.” Fire is represented as going out from before the Lord to devour his enemies, in various passages of the O. T., Leviticus 10: 2; Numbers 16: 35; 26: 10; 2 Kings 1:10, 12, 14; Psalms 21:9, compare 2 Samuel 22:9; Psalm 18:8; and in Revelation 20: 9 (compare Hebrews 10: 26, 27). The divine anger is represented as “a consuming fire,” Deuteronomy i5: 24; Hebrews 12: 29. And such passages as Psalms 73:27; 104:35; Malachi 4:1; Matthew 13: 30, 40-43; John 15: 6; Hebrews 6:8, can hardly be referred to God’s temporal judgments.
If now literal fire is the most natural emblem of destruction, we should expect that the fire of divine wrath will destroy the soul. The passages supposed to prove the contrary will be examined in their place.
The wicked are said to be “slain,” in various passages that most naturally indicate their final doom; e. g. Psalms 34:21; 62:3; 139:19; Proverbs 1:32; Isaiah 11:4; 66:16; Luke 19:27. Compare the phrases “blot out,” Psalms 69: 28; “grind to powder,” Matthew 21:44; Luke 20:18; “dash in pieces,” Psalms 2:9; “tear in pieces,” Psalms 50:22; “put away as dross,” Psalms 119:119; “shall be as nothing,” Isaiah 41: 11, 12; “shall not be,” Psalms 37:10; Proverbs 12:7.
We might here adduce the various forms of prayer and imprecation respecting the wicked, which would be meaningless, or horrible, if they must subsist forever. That of Abigail is an example: “The soul of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of life with the Lord thy God; and the souls of thine enemies, them shall he sling out, as out of the middle of a sling” (1 Samuel 25:29). And that of Peter: “Thy money perish with thee” (Acts 8: 20).
4. PASSAGES SUPPOSED TO PROVE THE IMMORTALITY OF THE LOST.
“We now come to the second division of the inferential argument. The passages on which it is based may be classified, as follows:
Those in which the ruin of the lost, under various names, is spoken of as eternal. The expressions are: “everlasting contempt,” Daniel 12:2; “everlasting destruction,” 2 Thessalonians 1:9; “everlasting punishment,” Matthew 25: 46; “eternal damnation,” Mark 3: 29; “eternal judgment,” Hebrews 6: 2.
Those in which the term “everlasting” or its equivalent is applied to the cause of their supposed endless misery. The expressions are: “unquenchable fire,” Matthew 3:12; Luke 3: 17; Mark 9:43, 45; “ their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched,” Isaiah 66: 24; Mark 9: 44, 46, 48; “everlasting” or “ eternal fire,” Matthew 18:8; 25: 41; Jude 1:7; “everlasting burnings,” Isaiah 33: 14; “the wrath of God abides on him,” John 3: 36.
One expression supposed to denote eternal sinfulness, Revelation 22: 11.
Those in which the concomitants of the final ruin are supposed to indicate an eternal existence. See the phrases: “mist of darkness forever,” 2 Peter 2:17; “blackness of darkness forever,” Jude 1:13; “smoke,” and “smoke of torment,” rising foe ever. Revelation 14:11; 19:3. Here belong the expressions, “wailing,” and “gnashing of teeth,” Matthew 8:12; 13:42, 50; 24:13; 24:51; 25:30; Luke 13:28; “to be without,” Revelation 22:15; also the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, Luke 16: 19-31; and the phrase “everlasting chains,” Jude 1:6.
The passage in which Satan, the beast and the false prophet are said to be “tormented, day and night, forever and
ever,” Revelation 20: 10.
We might remark upon the paucity and general obscurity of these expressions, if they alone, or as a class, must prove man’s danger of incurring eternal woe. But it will be better to inquire respecting them, one by one, what they do mean.
1. “Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake; some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” — Daniel 12: 2.
It is thought by good critics that the prophet here speaks only of the resurrection of the righteous, called the “first resurrection” in Revelation 20:5; and that the passage should be read: “these [who awake] to everlasting life, and those [who do not awake] to shame and everlasting contempt.” This would agree with the Syriac version: “some to death, and the eternal con- tempt of their companions.”
But we are willing to take the passage as making no distinction between the first and the second resurrection. We need then only to correct the frequent dislocation by which the “shame” as well as the “contempt” is made everlasting. Though even on this we need not insist; for the word “shame” cannot refer to the feelings of the lost. The Hebrew is used only here and in Isaiah 66:24 (English “an abhorring”), where, says Dr. Wintle, it denotes “a kind of spectacle, show, or nausea,” and is translated “nausea” by Buxtorf in his Concordance. The allusion seems to be to the putrefaction of death. The “contempt,” if it expresses a feeling of the righteous, is farther described in such passages as Malachi 4:3; Matthew 13:40-43; 2 Peter 2: 9-12; Psalms 102: 7; on which last passage Hengstenberg remarks, perhaps too carelessly: “The annihilation of the wicked comes into notice as the basis of the deliverance of the righteous, which is the proper theme of the Psalm.”
3. “And to you who are troubled, rest with us; when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall be punished with everlasting destruction, from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power.” — 2 Thessalonians 1: 7-9.
The common mistake in the interpretation of this passage is in taking the preposition “from” to denote separation, and not the origin or source of the destruction named. The parallel expression in Acts 3: 19, “The times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord” and others describing the destruction of God’s enemies (Leviticus 10: 2; Numbers 16: 35; 2 Kings 1: 10, 12, 14; Revelation 20: 9), suggest the true sense; which is thus given by Macknight: “These wicked men, being raised from the dead, shall suffer punishment, even everlasting destruction, by fire issuing from the presence of the Lord.” And by Conybeare and Howson: “Then shall go forth against them, from the presence of the Lord, and from the brightness of his glorious majesty, their righteous doom, even an everlasting destruction.” This view is supported by Grotius, Cocceius, Pellicanus, Castalio, Le Clerc, Poole, Hammond, Benson, Henry, Bengel, Pelt, Baumgarten-Crusius, De “Wette.
The sense of the adjective “everlasting” will be given in our discussion of Mark 3: 29, and Hebrews 6: 2.
30. “These shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal.” — Matthew 25: 46.
This is the most important of all the passages supposed to affirm the eternal suffering, and to imply the immortality, of the lost. As we have before remarked, we waive all argument in behalf of a limited sense of the word “everlasting,” though a very strong case could be made out for such a sense, if the doc- trine of human destiny were made to turn on words expressive of duration. Not only are all the terms that denote eternity very often in the Bible used in a modified sense, but the very phrase here employed by our Saviour to denote the doom of the lost, is used by Philo to express an insuperable resentment in this life. “It is better,” he says, “not to promise at all, than not to give prompt assistance. For, in the former case, no blame follows; but in the latter, there is dissatisfaction from the weaker class, and a deep hatred and lasting punishment from such as are powerful.”
He also speaks of an “eternal (perhaps meaning far reaching) and perfect wisdom.” And the argument to show that it signifies, not the continuance, but the spiritual nature, of the future retributions, is supported by numerous examples that have been carefully collected by a late writer. But, happily, the whole doctrine of a future life was never designed, and has not been left, to depend on this class, nor on any single class, of words. Man’s hope of immortality is, rather, inwrought into the very texture of the revealed Word, and is derived from the momentous facts of the gospel history.
In discussing the passage in hand, we accept, at the outset, the translation of Kolaai by the word “punishment,” and inquire (1.) Does it necessarily denote conscious pain? (2.) Did the Jew s of Christ’s time regard eternal privation of being as an eternal punishment?
(1.) We are told that the word is peculiarly expressive, a stronger word than the one commonly used to denote punishment; a verbal noun, denoting action, and not result; a noun of infliction. And from the Syriac we have in this place, “torment;” as also in the common version of 1 John 4:18.
The Syriac, however, cannot be relied on in this argument, as it does not render the word uniformly in the four places where the noun or the verb occurs. In Acts 4:21, it reads: “to punish;” in 2 Peter 2: 9: “to be tormented;” as also in verse 4, where some manuscripts read in 1 John 4:18: “exists in peril.”
Moreover, the Syriac word used in the passage in hand admits a milder sense, and is rendered “supplicium” (punishment) by Walton and White.
The translation of the word by “chastisement” is, we think, no better supported. That is indeed the classic sense of the word, which appears in the adjective, in Proverbs w1:11. But it is not favoured by the other passages in the New Testament; and it is opposed by the distinction often made between the two Greek words, as corrective or disciplinary, and judicial. The former was the punishment of children and slaves; the latter, of enemies or criminals. Thus Aristotle: “It is inflicted for the sake of him who suffers it, but for the satisfaction of him who requires it.”‘ And Eustathius says: “It is properly a certain kind of punishment; that is, a certain chastising and restraining of the disposition, but not vindictive punishment.”
The translation by “restraint” is favoured by the use of the present tense in 2 Peter 2: 9 (compare verse 4; Jude 1:6; and perhaps Acts 4:21), and by a remark of Schleusner. It is favoured by the tenor of various passages which represent the wicked as the troublers of the righteous, to be effectually restrained by God’s final judgments. See Psalms 37: 73: 102; Isaiah 66:24; Daniel 12: 2, 3; Matthew 13: 40-43; 2 Thessalonians 1:6-10; 2 Peter 2: 4-12; Jude 1:5-7, 13. But this idea is not prominent in Matthew 25, and such a rendering would be hardly tenable.
One respectable writer accepts the translation by the word “abscission,” or “excision.” This seems to be supported by the cognate (Matthew 24: 22; Mark 13: 20), and by the original sense of “pruning.” But in pruning, the tree is not “cut off” — only the branches. And though, by the laws of language, the word might easily have acquired this sense, we find no proof that it has done so.
The general sense of “punishment” we think is sustained by the comparison of the twenty-eight instances in which the noun or verb occurs in the Septuagint and other Greek versions. Most of these are found, indeed, in the Apocryphal Books. But this volume of Hellenistic Greek is inferior to no other authority, to determine the usus loquendi of words in the New Testament. The following are the most important of the passages:
Ezekiel 14: 3, 4, 7; 43:11; 44:12. (margin). Here Kolaacc occurs as the equivalent of “stumbling-block.” Schleusner explains the translation thus: “Whatever is the cause of misfortune or punishment, is called in Scripture a ‘stumbling-block.’ “For the nature of the punishment incurred, see chapter 14: 8-10.
Ezekiel 18: 30, “So iniquity shall not be your ruin.”
2 Samuel 8:1, “David smote the Philistines, and subdued them.”
Proverbs 22: 23, “For the Lord will plead their cause, and spoil the soul of those that spoiled them.”
Esdras 8:27, “And whosoever will not do the law of thy God, and the law of the King, let judgment be executed speedily upon him, whether it be unto death, or to banishment, (margin rooting out), or to confiscation of goods, or to imprisonment.”
Wisdom 3:1-4, “But the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and torment may not touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, and their exit was reckoned a calamity, and their departure from us, utter destruction; but they are in peace. For though in the sight of men they are punished, their hope is full of immortality.”
Wisdom 11: 5, 6, “For by what things their enemies [the Egyptians] were punished, by the same things they in their need were benefited.” Compare verses 19, 17, and chapter 12:14, 15, 27; 16:1, 2, 9, 24; 18:11, 22.
Wisdom 14: 8-10, “But the idol that is made by hands is cursed, and also he that made it; himself, because he made it, and the corruptible thing, because it was called a god. For to God both the wicked and his wickedness are alike hateful. And that which was made, together with him who made it, shall be punished.” Compare verse 13: “For neither were they from the beginning, neither shall they be forever.”
Wisdom 14:4, “For a fatuity of which they [the Egyptians] were worthy brought them to this end; and they lost the remembrance of those things which had happened, that they might fill up the punishment which was wanting to their torments.”
2 Maccabees 4:38, “He put to death the sacrilegious wretch, the Lord repaying him his deserved punishment.”
2 Maccabees 6: 14, 15, “For, not as with other nations, (whom the Lord patiently expects until he shall punish them in the fullness of their sins,) doth he also deal with us, so as to suffer our sins to come to their height, and then take vengeance on us.”
The other passages are 1 Maccabees 7:7, and 3 Maccabees 1:3; 6:3, where the context shows that the punishment is death.
The ethical sense of “punishment,” as distinct from calamity or mere excision, is apparent in all the passages. But the word by no means determines the kind of punishment. It may be torment, or it may put an end to torment (Wisdom 19: 4). It may be banishment, confiscation of goods, or imprisonment (3 Esdras 7: 27). In most of the passages, it is death. In one (Wisdom 3:1-4), it is the loss of immortality, or utter destruction, which seems also to be regarded as a “torment.” And in another (Wisdom 14: 8-10), the destruction of an idol made of wood, in token of God’s displeasure, is called punishment. To say nothing of these remarkable instances, those in which the punishment designated is death, show that the word does not necessarily denote torment.
The argument from the phrase “everlasting punishment” is then reduced to this question: Can the adjective qualify the noun in any specific sense, as well as in its generic sense? If in a given instance the meaning is pain, is it as proper to speak of “eternal pain,” as of “eternal punishment?” If in another instance the meaning is death, is it proper to speak of an “eternal death?” If the given punishment is one of loss, may that loss be called eternal? If so, then all argument for the specific sense of “torment” from the general sense of “punishment,” is at an end. The proof of eternal suffering cannot be made out from the phrase “everlasting punishment,” but must be derived from other sources. And this leads us to our second inquiry:
(2.) Did the Jews of Christ’s time regard eternal privation of being as eternal punishment? This question is already answered so far as the two passages just cited (Wisdom 3:1-4; 14:8-10) may be taken to show their opinion. But there are passages in the canonical Scriptures equally in point. Thus Peter, speaking to the Jews of the resurrection of Jesus, says: “Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death because it was not possible that he should be held of it” (Acts 2:24). It was certainly not the pains of dying that Peter had in mind; for Jesus w as not saved from them. Yet we do not suppose that he actually suffered pain in the interval between his death and resurrection. The phrase was proverbial, denoting the state of death as one of gloom and wretchedness, com- pared with life. This sense is supported by Lightfoot, who says: “By the pains of death we are not to understand so much the torments and pangs in the last moments of death, as those bands which followed, viz.; the continued separation of soul and body, the putrefaction and corruption of the body in the grave.” Thus David speaks of the “sorrows of death,” the “sorrows of hell,” the “snares of death,” and “the pains of hell” (Psalms 18: 4, 5; 116: 3; 2 Samuel 22: 6).
And Job desires to “take comfort a little,” before entering “the land of darkness and the shadow of death; a land of darkness, as darkness itself, and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness (chapter 10:21, 22). And in Ezekiel 32:24, 25, 30, the enemies of Israel are spoken of as “enduring shame,” while they are described as “slain,” “fallen by the sword,” “gone down to Sheol,” or to “ the pit,” and in their graves. The Seventy render “shame” by “torment,” by which they evidently mean the torment of being dead; and in Isaiah 14: 9-20, we find the same dramatic representation of the state of death as a sore evil. “The worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee.” Babylon is “gone down to the stones of the pit; as a carcass trodden under foot.” This natural sentiment, that it is an evil thing to be dead, often transfers to the dead the thoughts of the living about them. This is quite apparent in the famous argument of Cicero, where he finds it so difficult to dispel the illusion that the body of one actually dead may suffer in being torn by dogs and birds of prey. And it was said by an ancient Rabbi: “The worm is as tormenting to a dead man, as a needle to living flesh.”
We will conclude this discussion by observing — (1.) That the contrast of the punishment with “life eternal,” naturally suggests that it consists in eternal death. Thus De Wette: “The conceptions — eternal punishment and eternal life — are not strictly contrasted. It is not merely blessedness, but life in the fullest sense of the word; and that which properly corresponds to it is annihilation.” And (2.) we may derive a moral argument from the full account here given of the solemn judgment of the great day.
What is the sin and guilt for which the final sentence is here pronounced? For what crime are they condemned to their eternal punishment? The indictm.ent, if we may so name the accusation, runs thus: “I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.” This charge involves the lack of all true goodness, and the basest ingratitude.
But how different it is from the reasons commonly assigned for an eternal suffering. Yet it is God’s own Theodicy. Sinful men have not loved nor regarded Him who came to save them; they have rejected and scorned Him who came that they might have life. Shall an immortality that is “not life” be their retribution?
4. “But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.” — Mark 3: 29. “The doctrine of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment.” — Hebrews 6: 2.
The words “damnation” and “judgment” are not essentially different. The former has indeed become a synonym of “eternal misery;” but this is owing to the history of doctrine; not at all to its etymology,- nor to the original Greek. Thus Christ says: “As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just.” And again: “The weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and truth.” “Judgment and the love of God; these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.”
But instead of this milder sense, which gave to the Hebrew champion and deliverer the name of “judge,” the word has in Mark 3: 29, the severer meaning of “condemnation.” The equivalent term in Hebrews 6: 2, denotes in general “sentence,” whether favourable or unfavourable. The word yields no argument for the immortality of the lost. That must be sought in the qualifying adjective “eternal,” and the argument is reduced to this: Can an irreversible sentence be properly called “eternal,” though it be a sentence of utter destruction? Or, is this adjective used to denote the eternity of effect?
The examples are numerous. Thus we read of an “ eternal salvation” (Hebrews 5:9; compare Isaiah 45:17); of “eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9:12); of “the everlasting gospel” (Revelation 14:6, see Barnes’s note); of a “perpetual covenant” (Exodus 31: 16; Jeremiah 50:5); a “perpetual statute” (Leviticus 3:17; 24:9); a “perpetual decree” (Jeremiah 5:22); a “perpetual ordinance” (Ezekiel 46:14); a “perpetual end” (Psalms 9:6). And such instances might be multiplied, if we take the Hebrew “forever,” as equivalent to the word “eternal. “ See Numbers 18:19; Job 4:20; 14: 20; 20:7; 23:7; 36:7; Psalms 44:23; 49:8; 52:5; 77:7, 8; 83:17; 112:7; Obadiah 1:10; Micah 2:9.
Like examples abound in early Jewish writings. Thus in the Book of Enoch (Laurence’s translation): “Even to the day of judgment, and of consummation, until the judgment [the effect of] which shall last forever, be completed” (10:15). “For in the great day there shall be a judgment, with which they shall be judged until they are consumed” (19:2). “Until the period of the great judgment; when all shall be punished and consumed forever” (24:9). “They shall be cast into a judgment of fire; they shall perish in wrath, and by a judgment overpowering them forever” (90: 11; compare verse 13: “And blasphemers shall be annihilated everywhere”).
“An everlasting judgment shall be executed” (92:16; compare 103:5; 104:3).
We add a few examples from the Talmud and the Rabbis, some of which explain the Jewish doctrine of a two¬fold judgment, and thus meet the apparent argument in the phrase “hath never forgiveness.” After having spoken of the power and judgments of an earthly king as temporary (“if he should slay me, that slaying would not be eternal “) Jochanan ben Zaccai says: “If the King of kings shall be angry with me, his wrath is eternal; if he shall bind me, his bands are eternal; if he should slay me, his slaying is eternal. “Again it is said those guilty of certain sins “shall descend into Gehenna, and shall there be judged forever.” On which Abarbanel remarks:
“Such are enormous sins and perverse deeds, which blind the eyes of the mind, and subvert the soul, so that he who commits them shall be cast out from the inheritance of the saints, which is the life of the world to come.” “He that denies the resurrection of the dead, shall not have part in the resurrection of the dead; for God rewards him with the same measure.” Again he says: “A sinner who is an Israelite shall be punished according to his sin, yet shall have part in the world to come; but if a man shall not believe all these articles [of the Faith], he is already excluded from the lot of Israel, as a heretic and an Epicurean [infidel].” And to the same purpose:
“Now the greatest reward is the world to come; and the heaviest punishment is extermination.” And Maimonides:
“The sages say, For three transgressions punishment is inflicted upon a man in this world, and moreover he has no share in the world that is to come; viz: idolatry, adultery, and bloodshed; but a bad tongue is equivalent to all these.” With which agrees the Talmud: “There are four things which are avenged of a man in this world, and yet the capital [of the sin] is reserved for the world that is to come.” The distinction is that of interest and principal; the former might be exacted, and the latter remitted. So Maimonides again:
“On all wicked [Israelites], though their sins be numerous, judgment is pronounced according to their sins, but yet they have a share in the world that is to come; for all Israel have a share in the world to come, although they have sinned; for it is said: “Thy people also shall be all righteous; they shall inherit the land for ever;’ which means, the land of life, or the world that is to come. Also, the pious of the Gentiles shall have a share in the world that is to come. These, however [viz.: heretics, they who deny the law, etc. have no share in the world that is to come, but they are cut off, destroyed, and condemned forever and ever.”
Such were Jewish views of the “foundation of the faith”
(Hebrews 6:1, 2). Christ recognizes the distinction between forgiveness here and hereafter (Mark 3:29; compare
1 Corinthians 5:5, 11:30), and makes his own application of it. The doctrine is that of 1 John 5:10: “There is a sin unto death; I do not say that ye shall pray for it.”
With these passages should be also compared Psalms 1: 4; Matthew 3: 10; and John 15: 6. It is obvious that any mode of reasoning which would infer from them the immortality of the lost, must assume the indestructibility of chaff, of felled trees, and of the dry branches of a vine. We need hardly remark that the word “ unquenchable“ denotes the fierceness of a fire, which cannot be quenched, but must burn on, consuming what it will. Thus Wetstein; “The word denotes such a fire as cannot be extinguished before it has consumed and destroyed all. “ So Kuinoel and Rosenmuller. And Bloomfield, speaking of the oriental custom of burning straw and stubble, adds: “The word completes the awful image of total destruction.”
A similar phrase is found in Homer, where the scholiast explains: “that which burns down quickly, or is quenched with difficulty.” And the same phrase occurs in various passages in the classics, in the same sense. Eusebius employs it in two instances in recounting the martyrdom of Christians. Cronion and Julian were scourged and afterwards “consumed in an unquenchable fire;” and “Epimachus and Alexander, who had continued for a long time in prison, enduring innumerable sufferings from the scourges and scrapers, were also destroyed in an unquenchable fire.”
31. “And they shall go forth and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire he quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.” — Isaiah 66:24; compare Mark 9:44, 46, 48.
Here again we observe the mode of reasoning which deduces the immortality of the lost, must assume the indestructibility of “carcases.” But the parallel passages show that the “unquenched” fire is one which is not put out, but must consume and destroy. Thus in Jeremiah, foretelling the destruction of Jerusalem, we read: “Behold, mine anger and my fury shall be poured out upon this place, upon man, and upon beast, and upon the trees of the field, and upon the fruit of the ground; and it shall burn, and shall not be quenched” (7:20). Compare 2 Kings 22: 17; Psalms 118: 12; Isaiah 1:28, 31; Jeremiah 4: 4; 17: 27; Ezekiel 20: 47, 48; Amos 5:6.
But why is it said “their worm shall not die?” The reason is two-fold: (1.) The word translated “abhorring,” used else- where only in Daniel 12: 2, and signifying the nauseous spectacle of putrefying carcases, shows that the“ worm” is not that of con- science, but either literal vermin, or something else of which that is a type. So the writer of Ecclesiasticus: “Humble thy spirit very much; for the vengeance on the flesh of the ungodly is fire and worms” (7:19). Compare 10:11; 19:3; cited above, p. 183; also the Targum of Jonathan on Isaiah 45: 6: “I will not grant them long life, but I will pay them vengeance for their sins, and deliver their carcases to the second death;” and Lightfoot: “To be devoured by worms was reckoned an accursed thing, and what befell none but men of the greatest impiety.” And (2.) to the agency of the worm is added that of fire, to set forth, by iteration, the completeness of the destruction. What the worm does not devour, the fire shall consume. Thus the prophet Joel: “That which the palmer-worm hath left, hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left, hath the canker-worm eaten; and that which the canker-worm hath left, hath the caterpillar eaten” (1:4).
The phrase has a historical allusion, respecting which there are two opinions. One is that of Dr. Alexander, who, deriving the figure from the fires kept up in the valley of the son of Hinnom, or Tophet, makes it an allusion to the fate of the apostate Israel: “The central figure is Jerusalem, and its walls the dividing line between the two contrasted objects. Within is the true Israel, without the false.” The latter is finally exhibited, no longer living, but committed to the flames of Tophet.
“To render our conceptions more intense, the worm is added to the fire, and both are represented as undying. That the contrast hitherto maintained may not be forgotten even in this closing scene, the men within the walls are seen by the light of these funeral fires, coming forth and gazing at the ghastly scene, not with delight as some interpreters pretend, but as the text expressly says, with horror. In its primary meaning, this is a prophecy of ruin to the unbelieving Jews — apostate Israel.“
The other opinion is that of Albert Barnes, who derives the figure “from a scene where a people whose lands have been desolated by mighty armies, are permitted to go forth after a decisive battle, and to walk over the field of the slain, and to see the dead and putrefying bodies of their once formidable enemies.” Of this, the destruction of Sennacherib’s host would be a notable example. Either derivation explains the language used. It is not the immortality of the individual soul, but the multitude of those who finally perish, that challenges the unquenched fire, and the unfailing worm. They are as the sand of the sea (Revelation 20:8). Their number suggests an immortal feast for worms, like the “supper of the great God” to which the fowls of heaven are invited, in Revelation 19:17, 18. Hence the expression in Isaiah I16: 15, 16: “Behold the Lord will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire; and the slain of the Lord shall be many.”
Thus the words in Isaiah 66:24, are in two ways explained by reference to the scenes of time; and in one or other of these explanations nearly all the commentators are agreed. It follows that to extend the allusion — as many of them do — to an eternal scene, explains nothing, and therefore proves nothing. It is an assumption of the thing to be proved. And although the words as quoted by our Saviour cannot refer so immediately to the valley of Hinnom, or to the destruction of an army, but are applied directly to God’s final judgment, yet to suppose that they now indicate the soul’s immortality is no less an assumption of the, thing to be proved, and it is to deduce indestructibility from the images of utter destruction. But in the context the hypothesis of entering into life halt or maimed or with one eye, as strongly intimates the literal destruction of one’s being, soul and body, as the mention of “carcases” in the original passage.
But the explanation of these passages will be incomplete without a consideration of that vexed passage in Mark 9:49: “For every one shall be salted with fire, and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt,” in which a few commentators find the eternal conservation of the lost. All such argument, at least, is done away by the remarks of Hammond, who says: “The word salted is made answerable to the Hebrew and is set by Symmachus (Isaiah 51: 6) to signify consumed, in like manner as the whole burnt offering is consumed — burnt all of it with fire; which is answerable to the unquenchable fire going before; and so the meaning of this expression will be here, that that first sort of men, the apostates, or wicked, carnal Christians, shall be used as the burnt offerings are, — they shall have fire instead of salt. But the pious minded Christian, like the minchah, shall have the salt, the grace of God and Christian doctrine; and by God’s help make use of it, to eat up all his corruptions and degrees of putrefaction left in him, and also to be a, principle of union and peaceable-mindedness in him; as among other uses of salt it is said to be unitive. But it is not unlikely that in this place, and in that of Isaiah, may be put for which signifies first to he caught, then to be consumed; so (2 Peter 2:12) is ‘preying upon, and, joined with destroying or consuming. So in Isaiah 66, after the mention of God’s pleading by fire (verse 16) is added: “they shall be consumed together verse 17).” This view is supported by the remarks of Whitby, which are the more significant because he has just expatiated on the notion of the perpetuity of the condemned.
He says: “It is the property of salt to preserve things from corruption; hence a covenant of salt is put for an everlasting or inviolable covenant. So Numbers 18: 19: ‘It is a covenant of salt for ever before the Lord; ‘and God gave David and his sons kings over Israel for ever by a covenant of salt (2 Chronicles 13:5). Whence the Jews say, salt was to season all their sacrifices, to signify that they preserved their souls from corruption, as the salt did the sacrifice; Philo, that salt is a symbol of the perpetuity of all things, preserving that on which it is sprinkled. And on those words: ‘With every oblation you shall offer salt,’ — ‘By this,’ said Philo, ‘he signifies the perpetual duration of them; salt being the preservation of bodies next to the soul itself; for as the soul is the cause that our bodies are not corrupted, so is salt, preserving them for a long time, and rendering them in a manner incorruptible.”
7. “Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.” — Jude 1:7. “Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off and cast them from thee; for it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet, to be cast into everlasting fire.” — Matthew 18:8. “Then shall he say unto them on the left hand, Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” — Matthew 25: 41.
The phrase used in each of these passages, is manifestly equivalent to the Trip uaSecrov of Matthew 3: 12; Luke 3: 17, and Mark i10: 43, 45. In two of these passages (Matt, 18: 18, and Mark i10: 43, 45) the phrases are used interchangeably, in different accounts of the same discourse of our Saviour. If one of them indicates a complete destruction, the other cannot indicate an immortality of the lost; and we might here rest the argument.
But it will be better to show how the adjectives should denote the same thing. This is told in a word. The former describes the fierceness and all-consuming violence of the fire; the latter, its irreparable effect. The eternal fire is that which destroys utterly and /or ever. This eternity of effect, which we noted in Mark 3: 29 and Hebrews 6: 2, has been remarked by commentators on one of the passages in hand. Thus Witsius, after saying that the words in Jude 1:7, are “not to be restricted to that fire wherewith those cities were burnt, but to be extended to the flames of hell, with which the lewd inhabitants of those cities are at this very day tormented,” adds: “ But it is true of both, that they were burnt with fire; which with respect to the towns may in some measure be said to be eternal, they being so consumed as that they never shall or can be restored.” And Whitby: “I conceive that they (the inhabitants) are said to ‘suffer the vengeance of eternal fire,’ not because their souls are at present punished in hell-fire, but because they and their cities perished by that fire from heaven, which brought a perpetual and irreparable destruction on them and their cities.” And Bloomfield: “On the commentators (I think) require too much. Benson explains it: a fire which burnt till it utterly consumed them. See Whitby. It is not necessary to press on. We need only suppose that the Apostle’s meaning is, “they are publicly set forth (which is a forensic term), for an everlasting example (in their fiery destruction) of the punishment God sometimes inflicts for sin in this world, which is but a faint type of that which he hath reserved for the next.”
Very true; a fire that utterly consumes, is a “faint type“ of a destruction ever going on and ever incomplete. Hammond speaks of “ the utterly irreversible destruction, such as fell on Sodom, called aluviov TTvp, eternal fire, utterly consumptive.” Episcopius takes the passage in the same sense. Adam Clarke takes it as applying either to the inhabitants or to the cities, and says: “ In either case the word rrvp aluviov signifies an eternally destructive fire; it has no end in the punishment of the wicked Sodomites, . . . it has no end in the destruction of the cities; they were totally burnt up, and never were and never can be rebuilt. In either of these cases the word aluvtog has its proper and gram- matical meaning.” And Rosenmiiller: “We may understand TTvp aitjviov of a destroying fire; that is, one which utterly wasted and reduced to nothing. But we may also understand a fire perpetually smoking.”
Here is a slight addition to the sense of its meaning, which, however, does not all conflict with that just given. Those cities became an eternal monument of desolation. Thus Cajetan: They “were burned with fire from heaven, of which conflagration the traces still remain and ever will remain to the end of the world; to wit, a continual desolation, a Dead Sea, constantly smoking and exhaling pitch and sulphur wherewith it was burned; admitting neither fish nor any living thing; but speedily destroying them; producing apples of emptiness and ashes; so that Sodom has the appearance of a past fire, and is a vivid example of what will be in Gehenna.” Be it so; if the antitype is true to the type, what is the immortality of the lake of fire and brimstone — the Dead Sea of the world to come?
And these cities were an example in fact, as well as intent. “Nothing was more known and celebrated among authors, sacred and profane, Jewish, Christian, and heathen writers, than ‘ the fire that fell down upon Pentapolis,’ or the five cities of Sodom; they being mentioned still in Scripture as the cities which God overthrew with a perpetual desolation; in the Apocryphal writings, ‘the waste land that yet smokes.’“
It is here worthy of note that the adjective “suffering” in Jude 1:7, refers to the cities rather than to the inhabitants. And it only remains for us to answer an objection derived from the nature of the human soul, which is supposed to preclude the proof of an utter destruction from some of the passages now considered. It is best stated and answered in the words of Whately: “Supposing the soul to be immaterial, it cannot be destroyed by literal fire and worms. That is true; but no more can it suffer from these. We all know that no fire, literally so called, can give us any pain unless it reaches our bodies. The ‘fire therefore, and the worm,’ must at any rate, it would seem, be figuratively so called, — something that is to a soul what fire and worms are to a body.
And as the effect of worms or fire is, not to preserve the body that they prey upon, but to consume, destroy, and put an end to it, it would follow, if the correspondence hold good, that the fire figuratively so called, which is prepared for the condemned, is something that is really to destroy and put an end to them; and is called ‘everlasting’ or ‘unquenchable’ fire, to denote that they are not to be saved from it, but that their destruction is to be final.”
These are doubtless the words of the unbelieving Jews, who had advised ungodly alliances with the surrounding nations, and are now terror-stricken at the dangers that impend. Some think the “devouring fire” refers to the presence of God, which affrights the wicked as if it were a “consuming fire” (Deuteronomy 4:24). More precisely, this would be the Shekinah, threatening to devour them, as the adherents of Dathan and Abiram were consumed. By others it is referred to the fury of the Assyrians, raging as a fire (Proverbs 30:16; Isaiah 10:7; 14: 6); or to their ancient and inveterate enmity (Ezekiel 25: 15); or to the actual invasion and devastation of the land by them. Hence the remark of Grotius, in the style of some of the passages adduced under Matthew 3: 12: “The fire that is not quenched; such they thought to be the Assyrian power.”
But we prefer the exegesis which refers the passage to the destruction of the Assyrians, in which the unbelieving Jews feared they might share. Hence the expression in verses 10-12, where the Assyrian army is represented as awaiting a sudden and utter destruction: “Now will I arise, said the Lord; now will I be exalted; now will I lift up myself. Ye shall conceive chaff; ye shall bring forth stubble; your breath, as fire, shall devour you. And the people shall be as the burnings of lime; as thorns cut up shall they be burned in the fire.” This had been already foretold in chapter 27:4: “Fury is not in me [i.e. I am no longer angry with my people]. Who will set the briers and thorns against me in battle? I would go through them; I would burn them together.” The prophecy appears as history in chapter 37:36: “Then the angel of the Lord went forth, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred and four score and five thousand; and when they arose early in the morning, behold they were all dead corpses.” According to the custom of the eastern nations, these bodies should be burned. And on the phrase “burnings of lime” it is remarked by Dr. Alexander, that the same word “burnings” is applied (Jeremiah 34: 5) to the aromatic fumigations used at ancient burials [i.e. in the funeral pyre], to which there may be allusion here. The ideas expressed are those of quickness and intensity. The thorns are perhaps described as cut up, to suggest that they are dry, and therefore more combustible.”
The effect of this display of divine power is to alarm those who have not trusted in God, and who cannot know Him as their deliverer. “Who among us,” they exclaim, “shall dwell with (this) devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with (these) perpetual burnings?” Thus Dr. Alexander renders the passage, with whom agree Luther, Vitringa, Le Clerc, Matthew Henry, and Lowth.
Here again, to extend the meaning of the passage to the future world explains nothing and proves nothing. And if we allow the extended sense, it would only prove the very doctrine we maintain. A parallel passage in Revelation 6: 17, is significant of anything but the eternal endurance of the wicked: “For the great day of His wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?” With which should be compared the expression “both soul and body,” in Isaiah 10: 18, and Matthew 10: 28, which, if strictly taken, would show that the first and second deaths were included, the latter named in anticipation, or both to be actually combined in one.
32. “He that believes on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believes not on the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.” — John 3: 36.
How, it is asked, can the wrath of God abide on those who do not exist? It is sufficient to reply that the state of death was deemed by the Jews an evil. Death past all hope of return to life was no less an evil. And by a natural dramatism, the subtlety of thoughts ever transcending the subtlety of words, such a destiny might be expressed in language which, grammatically taken, implies existence. The idea is, God’s wrath shuts up the wicked in eternal non-existence. If they would escape they “shall be turned back into Sheol, and all the nations that forget God.”
But there is a truer exegesis of the passage, which makes it retrospective. See verse 18. The world is already under condemnation, and in case of unbelief, the sentence continues in force, awaiting until it be executed. This agrees with what Calvin says: “I am not dissatisfied with the view given by Augustine, that the word ‘abides’ is used to inform us that from the womb we were appointed to death, because we were all born the children of wrath (Ephesians 2: 3).
At least I willingly admit an allusion of this sort, provided we hold the true and simple meaning to be what I have stated, that death hangs over all unbelievers, and keeps them oppressed and overwhelmed in such a manner that they can never escape.” So Erasmus, Lightfoot, Kuinoel, Doddridge, Alford.
Even the elder Edwards, who adduces this passage in support of the theodicy of eternal sinfulness, remarks upon it: “Thus Christ takes leave of his Church till his last coming, warning them to improve the means of grace they have, and informing them that they are never to have any other.” This suggests the true sense, which is stated by the Venerable Bede: “Evil men are permitted to wax worse, or to reach the climax of wickedness, so they shall find God’s judgment to be just.” It is given more fully by Lowman: “The providence of God will indeed permit things to continue in this world, just as these things represent the state of them. Men of evil principles and corrupt hearts will continue in acts of injustice and oppression, and. to promote false religion and wickedness, notwithstanding all the cautions of religion and judgments of Providence. Yet the cautions, directions, and encouragements of these prophecies, and the judgments of Providence foretold in them, will have a better effect on good minds, to their perseverance in truth, righteousness and holiness.” And the more critical examination of the principal words confines their significance to the scenes of time.
Thus Daubuz: “He that wrongs (or the unjust) denotes, in a peculiar manner, throughout this prophecy, the persecution and murder of the saints. ‘He which is filthy,’ seems principally to denote those who shall be guilty of idol worship. These prophecies will be of great use, as they shall contribute to the constancy of the righteous and the holy, though they should not effect a general reformation in the world, though men of evil principles and wicked hearts shall still remain persecutors and idolaters.” This view is supported by the Syriac and Arabic versions; by Rosenmuller, who cites similar expressions from the classic writers; by Cornelius a Lapide, Eichhorn, Poole, Henry, Andrew Fuller, Bloomfield, Hengstenberg, Jenks, and Stuart.
“Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.” Jude 1:13.
“We came into the world,” says Clement of Rome “as it were out of a sepulchre, and from darkness.” This expression suggests that the term “darkness” was with the Jews a synonym of chaos and non-existence. Blank nothingness, where no light is, appears as a blackness, and is more naturally conceived as a dread something than as a nothing. The concrete expression is more lively and vigorous than the abstract, which comes as an afterthought. Hence such terms as “nothingness” and “annihilation” were rarely used by the ancients, though they are now common. The state of things before the world was, is described in the oldest of books as a Tohu vau Balm — something empty and void; not unformed matter, but nothingness —
“Illimitable, without bound. Without division, where length, breadth, and height, And time, and place, are lost.”
And upon the face of this “deep” was Darkness. In Gentile speech, “Chaos and old Night” were the significant Nothing out of which all things were created. This was the outer limit, the utter darkness, upon which creative Light is ever encroaching, as the Spirit of God hovers over it to impart new being. And His wrath is the fire that remands thither all that has no place in His dominion.
Some have thought the phrase “outer darkness” is an allusion to some dark, dreary prison in Jerusalem, where malefactors were condemned to perish by hunger, want, and cold. More natural is the allusion to Gehenna as a gloomy abode of death. Thus the Targum on 1 Samuel 2:9: “The wicked shall be avenged in Gehenna, in darkness.” (Compare on Psalms I33: 13.) The terror of this darkness, even aside from the notion of punishment, is finely depicted in the Septuagint and Vulgate translations of Job 10:21, 22: “Before I go and return no more, to a land that is dark and covered with the mist of death; a land of misery and darkness, where is the shadow of death, and no order, but eternal horror dwells.”
The expression in the epistle of Jude is well illustrated by the Syriac version: “Shooting stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.” With this compare the passage in the book of Enoch: “Mercy shall be showed unto the righteous man; upon him shall be conferred integrity and power for ever. In goodness and righteousness shall he exist, and shall walk in everlasting light.
But sin shall perish in eternal darkness, nor be seen from this time forward for evermore” (91: 3; compare Daniel 12: 3; Proverbs 24: 20).
The expressions, “wailing,” and “gnashing of teeth,” which are connected with the “outer darkness” (Matthew 8: 12; 22: 13; 25:30), and with the “furnace of fire” (Matt, xiii; 42, 50), are here explained by reference to Psalms 112: 10. They denote, not an ever-subsisting malignity and contention, but the rage of envy and shame, in disappointment of eternal life. “The wicked shall see it, and shall be grieved; he shall gnash with his teeth, and melt away; the desire of the wicked shall perish.”
The “portion with the hypocrites” (Matthew 24:51) may be an allusion to Isaiah 33: 14. And the expression in Revelation 22: 15, “without are dogs, etc,” should be compared with Luke, 13: 28, and Psalms 112: 10. The radical idea is that o exclusion, from the kingdom of light and life.
The expression in Jude 1:6, “reserved in everlasting chains, under darkness, unto the judgment of the great day,” obviously denotes an imprisonment from which there is no release for the better. A similar phrase is used by Josephus, in speaking of the tyrant John as condemned by the Romans to “eternal imprisonment;” and a passage still more similar occurs in Cicero, who says that Catiline “does not hesitate to commit Publius Lentulus to eternal darkness and chains.” It is properly illustrated by the following, taken from the book of Enoch: “Bind Azazel hand and foot; cast him into darkness; and opening the desert which is in Dudael, cast him in there. Throw upon him hurled and pointed stones, covering him with darkness; there shall he remain forever; cover his face, that he may not see the light. And in the great day of judgment let him be cast into the fire” (10:6-9). “There shall they be taken into the lowest depths of the fire in torments, and in confinement shall they be shut up forever. Immediately after this shall he (Samyaza), together with them, burn and perish” (10: 17, compare verse 15, above).
The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, in like manner, simply denotes that there can be no improvement of the condition of those who die out of Christ. Aside from this, it proves nothing beyond the judgment. It belongs to the intermediate state; for the torment of the rich man here described is not that of Gehenna, but of Hades. In this view it will be considered in a subsequent discussion. We need here only remark that the distinction between Hades or Sheol, and Gehenna, is strictly observed in the Bible, and is often remarked by the commentators. The former is the Underworld, the place of disembodied souls, or the state of the dead. The latter is the “furnace of fire,” the “lake of fire and brimstone,” the unquenchable or eternal fire which consumes utterly and destroys forever. The term (yeewa) occurs in twelve instances in the New Testament, viz. Matthew 5: 22, 29, 30; 10: 28; 18: 9; 23: 15, 33; Mark i10: 43, 45, 47; Luke 12: 5; James 3: 6.
Wetstein, in his note on Matthew 5: 22, remarks: “All the punishments of more atrocious crimes were inflicted, either by God or men; severe punishments, indeed, by the judgments of twenty-three men; those more severe by the Sanhedrim; but the severest of all by God, in the excision either of body, or of soul or of both. Of this punishment Christ is speaking here, and in verses 29, 30, and chapter 10:28.” And of the Jewish use of the term Gehenna he cites among others the following examples: From the Jerusalem Targum on Genesis 3: 24: “ He made Gehenna for the wicked, like a two-edged sword, cutting either way; and in the midst of it, sparks and coals, burning up the wicked.” From the Targum on Psalms 37: 20; “And they shall be consumed in the smoke of Gehenna.” On Ecclesiastes 8: 10: “They have gone to be consumed in Gehenna.” And on Isaiah 31: 9 Gehenna is spoken of as “a fire which goes forth from the bodies of the wicked and sets them on fire; for it is said: Ye shall conceive chaff, and bring forth stubble; your breath, as fire, shall devour you.” This may illustrate the peculiar use of the word in James 3: 6.
12. “And the smoke of their torment ascends up forever and ever; and they have no rest, day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receives the mark of his name.” — Revelation 14: 11.
“And again they said, Alleluia. And her smoke rose up forever and ever.” — 19: 3.
The first of these passages refers properly to the scenes of time, and not to the final judgment. The chapter contains no allusion to the resurrection, or to the opening of the books. It opens with a dramatic representation of heaven as a witness of the tragic events of earth. In the mingling of mercy with judgment, the “everlasting gospel” is proclaimed (verse 6). Because the time is one of unprecedented distress, those who die are happy in being saved from the evil to come. “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, from henceforth, that they may rest from their labours” (verse l3). The days of trouble will try “the patience of the saints” (verse 12). The chapter closes with an account of “blood, even unto the horse-bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.”
And the very expression; “who worship the beast and his image,” seems to refer to the earthly conduct and condition of idolatrous people. The passage proves an earthly immortality, if it proves any; and the same may be said of the similar passage in chapter 9: 6, sometimes adduced in this argument: “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.”
But when we look to the context of the latter passage, we find that “Babylon,” which is doubtless the same idolatrous polity under another name, is utterly destroyed. See chapter 18: 8-10, 15, 18, 21. “She shall be utterly burned with fire.” She “shall be found no more at all.” Her desolation strikes terror into the hearts of those who were seduced by her; they “bewail her, and lament for her, when they see the smoke of her burning, standing afar off for fear of her torment.” What is this but the torment of being utterly destroyed?
The figure of “smoke ascending” is borrowed from the destruction of the cities of the plain (Genesis 19: 28), and was already employed by Isaiah in describing the desolations of Edom: “The streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become pitch. It shall not be quenched, night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up forever and ever; from generation to generation shall it lie waste; none shall pass through it forever and ever” (34: 9, 10).
Daubuz, one of the ablest and most learned commentators on the Apocalypse, and who states very strongly the common view of the destiny of the lost, finds no proof of that doctrine in these passages. He illustrates the view we have given of them by citations from Homer (Iliad, 21: 522), Virgil (Aeneid, 3: 2, 3), and Seneca (Consol. ad Polyb. chapter 1), and says: “So then, the smoke ascending forever and ever, is not to signify a continual burning; but by a metonymy of the efficient for the effect, to signify that it is burnt for ever, and never to be restored.” This derivation of the language is sustained by Cocceius, Eichhorn, Newton, Fuller, Clarke, Hengstenberg, Stuart, and denied, perhaps, by none. That one of these (Hengstenberg) should take the language in either passage as “an image of the torments of hell,” in the common view, is simply to assume the point in question; to explain no word and to prove nothing. It strangely deduces an immortal life from the imagery of desolation and death.
One passage yet remains, a frequent resort to prove the immortality of the lost:
Verse 13. “And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city; and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and false prophet are; and [they] shall be tormented day and night forever and ever.” — Revelation 20: 9, 10.
This passage cannot be claimed as proving directly anything beyond the eternal existence of Satan, the Beast, and the False Prophet. The argument from it for the immortality of those who worship the Beast or the False Prophet, is inferential; and to infer simply an eternal succession of their worshippers, is quite as good reasoning. Moreover, the .argument for the immortality of all the wicked must be deduced from what is here supposed to be intimated of only a part of them; for many generations of the heathen, and all the ancient world, are utter strangers to the Beast and the False Prophet; and such perhaps are “the nations in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog,” who are here described as deceived by Satan, and devoured by fire from God out of heaven (verses 8, 9). Karefayev, says Stuart, is “intensive, to eat up, devour, so that it denotes utter excision.” The argument from Matthew 25: 41, must also assume, that if the devil and his angels “are strictly immortal, and un-destroyed by the “eternal fire,” the same is true of wicked men.
The whole argument must begin, then, with proving that Satan, the Beast, and the False Prophet, are immortal. By parity of reasoning, Death and Hades, named in verse 13, and appointed to the same “lake of fire,” are also immortal. But this is not allowed. Thus Nitzsch, speaking of the second death, remarks: “The idea of annihilation becomes more prominent when we consider that even death and Hades (which shall absolutely be no more) are cast into the lake of fire.” And Stuart: “Hades and its king, as appears by verse 14, are to be cast into the lake of fire, after the judgment-day; i.e. they are to be utterly destroyed.” But he adds: “The place for disembodied spirits will be of no further use, after the resurrection of the body and its re-union with the soul. Death will then have completed his work, and will therefore be no more.”
This is remarkable. Death and Hades, symbolical person- ages, are supposed to cease from being; while their subjects, “the dead,” — whose names, after their resurrection, are not found in the book of life, who are cast into the same lake of fire (verse 15), in which Gehenna both soul and body are destroyed (Matthew 10:28), and which is the “second death,” — are supposed to be immortal! Who does not see, rather, that Hades and Thanatos are only other names for the dead; or, at least, that the destruction of their kingdom includes that of all who were its proper subjects?
The righteous, over whom “Death hath no dominion,” live; but not those who loved Death. “They follow him that are of his side” (Wisdom 2:25).
But if Death and his own are destroyed, why not the Beast and the False Prophet in like manner? How are they immortal without their worshipers — either singly, or in endless succession? All are alike symbolical personages, and all must share the fate of those who constitute them. All argument from their nature shows that if Death and Hades cease to be, so likewise do the Beast and the False Prophet. Of the party of Satan, — the Gog and Magog destroyed by fire as the prelude of these final judgments, — it may’ be even doubted whether they appear at all in the resurrection; it is more natural to suppose that after their summary judgment, that of Satan, not a symbolical personage, along with that of the Beast and the False Prophet, remained yet to be described.
But why are they said to be “tormented, day and night, for ever and ever?” This might be said of the Beast and the False Prophet as impersonations, henceforth without power or worshipers. Compare what is said of Babylon, chapter 18:7, 8, 19. But w e think the language describes their utter and irrevocable destruction, in a dramatic form which is quite consistent with the general structure of the book, and of which dramatism we have already found so many examples. To those before cited, we will only add here the language of taunting and insult addressed by the dead to the fallen Babylon, in Isaiah 14: 9, 10, 12: “Hades from beneath is moved because of thee for to meet thee at thy coming; he rouses for thee the mighty dead, all the great chiefs of the earth; he makes to rise up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All of them shall accost thee, and shall say unto thee: Art thou, even thou too, become weak as we? Art thou made like unto us? How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! Art cut down to the earth thou that didst subdue the nations!” (Lowth’s translation.) And Ecclesiasticus. 21: 10, 11: “The congregation of sinners is like tow heaped together; and the end of them is a flame of fire. The way of sinners is made plain with stones; and in their end is hell, and darkness, and pains.”
But will Satan actually cease from being? Is he indeed mortal? The prophecies all look that way. Our translators have indeed dealt somewhat tenderly with the great Adversary, in Genesis 3: 15, where the true sense is that the Seed of the woman shall crush the head of the Serpent. The words in Hebrews 2: 14, and 1 John 3: 8, express indeed the dispossession of Satan, rather than his final destruction. But that doom, in common with the destruction of every power hostile to God, is told in Daniel: “I beheld then because of the voice of the great words which the horn spake; I beheld even till the Beast was slain, and his body destroyed, and given to the burning flame. As concerning the rest of the Beasts, they had their dominion taken away; yet their lives were prolonged for a season and a time” (7:11, 12). See also Matthew 25: 41, and pp. 202,-sq.
5. CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.
The now prevalent doctrine of immortality has been sup- ported recently in an indirect scriptural argument. If it was a prevalent error of the Jews in Christ’s time, why, it is asked, did he not expose it by direct and explicit asseveration? Was it not a culpable and enormous neglect, if the Great Teacher failed to point out and condemn so fearful a delusion? Could he for a moment allow his hearers to indulge the persuasion, of an absolute immortality, or to feel the terror of an eternal misery, if cither doctrine were totally false?
Our reply is three-fold.
1. From the hook of Enoch. The following passages have been cited; “Moreover, abundant is their suffering until the time of the great judgment, the castigation, and the torment of those who eternally execrate, whose souls are punished and bound there forever.
A receptacle of this sort has been formed for the souls of unrighteous men and of sinners; of those who have committed crime, and associated with the impious whom they resemble. Their souls shall not be annihilated in the day of judgment, neither shall they arise from this place” (22:12, 14). “Never shall they obtain mercy, said the Lord of spirits” (39:2). “The countenances likewise of the mighty shall He cast down, filling them with confusion. Darkness shall be their habitation, and worms their bed; nor from that bed shall they hope to be again raised, because they exalted not the name of the Lord of spirits” (46:4). “But has it not been shown to them, that, when to the receptacle of the dead their souls shall be made to descend, their evil deeds shall become their greatest torment? Into darkness, into the snare, and into flame which shall burn to the great judgment, shall their spirits enter; and the great judgment shall take effect forever and ever” (103: 5).
Two questions are here to be settled:
33. Do these passages decide the doctrine of the book?
34. If so, do they determine the doctrine of the Jews?
We think neither. For, in the first place, the book is as silent respecting immortality as the Scriptures themselves. The citations before made also show that some of the above expressions may denote the eternity of effect. Moreover the style of the book is highly dramatic. Thus in the last chapter the righteous and the wicked are set in contrast, and it is said “sinners shall cry out, beholding them” (105: 27), though it was said in verse 21: “You, who have laboured, shall w ait in those days, until the evil doers be consumed, and the power of the guilty be annihilated. Wait, until sin pass away; for their names shall be blotted out of the holy books; their seed shall be destroyed, and their spirits slain.” And the expression: “their souls shall not be annihilated in the day of judgment,” does not necessarily imply that they will never be annihilated.
It should be compared with the following passages: “They shall be brought from every part of the earth, and be cast into a judgment of fire. They shall perish in wrath, and by a judgment overpowering them forever. Then shall the roots of iniquity be cut off; sinners shall perish by the sword; and blasphemers be annihilated everywhere. All who walk in the path of iniquity shall perish forever” (90:11, 13, 17). “And to this were brought the blind sheep; which being judged, and found guilty, were all thrust into that abyss of fire on the earth, and burnt” (89:35). “When all shall be punished and consumed forever, this shall be bestowed on the righteous and humble” (24:9). “Our spirits have been consumed, lessened, and diminished” (103:7; compare Isaiah 14:9, sq.). On the other hand it is said of the righteous: “None shall perish in the presence of the Lord of spirits, nor shall any be capable of perishing” (60:7). “ The saints shall exist in the light of the sun, and the elect in the light of everlasting life, the days of whose life shall never terminate; nor shall the days of the saints be numbered, who seek for light, and obtain righteousness with the Lord of spirits” (56:3). “These however die and perish. But you from the beginning were made spiritual, possessing a life which is eternal, and not subject to death for ever” (15:4, 6).
In the second place, respecting the value of the book as denoting prevalent opinions, it is clearly not the work of a Christian Jew, as has been supposed. It contains no allusion whatever to the redemptive work of Christ; and it has been well remarked: “The Christological portions do not possess sufficient distinctness to imply a knowledge of the New Testament. The name Jesus never occurs; though Son of Man, so often given to the Messiah in the Gospels, is very frequent. Neither are the appellations Lord, Lord Jesus, Jesus Christ, or even Christ employed. Is there not something unaccountable here on the supposition that the writer was instructed in Christianity?” It has, then, no Christian authority. And, though evidently written by a Jew, the lime and place of its composition are matters of dispute. It is doubted whether it was written during the reign of Herod, or earlier; but though alluded to in the “Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” about A. D. 100, and by several of the Fathers, it is not noticed by Philo or Josephus.
It is doubted whether its author lived in the northern part of Palestine, in the northern districts of the Caspian and Euxine seas, in Chaldea, in Egypt, or in Abyssinia; whether it was written by one person, or compiled from various tracts; whether it was quoted by Jude, or suggested by Jude’s citation of a tradition from Enoch. And finally, if it were an index of Jewish opinions, it would indicate no less clearly the foreign origin of any opinion that could be of use in this discussion. One writer pronounces it the work of a Jew because “there is so much imitation of Daniel, such an exhibition of Jewish conceptions mixed with superstition, and occasionally with cabalistic theology or oriental theosophy.” And, debating the place of its author, the same writer says: “It is true that there are allusions to the Oriental theosophy and the opinions of Zoroaster which would appear to recommend a Chaldean origin, at least of the astronomical part; but the author’s predilection for the images of fire radiance light, and other Oriental symbols, may be accounted for on some other supposition than that of his residence in Chaldea.
In what way he became acquainted with the Zend-Avesta, or the sentiments embodied in that book, we are not able to tell, although it is pretty obvious that various portions of his book are tinctured with the Oriental philosophy of Middle Asia.”
4. From the book of Judith, a single passage has been cited to prove Jewish opinions: “The Lord Almighty will take vengeance on them in the day of judgment, in putting fire and worms in their flesh; they shall feel them, and weep for ever.” We welcome this argument as a last resort to show that conscious misery is described in any book pretending to keep canonical company. Assuredly, if such a passage is to sustain the momentous doctrine, the character of the book and the best versions of it should share the burden. But the book is, perhaps, of less value than any other in the Jewish Apocrypha. It is not named by Philo or Josephus. Good critics differ by two centuries respecting its date; one assigning it to B. C. 104, and another to about A. D. 100. It is not even a respectable fiction.
“The difficulties, historical, chronological, and geographical, comprised in the narrative of Judith, are so numerous and serious as to be held by many divines altogether insuperable. Events, times, and manners are said to be confounded, and the chronology of the times before and those after the exile, of the Persian and Assyrian, and even of the Maccabaean period, confusedly and unaccountably blended.”
But why should we disparage the book? “We wish, for the sake of our argument, that it were canonical; that is, the book itself, and not the modern version of it. The conjecture of Arnald in his commentary, that the original Greek — for Hebrew there is none — (shall weep) has been mistaken, is supported by the Vulgate of Jerome which reads urantur (may be burned), by a still older Latin version” which reads may be burned up, and by the Syriac, which, it has been remarked, indicates the inferiority of the manuscripts now extant. The sense of the passage would then be: “that with pain they may be consumed forever.”
35. The doctrines of the Pharisees are cited to show that the Jews commonly held an immortality which Christ did not explicitly deny. To this we reply:
(1.) The influence of the Pharisees on the opinions of the common people was more apparent than real. It was indeed powerful, but it was so connected with the arts of imposture and fraud, that they often overreached themselves, and lost the popular regard. The very conception of Pharisaism was such as must expose its professors to frequent contempt, as they did suffer the severest denunciations of Christ. It began in the ambition of name and influence, which is sure to grasp the shadow and lose the substance. “They bear their chief characteristics,” says one, “in their name, which, from a word denoting ‘to separate,’ marks them out as the elite of Hebrew society, the men of note and distinction, whose motto, in the words of Horace, might have been different, or, in the accurately descriptive terms of Jesus, they trusted in themselves, and despised others’ (Luke 18: 9); men of whose character notice is found in the Bible as early as the days of Isaiah (65:5; 66:17).
This, which was the fundamental quality of the Pharisees, and which, setting them forth as per- sons of extraordinary parts, superior intelligence, possessed of a higher knowledge, a lofty and satisfactory method of interpreting the sacred writings, a transcendental philosophy which, despising common sense as a tame, vulgar thing, could solve all questions, and expound hitherto unknown truths, — made them “the observed of all observers,’ the oracles of the day, the only true interpreters of Judaism.” “Like cunning priests and Jesuits,” says another, “they prayed with forms and phrases, they seized a place in the hearts and consciences of men, corrupted them even by means of pious instruction, led them whither they would have them go, acquired many a fair prize, and became rulers of an earthly kingdom of darkness.”
Josephus, who was himself a Pharisee, says that they “were able to make great opposition to kings; a cunning sect they were, and soon elevated to a pitch of open fighting and doing mischief.” And he gives instances of their frauds and pretended prophecies, practised to compass their designs. Now when we consider their oppressions and extortions, with the weak foundation of traditions on which they rested their authority, and their fanciful methods of interpretation, we may suspect that the common people yielded a deference often feigned, and more in fear than in faith. May we not infer as much from the language of Josephus: “The Sadducees are able to persuade none but the rich, and have not the populace obsequious to them; but the Pharisees have the multitude on their side”? — and of Mark, who says, in close connection with Christ’s denunciation of the scribes: “The common people heard him gladly”? (12: 37.)
But we are not left to conjecture in what estimation the Pharisees were held. The hatred of them was proverbial. They are thus censured by the Talmudists: “Among the plagues that come of the Pharisees, is this: A person conspires with orphans, to plunder the widow.
When Rabbi Shabbatai had spoiled a certain widow of her goods, the orphans came to Kabbi Eleazer, who said to them: What business with us? You are foolish not to tell this to the scribe. So the Rabbi. But the scribe says: Pretend that you are going to sell your goods; when the widow sees it, she will ask a stipend, and lose her living. They did so. In the evening that poor woman went to R. Eleazer, who said of her: The plague of the Pharisees has come upon her.”
Another proverb occurs in the same Jewish book: “A Pharisee woman, and the scraping of the Pharisees on the stones, ruin the world.” The“ scraping of the Pharisees “ is an allusion to one of the seven sects into which the Talmud divides the Pharisees, the names of which will show that they were no more hated than contemned. These were,
Lightfoot, remarking upon these sects, says that, granting the better sort of them came to John’s baptism, the best of the Pharisees were the worst of men. And Calmet remarks that this account shows them to have been deeply immersed in the idlest and most ridiculous superstitions. But this condemnation of them was written only about two centuries after Christ’s time, in a work that remains as the oracle of Jewish opinion.
We conclude that the influence of the Pharisees was the common influence of hierarchies. The reputation of expounders in orthodoxy was industriously kept up, and the empty name has continued. Those of the people who thought at all, thought for themselves.
(3.) Christ himself denounced not only the practices, but the doctrine of the Pharisees. And the whole account of them in the New Testament shows that though they may have been learned or subtle, they were in no sense wise. John the Baptist hails them with the language of surprise: “O generation of vipers! Who hath taught you to flee from the wrath to come?” And the scriptural catalogue of their vices has been fairly made out by a late writer in about fifteen charges, either of which might justify the exhortation of Christ to “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.” And when Christ enjoined respect for the scribes, as sitting in Moses’ seat, the proof is wanting, either that the scribes were responsible for all the opinions of the Pharisees, or that if they were, the people were therefore to accept their theological opinions as correct. Nor do the instances in which Christ and Paul took sides with the Pharisees against the Sadducees show any farther sanction of their views than in these two points: the existence of spirits, and the resurrection of the dead. We need not be surprised, then, when we find that the reputation of the Pharisees among the Christians was no better than among their own people. By several of the Fathers they were reckoned as heretics; for another error, indeed, viz. the denial of man’s free will, in a Stoic doctrine of fate; yet the fact shows that the early Christians never regarded them as of standard orthodoxy.
(2.) The Pharisaic doctrine of immortality (which we here admit simply for argument’s sake, resting as it does wholly on the testimony of Josephus, of whom hereafter) was evidently of foreign origin, of a philosophic cast, and, so to speak, un-Jewish. The account given by Josephus is in a nomenclature to which the Jews had been strangers, which is unknown to the Talmud, but with which the Greeks and Orientals were quite familiar. Something here may be allowed for the private opinions and trimming habits of Josephus; but it has been observed that his statement of Pharisaic doctrine might be mistaken for that of transmigration; and his dissuasive from suicide is quite Platonic: “The bodies of all men are corruptible, and are created out of corruptible matter; but the soul is ever immortal, and is a portion of the divinity that inhabits our bodies.”
And the writer already cited, speaking of the Pharisees, says: “It is evident that the popular faith of the Jews had to a certain point adopted the dualism of the Parsees, which was made subordinate to the Mosaic monotheism.” And again: “ It would appear that Rabbinism was but an unfolding of Pharisaism, the full and swelling stream of corrupt doctrines, views, and practices, of which the rivulets run up to the days of Christ, and stretch back to those of Ezra, till they are lost in the fountain-head — the religious philosophy of a corrupt Zoroasterism.” And he concludes:
“It is to unite the hawk and the dove, to bring into one darkness and light, to expect figs from thistles, if we will persist in maintaining that Jesus and the Pharisees had any essential and peculiar features in common — we say essential and peculiar features, because such only are of any value in the argument; since even the Pharisees, as men and monotheists, doubtless had some good traits, and possessed some scattered rays of truth “
III. But for still another reason Christ did not sanction the doctrine in question by his silence respecting it. It was not his custom to oppose particular errors by explicit mention and condemnation. For the method of the Great Teacher was:
102. To inculcate general principles, rather than special precepts. Of this the Sermon on the Mount is an example, as also his teaching by parables which were sometimes explained, not to the public ear, but to the disciples alone. And there are abundant proofs of this, in the variant applications that have been made of the principles which Christ has laid down.
103. He taught by affirmation, rather than denial. The Gospel was not a negation, but a Revelation. He came “not to destroy, but to fulfil,” in this sense also, — that he removed errors not by the special refutation and demolition of them, but by offering truth in their stead. And the children of wisdom have ever done this. The successful reformer has ever laboured first and most to proclaim some great truth of which his heart was full. Thus have deep-seated evils been best removed. In this respect Christ and the Apostles were model reformers.
Christ undermined the foundations of the kingdom of Might, which had imposed an oppressive tyranny upon the Jews, by asserting another principle, and a higher law. He told of a kingdom of Truth, and bade men “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s — and to God the things that are God’s.” And Paul struck at the root of a prevalent system of slavery, by saying: “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven.” But the same argument now offered to show that Christ recognized man’s proper immortality, might be offered, and is employed, to show that tyranny and oppression are right. And,
104. Christ dealt not with the theories of men, but with their conduct. He was a practical teacher. He rarely, if ever, spoke of what we should call doctrinal errors. And when he uttered his warning against the “doctrine” of the Pharisees and Sadducees, he did not mean their false systems of philosophy, but their bad instructions. The pernicious leaven was the making void the law of God by the traditions of men, and the thousand other corruptions and perversions by which they sought to do away the weighty duties of justice, mercy, and truth. The rational forms of doctrine are important in their place; but Christ never gave them the prominence they hold in that doctrinalism which is itself a perversion. The “sound doctrine” which he taught was the healthy instruction (Titus 1: 9) of the Great Physician, come to recover men from death, and teach them in the ways of life.
Through the grave did Christ “show the path of life.” The effect of his doctrine of life upon the early language of the Christians, before it was corrupted by the mixture of foreign views, will appear when we come to the history of their time. The immediate effect of his teaching is remarkably apparent in the earliest and most valued version of the Word of Life, — the Syriac, in which the very names of the Saviour and of his saving work are the “Life-Giver,” and the “giving of life.” We may conclude this argument with a few examples, taken almost at random from Dr. Murdock’s translation. “I did not come to judge the world, but to vivify the world” (John 12:47). “Believe on the name of our Lord Jesus Messiah, and thou wilt have life” (Acts 16:31). “It is for your consolation and for your life that we are afflicted” (2 Corinthians 1:6). “Our concern is from heaven; and from thence we expect our Vivifier, our Lord Jesus Messiah” (Philippians 3:20). God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to the acquisition of life” (1 Thessalonians 5:9). “Jesus the Messiah came into the world to give life to sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). “And he is able to vivify for ever them who come to God by him” (Hebrews 7:25). “There is one Lawgiver and Judge, who can make alive, and can destroy” (James 4:12). “That ye may receive the recompense of your faith, the life of your souls” (1 Peter 1: 9). “Grace and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus the Messiah our Life-giver” (Titus 1: 4).
THE RATIONAL ARGUMENT.
“The truth sooner emerges from error than from confusion.” — Bacon.
1. THE METAPHYSICAL ARGUMENT.
The attempt to prove the soul immortal from its very nature is supposed to be so generally abandoned as worthy only of the Schoolmen, that an examination of it in any form may seem gratuitous or invidious. We shall examine it, nevertheless, for three reasons: 1st, because the subtlety of this argument often attracts the most acute minds; 2dly, because its traditional force in the community is not yet spent; 3dly, a fair view of the subject may correct the errors produced by reaction.
Augustine, shortly before his conversion to Christianity, wrote a book of sixteen reasons for the proper immortality of the soul. Among them are the following: The soul is a subject of knowledge, which is ever the same; and of reason, which changes not. As from body cannot be taken away that by which it is body, so neither from mind that by which it is mind. The soul is life; hence it cannot want life. No essence is contrary to the truth, whereby the mind is what it is.
We are not surprised that in his “Retractation“ the more sober and practical Augustine should speak of this book as obscure and perplexed, so that he himself could scarcely comprehend it; but we are surprised that he did not wholly abandon and condemn the entire argument. We can explain this fact only by adverting to the original arguments which still pleased many converted philosophers as much as they had been admired by Cicero. Here is one of them, from the Pheedo: “Does the soul always bring life to whatever it occupies? Indeed it does.
Is there, now, anything contrary to life, or not? There is, — death. But the soul will never admit the contrary of that which it brings with it, as has already been allowed. Most assuredly. Be it so; but what do we call that which does not admit death? Immortal.” The argument is as good as if one should say a given wheel will ever exist because it is essentially round. It is the nature of a thing to be what it is. And so things are eternized by their definitions.
We may excuse such puerilities because they were indulged beyond the dark ages, on which, perhaps, they throw some light. But what shall we say if we find the old sophism, — that, since motion must be either where a thing is or where it is not, therefore nothing can move, — revamped on our side of the dark ages to show that the soul cannot die? Yet this is done, in a book lately very famous, thus: “The power which is supposed to reduce the soul to a point of annihilation, must either exist in this given point, or it must not; if it exist, we have not yet arrived at that point which describes a nonentity; and where nonentity is not, annihilation can never be. And if it exist in this point, the soul can never be annihilated by its influence; and in either case the soul is immortal.” Again we are told: “If the soul be annihilated, it must be either by something which is in existence, or by something which is not. But that which is in existence can never produce what is physically contrary to itself, and that which has no existence can never act.” So there can be, perhaps, no physical pain. And again: “That which produces a nonentity is not power, but nothing.” Wherefore the Creator should take heed not to reduce an atom to nonentity, lest He should prove himself to be nothing.
Descending from these metaphysic clouds, we meet the more common argument from the un-compounded nature of the soul. It is a simple substance, not subject to disintegration, indivisible. This hope of an afterlife is as old as Socrates and Cicero, who should be welcome to it in so far it gave them comfort. Later criticism makes appeal to the most obstinate dogmatist, whether the proof of the continued existence of the soul after death derived from the simplicity of its substance has ever been able to pass beyond the limits of the schools, to penetrate the public mind, or to exercise the slightest influence on its convictions.” “With a brighter light to illuminate the unseen world, we can afford to recognize that this argument would also prove the atom indestructible, and creation, as well as un-creation, impossible.
Not only is the argument worthless; the fact of the soul’s un- compounded nature is not proven, perhaps cannot be. Immaterial substance may be organic, according to some law of spiritual being. All analogies look that way. The endlessly varied operations of the mind show a structure marvellously complex. If it be a homogeneous substance, its constitution is wonderfully intricate. If without parts, it is exquisite framed in the harmony of its faculties. Though it cannot be weighed by ounces or measured by inches, it may yet be really greater or less in its quantity of being; how else, regarding the soul as a pure entelechy, shall we avoid the common notion that all souls are originally alike, of equal capacity and power? How shall we explain the different tempers or the acquired habits of human mind? Are we sure men’s natures do not modify their very being? If the soul cannot be disintegrated, it may be deranged; and while this derangement lies deeper than our anatomy or chemistry, it may be no less a symptom of decay, a prelude of final dissolution. Without annihilation of sub- stance the soul may perish from being. There may be immaterial substance unwrought into personal or individual being.
Our theory of the soul’s nature will of course affect our view of its origin. Is it given to the body by an immediate creation, or by delegated power? Is the human species reproductive of its kind, no less than the brute? Is not the dignity of man’s nature concerned here?
We have partly anticipated the argument from the immaterial nature of the soul. The fact we readily admit, but granting even that spiritual substance is un-compounded and cannot be dissolved, it may yet be annihilated by the same power that created it. And we have already seen how the argument proves too much, so that, to save the dishonour of too much company in our immortality, some would have us call the brute soul imperishable but not immortal. Some men of large heart allow the conclusion to which the argument leads, and welcome all living creatures to immortal life. Bishop Butler accepts the inference, meeting the prejudice that may threaten our dignity with the remark that “the natural immortality of brutes does not in the least imply that they are endowed with any latent capacities of a rational or moral nature.” It is better to waive the entire argument, with a careful writer, who says: “As to the pretended demonstration of immortality drawn from the assumed simplicity and indestructibility of the soul as an immaterial substance, they appear altogether inconclusive; or, if conclusive, then such as must be admitted to apply, with scarcely diminished force, to all sentient orders; audit must be granted that whatever has felt and acted spontaneously must live again and forever.”
It is here worthy of notice that in the New Testament a distinction is sometimes made between the regenerate and the unregenerate, as if the former possessed soul and spirit, and the latter, soul only. Thus Jude speaks of a certain class of men as phsychical, not having spirit (verse 19), Christ speaks of that which is born of the flesh as flesh, and that which is born of the spirit as spirit (John 3:6). Paul calls the present body psychical, and the immortal body spiritual (1 Corinthians 15:44, 45). And writing to the Thessalonians he desires that their “whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ“ (1 Thessalonians 5:23).
In these and other passages the term “spirit” seems to denote more than temper or disposition. It is as if something, either substance or quality, were added to the being of those who are born of God, so that they are said to be born of an incorruptible seed (1 Peter 1:23; 1 John 3:9) and to be “made partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), while others are compared to irrational animals that shall utterly perish in their own corruption (2 Peter 2:12). Speculate as we may about the nature of this difference, we need not be surprised to find that the early Christians made much account of it in their hope of immortality. And Irenaius goes so far as to say that by the spirit the man becomes spiritual and complete; without this the soul and body are an incomplete man; such persons are called “flesh and blood,” and it is said of them, “let the dead bury their dead,” because they have not the spirit which vivifies the man; — but those who have this are “justly called men, pure, spiritual, living unto God.” This distinction is recognized but misapplied by modern philosophers, who say that man differs from the brute in having a spirit in addition to soul and body, and who assume that all men have spirit and are immortal.
2. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ARGUMENT.
Of this there are two forms: 1st, that founded on the conceptions of the pure reason and the elements of human personality; 2d, that derived from the manifold operations of the under- standing.
1. By the conceptions of pure reason we mean the ideas of time and space, the finite and the infinite, the beautiful, the true and the good, the right and the wrong, and other categories or primary modes of thought. Since these are of the soul’s very- nature and constitution, the argument from them is analogous to the higher metaphysical. It may be stated thus: How can the finite soul conceive of the infinite, the absolute, or the universal, unless it be itself of their nature, — a concrete personal expression of them, resembling their changeless permanence in its own immortality? Plato regards these ideas or primal forms and archetypes as real things, and proposes the argument thus: “There is a certain abstract beauty and goodness and magnitude; and so of all other things; which if you grant me, and allow that they do exist, I hope that I shall be able from these to explain the cause to you, and to discover that the soul is immortal.” It is stated by a late writer thus: “The understanding in man is differenced from the corresponding power in the brute, by its union with the spiritual, the supernatural, the universal reason. It has behind it, as it were, as that in which it is grounded, and from which it receives the inward life of its life, and which constitutes its true and very being, — the universal life and reason. You would say that it (the principle of personality) is essentially immortal; or that the form of intelligence and will which constitutes the proper being of humanity in each individual, is so pre-conformed to, and so partakes of, the universal and spiritual, as to be, in its own right, placed in antithesis to the ever becoming and continually evanescent phenomena of nature, and to have a principle that is abiding and one with itself.”
The last expression is so suggestive of the language of Scripture respecting “those things that are shaken, as things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain,” and respecting the spiritual as that “which lives and abides forever,” that we are surprised when so devout a writer says of the opinion that the soul becomes immortal by regeneration, “it seems to me that this contradicts philosophy no less than revelation.”
We were prepared rather to hear what the Platonists and the Fathers have finely said, that “God is the life of the soul, as the soul is the life of the body,” with the natural inference that when the soul forsakes God, its very life is forfeit. Disappointed of this, we must remark that the argument just as much proves the soul’s absolute eternity as its indefeasible immortality. And if it proves the spiritual nature of the unregenerate, it may be made to involve the immortality of brutes. For the instinct of the brute soul is an action not only according to the proper nature of the brute, but often according to higher laws, as absolute and eternal as any of the ideas conceived by the rational soul. The bee constructs its cell according to the very same principles of isoperimetric laws and of the strength of materials which the severe studies of a Euclid and a Newton have demonstrated. And we may not contemptuously say that the instinct of the brute is without thought; it outstrips thought, and may be better, as intuition is better than discursive reasoning. The most profound insight of man is often unable to justify itself by a reason — unconscious — inspired. Instinct is a species of inspiration; if not from God, yet from the laws which He regards; which pervade, if they do not constitute, the very being of the brute instinct, — “the life of its life.” The brute differs most from man in the defect of free will; which is not a defect compared with man’s abuse of it, nor half so good a reason why a creature should die.
We think it better therefore to leave this argument, which is obviously somewhat Gnostic, to the ancients who may have needed it while the actual life of man furnished the most slender material for the more valid argument from the right use of the “ideas.” The argument from man’s personality is thus relinquished by Dr. Muller, in a review of the doctrine we hold: “By the mere analysis of the conception of personality is the conviction of the immortality of the personal being not to be gained. But if these efforts of philosophy must remain gratuitous, it may nevertheless, in so far as it builds itself up on the principles assumed in Christianity, attain to an ever more full and clear knowledge of the great and real connection of the world, in which the immortality of the personal Creator has its fixed place; wherewith the conviction of this [human] immortality also gains an ever increasing philosophic evidence.” Upon which it is well remarked: “In these words is expressed in the most striking manner the difference between a truly philosophic doctrine of immortality, which must be also the truly Christian, and the rationalist doctrine now current among the great multitude of those who call themselves thinkers.”
2. The argument from the manifoldness of human thought, or from man’s boundless capacity of knowledge, is worthless unless we assume that knowledge is the highest good. If it be a means to an end, then the marvellous capacities of human intellect are indeed a weighty argument for a high end and des- tiny whenever they are employed aright. But if they are abused, perverted, squandered, their loss in the loss of being may be a just retribution. “Though one speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not love, he is nothing.” Intellect is to virtue what form is to substance; and the empty form of humanity, however splendid, is worthless to itself and to the world. Will God’s commonwealth be made less rich by the perishing of a glittering casket that yields no jewel?
3. THE MORAL ARGUMENT.
This is of two kinds: 1st, that from man’s capacity and desire of eternal happiness; 2d, that from his aspirations for virtue, or for being worthy of eternal happiness.
1. A mere wish for happiness may be disappointed. The world is full of ungratified desires and blasted hopes. Few gain the pleasures, the wealth, or the honours which they seek. Here all is vanity and empty effort. Will it be said that God often disappoints the earthly hope that He may quicken and gratify a heavenly? Doubtless; but this is a divine gratuity, not a human right; the special grace proves no general law. And multitudes seem to desire an endless pleasure with no thought of anything better than pleasure; they love it even more than they love God, for no better reason than the brute dreads pain and hungers for enjoyment. The desire may be more refined than that of the dumb animal; yet it is only aesthetic, never moral; and its grasp after infinity may have swallowed up the other capacities of the soul into its monstrous disproportion. It is the old prayer: “Let me die the death of the righteous,” offered by one who scorned the just conditions of felicity. It is the lust, or inordinate desire, which is forbidden in the last precept of the Decalogue because it tempts to the infraction of every other precept; which we are told has brought corruption into the world; which brings forth sin, the mother of death.
2. That which is indeed the moral argument for an afterlife is thus stated by John Howe: “Nothing can be more unconceivable than that the great Creator and Author of all things should frame a creature of so vast a comprehension as the spirit of man, put into it a capacity of knowing and conversing with Himself, give it some prospect of His own glory and blessedness, raise thereby, in many, boundless unsatisfied desires after Him, and inexpressible pleasure in the preconceived hope of being received into the communion of that glory and blessedness, — and yet defeat and blast so great an expectation by the unsuspected reduction of the very subject of it again to nothing.”
This argument we deem valid because we cannot conceive of God as kindling most noble desires that shall be unfed, and shall prey upon the soul to consume it. For all lawless and morbid cravings man is responsible; but the aspiration after virtue and holiness is God’s foster child, which He cannot leave to perish. As He is faithful and true, He will not frustrate the hopes which He has inspired. He will not tantalize the desires which, by the law of our moral being, by an approving con- science, and by the displays of His own goodness and glory, He has encouraged. Here the scriptural statement may be taken as the promise of man’s best and truest nature: “To those who by patient continuance in well-doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, — eternal life.”
But upon the very face of it this argument only proves the immortality of the good. Because it turns on moral character, and not on a physical nature of things, it even demands a divine power to immortalize the good and not the bad. Here we may note the confounding of things that differ — more disastrous to the truth than unmixed error — when the virtues of good men are supposed to prove an immortal life of all men. That the bad have no endless being as a demand of justice for their eternal punishment, we think has been already shown.
Here we meet a very important question, — Is immortality necessary to the love and pursuit of virtue? And some have seemed to suppose that duty and morality would be scarcely binding or possible without immortality. Is endless being the debt, or the reward, of virtue? If not, the argument has still to be cleared of matter that may perplex and destroy it. Let us say, then, God could have made a moral being for a hundred years of duty and gladness, dreaming of nothing beyond, to die in a glorious sunset of gratitude. Now that an endless scope of virtue and joy is opened before men, his claim must rest wholly upon God’s fidelity, not upon the merit or the necessities of virtue. True it is, that if the good man who loses this life for Christ’s sake have no hope beyond it, he is “most miserable,” unless virtue is its own reward. “I know not,” says one of the ancients, “how I can account them blessed, that, having never enjoyed any good as the reward of their virtue, have even perished for virtue itself.” Yet the self-sacrificing believer is said to receive an “hundred fold” even in this life; and if his losses were not made up here, in the peace which God gives, his deficit could be settled short of eternity.
The argument thus far shows that eternal life is a gratuity, not a debt. Yet it is bestowed on virtue with the utmost propriety because virtue is the highest good, and nothing else can compete with it for such an honour. It is just that which ought to endure forever. And while the virtuous man can neither demand nor desire endless delight as a reward, he must wish for a boundless scope. He loves not virtue that he may be immortal, but immortality that he may be ever virtuous, bearing the likeness of the Eternal.
4. THE ANALOGICAL ARGUMENT.
Analogy is a resemblance, not of things, but of relations. The foot of a mountain is not like the foot of an animal; nor the end of a street like the end of a day; nor the subversion of a city like the subversion of a scheme or a plan; yet the similar relation in each case suggests the use of the same term. Nearly all tropes and metaphors are founded upon such analogies.
In reply, therefore, to the trite saying that all analogy is against the annihilation of the soul, since all apparent destruction in nature is only a change of form, — there are several things to be said. 1st, the apparent annihilation of the brute soul furnishes no analogy because it is a similar ease. 2dly, until the simplex or un-compounded nature of the soul is proven past all doubt, we may suppose it to be destroyed by derangement and dissolution. 3dly, granting that it can be destroyed only by annihilation, then every case of a thing destroyed by derangement or disintegration is strictly analogous. Not to insist upon the fact that the terms “destruction” and
“annihilation” are often used interchangeably, things are variously destroyed, or put an end to, according to their natures. The methods of destruction are manifold; the practical result is the same; the thing destroyed is no longer what it was, but, as such a thing, has ceased to be. And in relation to this result every mode of destruction is analogous to every other mode.
But the argument from analogy reaches farther than the meaning of words. All things are in fact destroyed, that have either accomplished a temporary purpose, or have failed of their proper design. A large part of the visible world is thus decaying. Many things exist only to be consumed, and are of use only as they perish. Many things are worn away by use and are gone. Many things are abortive and come to nought. Thus the fashion of the world passes away.
Among living things we find striking analogies for the immortality of a class of the human species. The vegetable and animal world teems with the germs of life, of which a part only are matured. Every individual acorn is adapted to produce a mighty oak; yet most acorns are consumed as food; many decay as they fall; a few find root and germinate; these are decimated in their turn, and a few only grow up to be the strength and glory of their species. And the same law holds good in all kinds both of vegetable and animal life, the difference being only in the ratio of the whole number of germs to those that are matured, and in the stage of progress at which the decimation and destruction takes place.
But if we were to judge of the destiny of the acorn by its adaptations, we should say that the creative purpose will be frustrated, and the earth defrauded, if it does not become an oak. If we count the myriads that perish, we should say that God had overdone his work, and his skill and power are wasted. We must qualify the common remark that nothing is created in vain. What has been called the law of the divine parsimony seems to be overruled by a higher law of the divine bounty. The seeds of varied life are sown broadcast, by winds and waves and all moving things, so that no place may lack in whatever it run produce. The lavish abundance ensures the munificent designs of God and therefore is not in vain.
Now in Christ’s parable of the Sower (Matthew 13: 3-23) this analogy is applied to the destinies of the human species. The seeds that fall by the wayside, or in stony places, or among thorns, are made to illustrate the end of various classes of men. Those who fail of eternal life may seem to have been created in vain; but the purpose of the race is accomplished in those who bring the fruit of the divine word to maturity. And here we find ourselves confronted with what may be called the cosmic argument for the immortality of the good alone; i.e. the argument from the economy of the world, which the ablest of the School- men has unwittingly expressed thus: “Nothing forbids that a portion, either of angels or of men, should perish for ever; because the purpose of the divine mind is accomplished in those who are saved.”
But here we meet the objection that the soul of man is of special worth and may warrant an exception to the general rule; that all should be saved. We reply, a true analogy would make the probation of mankind not an exception to the rule, but the highest example of it. The law of selection in the case of man is different; the end is the same. The vegetable life ling is the sport of chance. The animal, with its spontaneity, can help and provide for itself; subject, however, to many dangers which it cannot avert, and to man’s dominion. Man, by his free will, is elevated to a higher rank, — beyond the reach of fate, but not of hazard. Indeed, the nations of men that have not heard the Word of Life are scarcely beyond the reach of fate, though strictly, as moral beings, they are salvable, and perish through unbelief in Him who is “not far from every one of them.” Those who dwell in Christendom stand higher than they, and may fall farther. Yet the design of the species is accomplished in those who are perfected, and who shall never perish, because moral perfectness is an end in itself, and when attained, may be ever maintained. Man, as a race, is still subject to the sifting analogies that underlie him. As free, he is called upon to choose for himself, to make his calling and election sure, to acquit himself as a man. Failing of this, he is rejected, or reprobate, as refuse and worthless. He is likened to tares, to the useless produce of the fisher’s net, to the field of briers and thorns, whose end is to be burned. Condemned as morally unworthy, his reprobation has a higher ethical significance, while its literal import remains.
And what we have just said of the sifting of the human race suggests some considerations respecting the differences in men’s privileges and opportunities, and the great difficulties and hard- ships through which many must escape death and attain life. If man is created absolutely immortal, subject to the alternative of eternal happiness or eternal misery, he seems to have hardly a fair trial here; we should suppose that instead of being exposed to any dangerous temptations, the Heavenly Father would have furnished every motive to virtue, and would have allowed no motive to sin; and we need not wonder if such fair trial for so fearful an alternative is sought in some pre-existent state.
But if we suppose that man is put on probation, not to escape an infinite evil, but to attain an infinite good, then the difficulties that beset his course are justified at once; the greatest variety of conditions among men, encouraging or disheartening them in striving for a most glorious prize, do not at all impugn God’s justice, or denote any departure from the principles of honour and right; they only mark the distinctions of divine grace. And then all analogy confirms the notion of such an ordeal, since every form of life and growth is a struggle with difficulties, — a war against opposing obstacles. All true life is activity, and activity is effort; it is only in keeping with the scheme of the created world, that the highest blessing should be offered on condition of the highest activity, — the working out of one’s own salvation with fear and trembling, with the contingency of an eternal loss of the offered boon in a proper death.
But a just analogy will sustain not only the fact of a conditional immortality, and the justice of it, but perhaps also a philosophy of it. Here we must distinguish between the rational argument and the rationalistic. The latter seeks proof of an afterlife in a nature of things, and will only accept a known law, which must be either a physical law, or something equivalent. Hence analogies which are not resemblances will not satisfy it. It cannot accept a reason for immortality in lieu of a cause of immortality. But the truly rational argument can do this, in a just faith that the reason and the cause are somehow in God’s providence connected. And the analogies support the faith. As in the animal creation every instinctive impulse to furnish a home, or to provide for a future stage of life, is attended with a corresponding constitutional faculty, so the moral sentiment of an afterlife may, by the law of Christian faith, take hold upon the very essence of the future life.
The transformation of insects not only gives an argument for the resurrection, but the exceptions from the rule support the notion of differences in the nature and results of the resurrection in the human species. An injury inflicted on the chrysalis produces a defect in the future fly; and in many species the greater number of nymphs utterly perish in their own pupae. So an injury done to the moral constitution may render the future life an abortion. The drone bee labours not, passes the summer in idle pleasure, and ought not to hibernate. How shall the “ought” be made fact? The instinct of the tribe destroys the drone. So the stronger and more enterprising nations of men supplant the weaker and idler; and wisdom and virtue are ever mightier than brute force. And though we cannot discover in all these cases by what connecting links the result is brought about, yet the analogy is here and in a hundred other cases complete, indicating that each human soul may live as long and no longer than it should. May we not, then, take the words of the Jewish Platonist in their strict sense, when he explains “tree of life“ as signifying “piety, the greatest of the virtues, by which the soul is rendered immortal“?
It may here be asked whether the soul is naturally mortal or immortal? If nature be absolutely distinguished from three other things, — miracle, judgment, and grace, it may be difficult to answer the question. We may safely say that as man was created for immortality, so that his endless life should come about in the proper course of things, it was as natural as it was proper; and death may be regarded as unnatural, because judgment overrules nature. Yet if the forfeited boon is recovered both by special power and as a special favour, we ought not so to speak of man as naturally immortal as to overlook the important fact of the Redemption, and it will be better to say that man was made for immortality; or, with the early Christians, that his nature is intermediate: or, better still, that he is immortal by grace.
SOUL AND BODY.
“Not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon; that mortality might be swallowed up of life.”
1. MATTER AND MIND.
The prevalence of a materialist philosophy which has frequently attended the doctrine we maintain, and which may be an extreme reaction from the notion that immateriality proves immortality, leads us to inquire what is the real distinction between matter and spirit. Here are involved mysteries of existence, and of time and space, which human reason may not be able to solve, but which may be an appointed discipline of our faculties, and which may show that materialism cannot explain itself.
Can anything act where it does not exist? It is probable that each particle of matter attracts, and thus acts upon, every other atom in the universe. For though the measure of attraction, decreasing in the ratio of the square of the distance, may become indefinitely small, it can never vanish in nothingness. And we cannot well explain attraction by the undulations of an ether diffused throughout space; for such an ether must at every point of space, receive its impulse in as many varying directions or degrees from every existing atom. And if we suppose that the atom acts without such an ether, and acts only where it is present, it follows that each atom is omnipresent. That which has been said, and we think truly, of the Infinite Spirit, is in part true of every monad that He has created, — its centre is somewhere, but its circumference is nowhere!
And to this astounding conclusion the modern and prevailing dynamic theory of matter seems to lead naturally, as any theory must perhaps accept it inevitably. And so far from matter being impenetrable, it is only the centres of ubiquitous atoms that can not interpenetrate; their atmospheres are all and everywhere inter-diffused.
But what follows? Must we turn Pantheists, and render to all the atoms divine honour; or rather abandon worship as wasted upon infinite teeming worlds? By no means. For, granting the ubiquity of the atom, it does not explain a single one of the peculiar properties of mind. We can freely fix our thoughts upon things absent and far distant. This is inexplicable by the law of the atom, which determines its power at such a distance, and makes it the same for all directions. No atom, and no number or configuration of atoms, can explain the retention or the recollection of thoughts by the mind. Nor can they explain the mystery of memory, in that, besides the reproduction of a thought, it gives us the former time of the thought, as though the moment itself re-existed in the mind! Nor can they explain the power of fancy, — the conception of things unreal, with the knowledge that they are unreal. Nor can they explain the power of choice; nor, to the fatalist who calls that unreal, can they explain the marvellous illusion. Atoms and their combinations are being ever changed and lost.
They are bound by the laws of their being, which they never think of disobeying. The ubiquity of all monads, even if we could solve that mystery, would not help us at all in the explanation of thought, feeling, conscience, or any of the phenomena of life. Matter is subject to the laws of time and space, which mind may observe, or may please not to observe. Nay, as the Divine Mind dwells in an Eternal Now, — is not only unchanged by age, but in the absolute sense grows not older; and as God is omnipresent, not by extension, partly here and partly there; so finite, thinking spirits may perhaps dwell in a temporal Now that is longer than a moment; perhaps covering the whole period of their life, explaining the mystery of memory we have suggested; and in a Here that is larger than the personal and bodily presence; not ubiquitous, simply because it is not a thing of space. From facts that have transpired, when persons seemed in an instant to recollect their entire past life and thoughts, which no mere brain could hold, there is reason to believe that no mature thought utterly perishes, except with existence itself. As if the past life of each personal being were unconsciously retained, as is the thick heart of the mighty oak, but which an unknown power may quicken all at once; which transient causes may partly revive; and which, playing occasionally without the consciousness, like the fingers of the musician, may explain some of the phenomena of spiritualism that are now so perplexing.
Our theory of the ubiquity of the atom is not refuted, we think, by the saying that the atom attracts its fellow by a certain ‘power or force. Such power or force is either a thing or a nothing. The distinction of substance and attribute does not meet the difficulty; for attribute is only a modification, quality, or form of substance, and can not exist separated from substance. It inheres in substance; it cannot stand without it.
But, when we compare the qualities of matter with those of mind, (and by their qualities alone can we know anything of either,) we find them, as already stated, wholly different. And we have set forth these marvels of the nature of matter, not to encourage the supposition that it may possess, or may be endowed with, the power of thinking, but for the opposite reason, viz.: to suggest to the materialist that there may be a spiritual substance.
The subtlety of matter in its essence is hardly surpassed by the subtlety that is claimed for spiritual substance. Yet the properties of matter seem fixed by mathematical laws. Given the inner nature of the atom, its qualities may be as strictly deducible as the properties of a circle, or of the sections of the cone; so that the change or addition of a single property would make the atom altogether a new thing. Such change or addition may be as impossible as that the properties of a square or a triangle should be added to those of a circle. A square may be attached to a circle, and have a working connection with it; but each will retain its own properties, will still be its proper self So when a principle of life, or a thinking power, is superadded to matter, it perhaps cannot be strictly a property of it. The vital or thinking principle perhaps must be an added immaterial substance, working upon, and with, and through the material, yet having its own proper and distinct being.
We freely grant, nay, in behalf of materialists whose piety and devoutness is unquestionable, we insist, that speculative materialism is not to be for itself condemned. And we are happy to know that one of our most profound thinkers and cautious writers takes the same view.- But we are also reminded that “ the genuine and fundamental doctrines of Christianity may become liable to the scoffs of some, and to the dread and disregard of others, from their supposed connection with such as are, in fact, no part of the gospel revelation. It then becomes a matter of importance to rectify even those mistakes which are not in themselves of any moment; since we thus (to use the expression of Dr. Paley) ‘relieve Christianity of a weight that sinks it.’” Thus, whether justly or not, it is by many believed that the suggestion made by Locke, that God was able to impart the power of thinking to a material body, gave occasion for the English and French deists to declare man a mere machine, who at death would be completely destroyed. And having ourselves observed that the doctrine we offer is disregarded by many for its supposed connection with materialism, we will add a few suggestions to show that that scheme, besides difficulties of its own, embarrasses the interpretation of the Scriptures.
105. If the human soul or spirit is not an immaterial substance, but perishes with the body, then the wicked will wholly die twice, and the penalty of the law will appear to be executed a second time. This difficulty, with another to be named hereafter, has led many to deny that the “resurrection of the unjust” signifies their being made alive.
106. This view makes the identity of man’s present and future being inexplicable, if not impossible. Of this identity we know of only six possible theories.
(3.) That the particles of the dying body will form the reviving body. This notion has ever given occasion for sceptical cavil. The perishing body may be scattered over the globe. It may fertilize the field and become the food of man, so that the same particles should belong to several of the dead. Many die of obesity or of inanition. Shall the resurrection restore to each person his own body, atom for atom?
Such a theory is not required by reason; for doubtless the particles of the body are all changed many times in a life of three score years and ten, yet the man is the same self. Nor is Revelation responsible for the theory. For the scriptural doctrine is not that of the resurrection of the Body, but rather of the Dead. In a single instance we read of “the redemption of our body,” but this expression does not require the recovery of individual atoms. Very frequently, the graves, and other receptacles of the dead, are spoken of as yielding them up; but we know that no mausoleum or catacomb can long retain all the dust that is committed to it. Such passages seem rather to denote that as Death has humbled us low in the dust, so God shall raise us up, delivering us from his power, and from all his prisons. And in the most full inspired account of the Resurrection, we are expressly told that the present and future bodies are not identical. “How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?
Thou fool! That which thou sows is not quickened except it die; and that which thou sows, thou sows not that body which shall be.” “So also is the resurrection of the dead. There is a sowing in corruption, there is a rising in in-corruption. There is a sowing in dishonour, there is a rising in glory. There is a sowing in weakness, there is a rising in power. There is sown a natural body, there is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.”
(4.) Another theory makes an unchanged organization the basis of identity. It is illustrated by the fact that while the particles of the living body change, as just stated, the organism remains much the same. It is sometimes illustrated by the repair of furniture or machinery, in which the parts may all be changed, and the thing be still
considered the same; also, by the flowing of a river, and the burning of a light. But the theory is defective; since the organization of the future and immortal body will not be the same with that of the dying body. And a partial similarity would only constitute a partial identity; which is, perhaps, absurd.
(3.) It was held by Leibnitz that things exactly similar, so that they cannot be distinguished, are to be taken as identical. This was his principle of non discernibleness. But if two acorns, alike to an atom, lay side by side, they would not be the same. No more so, if they were put successively in the same place. Nor, again, if the first were destroyed, and replaced by the production of the second. The theory is thus false in principle as well as in fact, though sometimes adduced to illustrate the point under discussion.
(5.) “In this alone” says Locke, “ consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being; and as far as consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person.” And again: “Consciousness makes personal identity.” He should have said, consciousness is the witness of our personal identity. It is a concomitant, not a cause. If nothing else makes identity, such a supposed consciousness would be a delusion. Omnipotence could indeed make us think and feel as if we had lived such and such former lives; but that would be an imposture, if we were really other beings. When God shall restore the memory of all things, the accusing or excusing conscience will be a part of our unchanged selves, and not a new creation.
(6.) Another theory is, that the divine power will, in the proper sense, reproduce our being in the Resurrection. “As you might be said to be nothing,” says Tertullian, “before you were in being, to just such a nothing will you return, when you cease to be. Why, then, can you not be recalled from this second nothing, as you think it, by the same Almighty Word which called you from your first. Be pleased, now, if you can, to solve the mode of your creation; and then demand the manner of your resurrection. Whatsoever element has your body in destroying, in abolishing, in annihilating, it shall deliver up the pledge, and return you whole. For pure nothing is as much at the Divine Word, as the whole creation.”
Here the difficulty of an identical re-creation seems to be felt, and the thing destroyed is conceived as still, in some sense, subsisting. It is a “pledge,” and the “second nothing” that holds it is only apparently a nothing. All is referred to the creative power, as if it retained its hold upon the vanished being. The theory comes to this, that the apparently destroyed being still subsists in God, and may be reproduced by Him. We sometimes meet with a similar interpretation of the passage: “For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” And a strict rendering of the words, “In Him we live, and move, and have our being,” might be taken as a statement of the same view.
How our preserved being is a continual creation, and yet not an emanation from God; bow we are dependent, and yet distinct personal beings; in short, bow our philosophy shall meet the demand of consciousness and of conscience, and avoid Pantheism, we need not now decide. But the theory under consideration is either pantheistic, reducing us to rays of being that may be withdrawn into the All-Being, and sent forth again; or it simply asserts the unchanged purpose of God to raise up the dead; that they still bold their place in his plan; that they do not lose their place in his creation.
But the purpose of God can go no further than his power. And if an identical re-creation is not an object of power, — if that which bas been strictly annihilated cannot be replaced by itself, the theory must fail.
(7.) There remains but one theory, the prevalent one which regards the soul as an entity, not destroyed by the death of the body, however dependent it may be on an embodiment for the purposes of active existence. In the doctrine of death which we maintain, this view of man’s nature would lead us to say that the first and second death are the first and second instalments of the debt incurred by sin; the execution of the sentence being divided, in such sort that those who escape the second death are in the New Testament spoken of not as properly dead, but as fallen asleep.
It remains for us to show that this view of man’s constitution is not opposed in the Scriptures, but is rather required by their language.
There are in the Hebrew three words, and in the Greek two, by which that part of man which lives and thinks, is frequently put in contrast with the body. These are nephesh, akin to which is NESHAMAH, to which is nearly equivalent, and which is commonly rendered soul; and ruach, to which is equivalent, commonly rendered spirit. Of nephesh there are various shades of meaning. In connection with the word life, it denotes a living creature, whether man or beast (Genesis 1:20, 21, 2-1: 30; 2:7 (last clause), 19; 9:12, 16).
It is used more abstractly to denote the life, the vital principle, or vitality (Genesis 9:5; 19:17, 19; 32:30; 35:18; 44:30; Exodus 4:19; 21:23). By a natural trope, the blood is some- times called the life (Genesis 9:4; Leviticus 17: 11, 14). The Greek is used in the same sense (Matthew 2:20; 10:39; 16:26; 20:28; Luke 14: 26; Revelation 8: 9).
By a still farther refinement NEPHESH denotes the subject of sensation, or of the bodily appetites and affections (Numbers 21:5; Deuteronomy 12:15, 20, 21; 24:15; Psalms 10:3; in the same sense, in Luke 12:19, 22, 23). It denotes the mind, or the desires, sentiments, affections and passions (Genesis 23:8; Exodus 23:9; Leviticus 26:43; Deuteronomy 6:5, 18:6; 2 Kings 9:15; Proverbs 13:19; in the same sense Matthew 11:29; 22: 37; Acts 14:2; 15:24; 1 Peter 1:22; 2:11, 25). Like the English word, it is often used in the sense of person (Genesis 12: 5; Exodus 1:5; Leviticus 4:2; so the Greek term. Acts 2:41; 3:23). It is used in the sense of self, the proper and responsible being, the personal hypostasis (Genesis 12:13; 49:6; Leviticus 11:43; Numbers 23:10; Psalms 13:2; so the Greek, Luke 1:46; 21:19). In the same sense it is applied to God (Leviticus 26:11; Jeremiah 5:9, 29).
The above are a few examples taken from many. The word NEPHESH is also used in a remarkable sense, which seems to contradict the notion that it refers to the principle of life; for it denotes a dead body in the following passages: Leviticus 19:28; 21:1, 11; 22:4; Numbers 5:2; 6:6, 11; 9:6, 7, 10; 19:13; Haggai 2:13. But the exception may be derived from the rule. As in the other passages the word refers not to the mere body, but to the body as living and animated, so here it may refer to the body as having lived. So our word corpse denotes a body that has lived; as death itself implies a previous life. And there are frequent instances of words denoting precisely opposite ideas, by some association, or by the law of contrast.
Both the Hebrew and Greek terms are derived from words that denote, to breathe; as though the breath were the cause of life. This fact explains the tropical sense of nephesh in the sense of the blood, without which there can be no life. We could not expect that in the infancy of mental science the distinction of soul and body should be very clearly apprehended; and a revelation must be made to man in words that answer to his conceptions of things. To our first parents, therefore, death was most properly described as a return to the dust whence they were taken. Though even here the metonymy of a part for the whole seems to be required; since the breath of life, which completed the being of the man, was not taken from the ground. But in the progress of human thought and of the divine revelation, the notions of soul and body are put in marked contrast.
Thus Isaiah speaks of the destruction of the enemies of Israel, “both soul and body,” i.e., “from the soul even to the flesh.” And Christ speaks of man as able to kill the body, but not the soul (Matthew 10:28; Luke 12:5); where the use of the word life instead of soul explains nothing; for in the death of the body the life is in fact destroyed. Nor will it meet the difficulty to say that man can destroy the life only temporarily, while God can destroy it eternally; for the same is true of the body; and the words of Christ make the distinction, not between the temporary and the eternal, but between the body and the soul. Nor can the word here rendered soul be taken as referring to the future, eternal life of the believer, as when it is said that his “life is hid with Christ in God;” for this sense of the word life is altogether different, as the fact of life and the principle of life are different ideas; and the former is expressed by a special term both in Hebrew and in Greek, where it so often occurs in the phrase “everlasting life.” Even if the soul were absolutely immortal or eternal, it would never be called except by a metaphor.
Neshamah, the Hebrew term akin to nephesh, and commonly denoting breath (Genesis 2:7; 7:22; Job 33:4; et ah), is three times used to denote the principle of intelligence, and is rendered spirit, or soul, in Job 26:4; Proverbs 20:27; Isaiah 57:16. The second of these examples is very similar to 1 Corinthians 2:11.
The distinction of soul and spirit, which we have already remarked as made in the New Testament, hardly appears in the Old. The word spirit, which both in Hebrew and Greek originally denoted wind, though in the Old Testament applied to all living things, is sometimes put in contrast with the body (Numbers 16: 22; Job 32:8, 18; Proverbs 16: 32; 18: 14; Ecclesiastes 3:21; 12:7; Isaiah 57:16; Zechariah 12:1). In the New Testament, where the term spirit is usually applied to the righteous, the contrast appears more strongly (Matthew 26:41; John 3: 6; Romans 1:3, 4; 8:1, 5, 13; 1 Corinthians 2:11; 2 Corinthians 7:1; Galatians 3:3; 5:17; 6:8; Colossians 2: 5; 1 Thessalonians 5:23; Hebrews 12:9; 1 Peter 3:18; 4:6). The most striking passage is that in 1 Corinthians V, 5, where Paul gives direction “to deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.” And the phrase in Hebrews 12:23, — “the spirits of just men made perfect,” — seems to denote the perfecting or glorifying of the departed saints by a termination of their “ unclothed“ state, in their resurrection at the last day.
2. THE DETENTION.
In the words last cited there is doubtless an anticipation of the future, as if it were present. For those addressed in the Epistle to the Hebrews did not consider “ the general assembly of the church of the first born “ as being already in heaven; their names only were written there. They had “not received the promise; God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect” (chapter 11:40).
This brings us to the Christian doctrine of glorification, and of the relation of soul to body; the contrast of which with the Platonic doctrine is not unlike that already noted between the two theories of man’s dignity.
The ancient philosophers, regarding Matter as inherently evil, and as the cause of evil, conceived of the body as the prison of the soul, and of death as a release, and the beginning of a higher life. Death was of nature; physical immortality was impossible, or most dreadful if it had been possible; and the thing next most dreadful was a long period of metempsychosis, ere we should be reunited to God, in the pure empyrean.
By the early Christians, on the other hand, the separation of the soul and body was regarded as the imprisonment. The disembodied soul was confined in Sheol or Hades, detained in that Underworld until the Resurrection, and not reaching its final destination until the judgment day. During the interval, or detention, as they sometimes called it, the righteous were conceived as resting in Abraham’s bosom, sometimes called Paradise, and the wicked as labouring in unrest and in gloom.
Thus Justin Martyr says, the more remarkably because he had been a Platonist: “If you meet with some who are called Christians, (meaning the Gnostics,) who dare calumniate the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and who say that there is no resurrection of the dead, but that at death their souls are received up into heaven, do not regard them as Christians.” The allusion to the “God of Abraham” (Luke 20:37, 38), seems to be in the style of the passage before cited from another martyr, Tyndale, answering to the Platonist, Thomas More: “And ye, in putting them [souls] in heaven, hell, and purgatory, destroy the arguments wherewith Christ and Paul prove the resurrection. If the souls be in heaven, tell me why they be not in as good case as the angels be?
And then what cause is there of the resurrection? “Irenaeus also thus censures the Gnostics: “How shall not they be con- founded who say that the Underworld (Inferos) is this world of ours; and their inner man, on leaving the body here, ascends to the super-celestial place?” Then, speaking of Christ’s death and resurrection, he adds: “The souls of his disciples also, for whom the Lord did these things, go away into an unseen place, appointed them by God, and there abide until the resurrection, which they await. Then receiving bodies, and rising entire, that is bodily, as the Lord also arose, they come thus to the vision of God.” And Tertullian, alluding to the spiritual manifestations of his day, which he attributed to spirits not human, says the spirit “sometimes affirms itself to be a gladiator, or beast-fighter, sometimes a god; caring for nothing but to exclude this doctrine of ours, and hinder the belief that all souls are compelled into the Underworld, so as to exclude the belief of a judgment and a resurrection.”
Such was the rule. The love of martyrdom sometimes appeared in the persuasion of an exception from it, which Tertullian sanctions thus: “No one, on leaving the body, dwells immediately with the Lord, except he who, by the prerogative of martyrdom, shall go to Paradise instead of the Underworld.” “The only key to Paradise is your blood.”
In view of the repugnance of the philosophers to the doctrine of a resurrection, and of the impatience of the Christians for it, it would be passing strange if this doctrine of a detention were derived elsewhere than from the Scriptures. “Ye shall be rewarded at the resurrection of the just,” is the promise of our Saviour. And on this event Paul, with the Gospel of “Jesus and the Resurrection,” seems to have fixed his hopes (Romans 8:23; 1 Corinthians 6:14; 15:12-55; 2 Corinthians 4:14; 5:2-4; Ephesians 2:6; Philippians 3: 10-13, 20, 21; Colossians 2:12, 13; 1 Thessalonians 4:14-18; 5:23; 2 Thessalonians 1:7; 2 Timothy 4:8). When the event would occur no one knew; but it was expected soon (1 Timothy 6:14; 2 Timothy 4:8; Titus 2:13; James 5:7, 8; 2 Peter 1:16).
The passages supposed to show that Paul expected to enter heaven at death, may, therefore, be easily explained otherwise. When he says he is “willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8), it is certain that his thoughts do not linger in the intermediate state, as if that were to be much prized. He immediately speaks of the scene of judgment (verses 9, 10). He had just said that he desired “not to be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life” (5:4); preferring, probably, to be “changed,” rather than to die and rise again. For the “change” of those who are alive at Christ’s appearing, by which the mortal body is somehow absorbed without a dissolution, seems aptly described as a being “clothed upon,” and as a “mortality swallowed up of life.”
And when Paul says in the context (5:7): “For we walk by faith, not by sight,” we may suppose that his faith leaped the chasm between death and the resurrection, anticipating the “unseen,” yet “eternal” state of blessedness for which he hoped (chapter 4:18).
The phrase, “to be absent from the body” may therefore denote, not the happiness of a disembodied state, but a release from the suffering and dying body, either to “ sleep in Jesus,” or to be present with Christ in the glorified body of the resurrection.
The other passage commonly supposed to show that death admits the soul to heaven (Philippians 1: 21-23), should be compared with the context. Paul had just said that Christ would be “magnified in his body, whether by life or by death.” When he then adds: “To live is Christ, and to die is gain,” he may signify either the gain to the cause of Christ, by the martyrdom which in his prison he now awaited, or his own greater reward, as a martyr, in the resurrection (chapter 3:10). Moreover, such were his present afflictions, that any form of death would be a welcome release. And as in the other passage, so here, the departure to be with Christ may denote either the repose of the saints in the bosom of Christ, or the full union with him in the resurrection, which Paul so earnestly desires (chapter 3:10-14).
And there are some reasons for supposing that the phrase here rendered “to depart” may signify “to release,” or “the release,” with special allusion to the coming back of the dead from Hades, of which the early Christians made so much. The verb here used occurs in Luke 12:36, in the sense of “return.” In twenty-two manuscripts of the Septuagint, including the Oxford, it is used in Joshua 22:8, for the Hebrew word which always signifies “to return.” And in Wisdom 2:1, it occurs in the phrase: “neither was there any man known to have returned from the grave” (released). In chapter 5:13: “An arrow parts the air, which immediately Cometh together again” (returns). In chapter 16:13, 14: “Thou hast power of life and death; thou leads to the gates of Hades, and brings up again. But a man kills, and cannot bring back the soul received [into Hades].” In 2 Maccabees 8:25: “Lacking time, they returned.” In chapter 9:1: “Antiochus returned in a disorderly manner from Persia.” In chapter 15:28: “Now when the battle was done, returning again with joy.” The noun as used in 2 Timothy 4:6, may signify “release”; though the context here shows that the hopes of Paul were centred not on the event of death, but of the resurrection.
The Parable of the rich-man and Lazarus, also, will not sustain the modern expectation of entering heaven at death. Borrowed from the Jews themselves, it simply illustrates their dramatic conceptions of the Underworld. Lazarus is in Abraham’s bosom; but Abraham was dead; and the Jews did not consider the patriarchs as living until the resurrection.’
Nor does the reply of Christ to the thief on the cross sustain the modern view. The meaning may be: “I say unto thee, even this day, when it all seems so unlikely, thou shalt be with me in Paradise, when I enter my kingdom;” or the term “Paradise” may denote the state of the saints in the underworld. With this interpretation the Gnostics disliked the passage; and we are told that Marcion cut away the expression: “Thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”
The doctrine of a detention, so far from conducing to that of purgatory, has been in fact most distasteful to the Roman Church; as the dispute between More and Tyndal will illustrate. It suffered still more for its connection, real or incidental, with Chiliasm. In this connection, it is asserted by Justin Martyr, in the passage above cited, where he adds that many, even those of that race of Christians who follow not pure and godly doctrine, do not acknowledge it. For T have demonstrated to thee that these are indeed called Christians; but are atheists and impious heretics.” In some manuscripts and early editions of Justin, the first word “not” has been omitted; and in the Paris edition (1742) labour is bestowed to make the omission consist with the context. The same causes contributed to the neglect of Irenaeus, whose only extant work has been preserved mostly in a Latin translation. It was supposed to be lost, until a copy was discovered by Erasmus, and given to the world. One writer, a Romanist, regarding the obnoxious doctrine as a “filthy clout annexed to his works,” says “it had been better that they had buried the same in eternal oblivion, than to uncover the secret shame of so worthy a father.”
But whatever indirect occasion for prejudice there was in the extravagances of the ancient Chiliasts, of the Munster Anabaptists, and of the Fifth Monarchy men, it is certain that some of the Reformers held the doctrine of detention in the intermediate state. Thus, Luther, in Ecclesiastes 9:10, says: “Another proof that the dead are insensible. Solomon thinks, therefore, that the dead are altogether asleep, and think of nothing. They lie, not reckoning days or years, but, when awakened, will seem to them- selves to have slept scarcely a moment.” This doctrine, however, incurred the greatest odium, and exposed those who favoured it to the severest reproaches and calumnies.
Thus Feuardentius says: “I call most Lutherans new Sadducees, who, when they read in Luther’s comments that the dead so sleep as to know and feel nothing, say that the soul of man dies with the body. I call the great mass of the Calvinists new Epicureans, who, hearing daily from Calvin and his ministers that all blessed spirits are dead, are larvae and shades with which we have no communion, exclaim, with the support of Calvin, ‘Let us say that the soul is extinct with the body, and forthwith Purgatory, and the Mass, and the Roman Priest will be done away.’ I call those Anabaptists, now sprung from the Lutherans and Calvinists, new Soul-slayers, who, in the year 1568, scattered through Poland the Cracow theses, of which the tenth is, ‘ We deny that any soul remains after death, but call that a device of Anti-Christ, to furnish his kitchen by the figment of Purgatory and the invocation of saints.’” Calvin replied to these charges, addressing, not the Romanists, but the Anabaptists, in his “Psychopannychy.” In an age of controversial abuse, this is perhaps the most objectionable of Calvin’s books. He repeats the reproach against the Soul-sleepers, calling them Psychotomists. The first resurrection he defines to be that of the sanctified soul, presently after the death of the body; the second resurrection is that of the body. The title of the work, — “Watchful through the Night,” perhaps indicates an opinion that the departed saints are not in the glorified state.
But the reformers had other work than to dispute about the economy, or to weigh the happiness, of an interim. The general result of their efforts, as it appears in the received theology, is well stated by a writer whose remarkable book should be good authority. “They extinguished the flames of Purgatory, and enlarged the bounds of hell by adding Hades to it. No middle state or place was any longer believed in, but every departed soul entered immediately upon the place of its destination, either heaven or hell. They carried this point too far. It was wrong to make a Purgatory of Hades; but it was also going too far to do it away together with Purgatory.”
But by this view the importance of the Resurrection was entirely overlooked. The only importance that could now be in any way claimed for it, was that it will contribute a body, an addition of physical torment to the lost, and of bliss to the saved; or that, ushering in a scene of judgment, it will give occasion for a vindication of God’s dealings with mankind. Thus the judgment becomes a trial not so much of human conduct, as of the divine administration. It followed that Christians must think and care less about their final redemption from the power of death. And that they actually did so is apparent in the fact that in a Body of Confessions published at Geneva in the year 1612, and designed to show a substantial agreement in doctrine among Protestants in order to meet the Roman clamour about their variations, eleven out of the sixteen collected Confessions made no mention of the Resurrection.
3. PSYCHOPANNYCHY.
Is the sentiment which Calvin expressed by this term, which illustrates the odd fortunes of words by its transfer to those whom he opposed, true? This question is of even less importance than that concerning our identity; save as its solution affects our habits of scriptural interpretation. What matters it, if the Christian is sure of immortality, with its burden of eternal glory, whether its consummation dates a few years earlier or later? Will the future eternity be abridged by any delay? If the future life were limited, we might wish to begin its enjoyment soon. Impatience for the finite is excusable; for the assured infinite, a faith longing with tireless patience and scorning ages of delay as a moment, is nobler. May not a little repose be better for us, ere the dawn of the sleepless, endless day?
We do not say that it will. We simply remark that the Scriptures give us few hints of the condition of the soul in its unclothed state. Beings of angelic order, ever waiting before the throne of the Heavenly Father, seem to be appointed as ministering spirits, guardians of those who trust in him. Whether the angels are pure spirits, or have some kind of body, we cannot tell. May not an embodiment be the needful furnishing and equipment of every finite spirit, for the purposes of its being? May not this be the only means of a relation to time and space; of a sensible connection with the material world, its beauties, its grandeurs, its harmonies? If the spiritual phenomena now so rife are the work of disembodied souls, may they not be explained by their privation and discontent, shut out from the world of sight and sound, hoping for no eternal day, seeking an abnormal connection with matter, and playing pranks worthy of their respite from the gloom of night?
And in the economy of thinking substance, may not a material apparatus be its balance-wheel, serving as a useful mechanism to regulate, and thus to help, its progress. It is well known that the brain pulsates strongly, with earnest thought and deep feeling; may not matter, like logic, be concerned with the distinction between reasoning, or “discourse,” and intuition? As these two methods, or rather parts and features, of thought, perhaps save us, by their due combination, from an overwhelming instantaneousness of thought on the one hand, and from sluggishness on the other hand, may we not suppose that in the disembodied state the soul is lost in an intuition of its past history, with no process of thinking and with no note of time? The interval between death and the resurrection may appear as a moment; and that moment such as is experienced in what may be a partial separation of soul and body, in the fright of falling from a precipice, or in apparent drowning; when the mind, perhaps, loosens from the brain. The continuance of such a state may be trance, or mania. The entire disruption is what we call death; which to the trusting soul may be a repose, under the conditions we have named; not a state of thinking; perhaps, on the other hand, not of unconsciousness; but of momentary all-consciousness, the same to those who die soon or late, the resurrection and the judgment close following.
The scriptural argument to show that the intermediate state is one of activity, rests on passages which are either obviously exceptional, or dramatic. The argument to prove unconsciousness is often based on the expressions, “the dead know not anything;” “their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished;” and, “there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goes “ (Ecclesiastes 9:5, 6, 10). But these expressions are evidently (verses 2, 4) the conclusion of an Epicurean argument, including the denial of all future life, which the “Preacher” had taken up. And when Hezekiah says: “the dead cannot praise thee” (Isaiah 38:18), the language is rather that of despair respecting any future life (5:11). The same may be said of the expressions in Job 3:11, 16; 14:10, 14; Psalms 6:5; 30:9; 88:10-12; 115:17; with which compare 1 Corinthians 15:18, where the argument evidently shows that those who are fallen asleep in Christ, are not perished, since Christ has risen.
The discussions of this chapter may be recapitulated in the words of another:
“The soul, to be complete, to develop itself as a soul, must externalize itself, throw itself out in space; and this externalization is the body.” “The doctrine of immortality in the Bible is such as to include always the idea of the resurrection. The whole argument in the 15th chapter of 1st Corinthians, as well as the representation in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, proceeds in the assumption that the life of the body, as well as that of the soul, is indispensable to the perfect state of our nature as human. The soul, then, during the intermediate state, cannot possibly constitute, in the biblical view, a complete man; and the case requires, besides, that we should conceive of its relation to the body as still in force; not absolutely destroyed, but only suspended. The whole condition is intermittent, and by no possibility of conception capable of being thought of as complete and final. When the resurrection body appears, it will not be as a new frame abruptly created for the occasion, and brought to the soul in the way of outward addition and supplement. It will be found to hold in strict organic continuity with the body, as it existed before death, as the action of the same law of life; which implies that this law has not been annihilated, but suspended only, in the intermediate state. In this character, however, it must be regarded as resting in some way, (for where else could it rest?) in the separate life, as it is called, of the soul itself; the slumbering power of the resurrection, ready at the proper time, in obedience to Christ’s powerful word, to clothe itself with its former actual nature, in full identity with the form which it carried before death, though under a fur higher order of existence. Only then can the salvation of the soul be considered complete. All at last is one life; the subject of which is the totality of the believer’s person, comprehending soul and body alike, from the beginning of the process to the end. The resurrection of the body will be simply the outburst of the life that had been ripening for immortality under the cover of the old Adamic nature before. The winged psyche has its elemental organization in the worm, and does not lose it in the tomb like chrysalis.”
4. RESURRECTION OF THE UNJUST.
To this endeavour after a philosophy of the resurrection, we may add a thought respecting that of the unjust. It is hard to believe that they are raised up by a miracle that ends in their destruction, or that accomplishes nothing but a judgment, which in this view must appear simply vindictive. If they have no immortality, why are their slumbers disturbed? But if their resurrection is connected with the Redemption, by a law that finds illustration in analogy of facts, this difficulty may be removed. Damaged seeds that are sown, often exhaust their vitality, and perish, in germination. And we have noted the fact, that of insects which pass through the chrysalis state to that of the psyche, or butterfly, many, from injuries suffered in their original form, utterly perish in the transition. Now the Glad Tidings of the Redemption, quickening and invigorating the soul with new life, may so far repair the injury done it in the Fall, that even the unbelieving, who derive many benefits there from in this life, may not altogether perish in the bodily death. Not to say that the average duration of life is greater for the Gospel, it seems certain that life is of a higher type. Even bad men in Christendom are familiar with moral sentiments, great truths of humanity, which the heathenish intellect has not conceived.
May not such truths, as food to the souls even of those who do not cleave to him who is the Truth and the Life, cause death itself to be divided, as the proper effect and token of the Redemption? And for judgment, it is as if the unjust, hearing the voice of God in the last call to life, should be putting on a glorious in-corruption, and should perish in the act.
THE HISTORICAL ARGUMENT.
“Our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.”
It is often alleged that the doctrine of the soul’s proper immortality is supported by the common consent of mankind; and many suppose that the view we have advanced is without a history, but is almost a new thing under the sun. Our previous discussions have sufficiently intimated the contrary; but we ought here to give a more full account of the hopes and fears, the beliefs and doubts, of men in the ages past, respecting their future destiny. A true account of these, and a more full statement of the effects of the received doctrine, will furnish, we think, a distinct and valid argument for our view.
1. EASTERN AND ANCIENT DOCTRINE.
Among the Chinese, Buddhism is the only doctrine of human destiny that can be properly styled religious. It was introduced from India in the first century of our era, and its Hindu doctrine of metempsychosis is too well known to be recited here. The other religious systems, or rather, substitutes for religion, are:
1st. That of Confucius, who stumbled upon the half-truth that virtue is its own reward, and needs no pay-day in an afterlife. The culture which he introduced might be called a parent-worship, and a reverence for the memory of the great. But this system, which has dedicated 1,560 temples to Confucius, is maintained simply for the sake of its rites, and as a useful establishment; it has no significance beyond that which is seen. And this “sect of the learned,” says Dr. Morrison, “which is so miserably deficient respecting the Deity, is also entirely silent respecting the immortality of the soul, as well as future rewards and punishments. Virtue is rewarded, and vice punished, in the individuals, or in their posterity on earth; but of a separate state of existence they do not speak.”
2d. The sect of the Rationalists, founded by Lautsz in the sixth century before Christ, resembled not a little the Grecian Stoics; and, like them, so far as they held immortality at all, held it not for all men, but for a class. They taught the emanation of all good beings from the bosom of Reason, and their return thither for an eternal existence; but that the bad are destined to successive births with many sorrows. The immortality of the good man, however, was little more than an eternal fame. “He who does not dissipate his life is imperishable; he who dies and is not forgotten has eternal life.” And, as though an impersonal life beyond the grave were of little account, the sect long endeavoured to find an elixir which should insure longevity or immortality. They are now degenerated.
3d. Another sect, less numerous, held that “there is no other principle of all things but a vacuum and nothing; from nothing all things have sprung, to nothing they must again return; and there all our hopes end.”
The Hindu doctrine is most important for our argument in its early history. And here its form is the same that reappears in some of the Grecian schools, viz. that the soul is immortal because it is eternal. This view is stated at large in a poetical document of very ancient date, the Bhagavad Gita, which is “admitted to contain the very essence of Brahmin philosophy, and which sets forth in a most lively manner, questions which must have agitated the Hindu mind at all periods.”
The following extracts show its ethical and religious character. “Let the motive be in the deed, not in the event. Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward.” “The man who, having abandoned all the lusts of the flesh, walks without inordinate desires, unassuming, and free from pride, obtains happiness. This is divine dependence. A man being possessed of this confidence in the Supreme goes not astray; even at the hour of death, should he attain it, he shall mix with the incorporeal nature of Brahma.” “The soul neither kills, nor is killed. You cannot say of it, it hath been, is about to be, or is to be hereafter. It is a thing without birth. It is ancient, constant, and eternal. As a man throws away old garments and puts on new, so the soul, having quitted its old mortal frames, enters into others which are new. The weapon divides it not; the fire burns it not; the water corrupts it not; the wind dries it not away. It is indivisible, inconsumable, incorruptible; it is universal, permanent, immovable. The former state of being is unknown; the middle [present] state is evident; the future state is not to be discovered.”
The Persians with all their Dualism, have a restoration doctrine of the soul. According to Zoroaster, it has Ormuzd for its creator, and is united to the body at its birth. At death it is sent to paradise, or to hell for its purification, according as good or evil predominates in its life, to await the resurrection In that day Maschia and Maschiana, the parents of the human race, will rise first, and the judgment succeeds. Those not yet purified are sent again to hell. Here the tortures of three days and three nights, equal to an agony of three thousand years, suffice to reclaim the most wicked. The world shall melt, and be purified; hell and its demons shall be cleansed; Ahriman reclaimed and converted to goodness.
Of the Egyptian doctrine of the soul Herodotus and Diodorus have given different accounts; i\\Q former asserting that this people were “the first of mankind who had defended the immortality of the soul;” and that they held its transmigration through various animal bodies, and its return to a human body, in a period of three thousand years. “The latter tells us that they “considered this life as of very trifling consequence, and therefore valued in proportion a quiet repose after death. This led them to consider the habitations of the living as mere lodgings, in which, as sojourners, they put up for a short time, while they called the sepulchres of the dead everlasting dwellings, because they continue in the grave such an immeasurable length of time.“
The reconciliation of these statements has been attempted in various ways. One writer regards metempsychosis as an esoteric doctrine of the priesthood, and thinks the common people looked to the sepulchre as their final resting place. Another asks whether transmigration was a dreaded destiny, to be delayed by the preservation of the body? Or did the embalmed body await its re-animation, when the soul should have ended its wanderings? Or was this care of the body an expression of concern — an enacted prayer for the welfare of the soul?”
Another remarks that the worthy alone were embalmed, after an ordeal from which kings were not exempt; and asks if the wicked alone were driven away from their bodies, and condemned to transmigration? “It is distinctly shown that all virtuous men became ‘Osiris,’ and returned again to the Good Being whence their souls emanated,” And he concludes: “There is sufficient reason to believe from the monuments, that the souls which underwent transmigration were those of men whose sins were of a sufficiently moderate kind to admit that purification, the unpardonable sinner being condemned to eternal fire. “Another writer, after an interesting discussion of the subject, says: “It would be vain to endeavour to combine these different statements and indications of opinion into a system which should represent the defined and universal belief of the Egyptian people.”
2. THE GRECIAN SCHOOLS.
The Pythagoreans. — “What simple and illiterate man or obscure woman is there now,” says Augustine, “that does not believe the immortality of the soul and a future life? Which point being first maintained among the Greeks in disputation by Piierecydes the Assyrian, Pythagoras the Samian was so touched by the novelty of the subject, that from a wrestler he turned philosopher.”
Augustine seems to suppose the doctrine “new“ to Pythagoras was the same which in his day had become almost the catholic doctrine. But in fact Augustine did not understand the “novelty,” and it will be new to many at this day. For Pherecydes expressed the pantheistic sentiment of the Hindus and Egyptians in a philosophic theory, and introduced the doctrine of the soul’s eternal nature. Hence the remark of Cicero that he “first taught that the souls of men are eternal,” carefully using the word that denoted an uncreated, divine nature. And the sequel shows that Pythagoras regarded this as the ground of before and after life. “They say,” adds Cicero, “that Plato came to Italy to form acquaintance with the Pythagoreans, where he learned all their doctrines; and especially that he not only concurred with Pythagoras on the eternity of souls, but gave a reason therefore which we will pass by, if you do not object, and abandon all this hope of immortality.” Tatian treats this doctrine as an arrogant opinion of the philosophers, opposed to the true faith in an afterlife. “Aristotle,” he says, “is the heir of Pherecydes’ doctrine, and traduces the doctrine of the soul’s immortality.” Cudworth, speaking of “that grand mystery of the Egyptian theology (derived by Orpheus from them) that ‘God is all,’ “traces to the same source the Pythagorean doctrine that “no real entity is made or destroyed,” as also its corollary, the pre-existence and transmigration of the soul. And Hitter tells us the Pythagoreans were wont to “refer all the appearances of individual soul-life to the universal ensouling energy of the world;“ and “all souls were with them an efflux merely of the universal soul.”
The Eleatlcs held likewise the Pythagorean doctrine of the One and the All. “The individual, by itself and separate from God, can have neither permanence or being.” Creation is impossible, as also motion; to prove which, famous arguments were devised by Zeno, one of the founders of the sect. The argument against creation
has been lately revived in a work en- titled “Immortality Triumphant.” Surely there is nothing new under the sun.
The Ionics, whose views were in some respects a transition from those just named to the doctrines of the Stoics, regarded the soul as “an emanated portion of the universal fire, or universal reason, which encompasses the heaven, and rules all; and therefore it can only be preserved by the constantly accruing fire.” Man’s life is a mere semblance. Hence the expressions of Heraclitus: “The very birth of man is a calamity — a birth unto death.” “Death is in our life, and life in our death.” “Men are mortal gods; the gods immortal men, living in man s death, and dying in man’s life.” The heaven of the Ionic was re-absorption into the divine reason.
The Stoic faith, so far as it was a faith, contemplated the immortality of a class, and will be examined hereafter. The doc- trine of the pleasure-seeking Epicureans is well known, at least in Paul’s citation of it: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” The Pyrrhonists were the avowed sceptics of the age, and doubted everything. But we think their doubts will not appear altogether without occasion, when we have examined the views of the three greatest thinkers of the age, and when we have seen the result of the Greek philosophy in the despair of its later admirers.
In the mind of Socrates the idea of Duty was paramount; and with this was connected a more definite notion of the personality of God and of man. The human soul was indeed derived from God, as a spark of divinity; but it then ceased to be a part of God. It was a divine being, or similar to God. In respect of its reason and invisible energy, it approximated to the divinity, and was therefore immortal. But by its freedom of will it might forsake its allegiance to God.
Such a doctrine must be well guarded by moral considerations, lest the divinity in the bad man should become his license. But how should the evil soul be punished? It could not die; for that would subvert the hope of immortality itself. In the choice between life and death for all, Socrates would say: “the soul is certainly immortal.” In the Phaido, he is made to speak of its destiny thus: “We should consider this, that if the soul is immortal, it requires our care not only for the present time, which we call life, but for all time; and the danger would now appear to be dreadful, if we should neglect it. For if death were a deliverance from everything, it would be a great gain to the wicked, when they die, to be delivered at the same time from the body, and from their vices together with the soul; but now, since it appears to be immortal, it can have no other refuge from evils, nor safety, except by becoming as good and wise as possible.” He then recites the myth respecting Hades, and the final judgment of souls; and adds: “Those who appear to be incurable through the magnitude of their offences, either from having committed many and great sacrileges, or many unjust and lawless murders, or other similar crimes, these a suitable destiny hurls into Tartarus, whence they never come forth.” Those who can be cured are subjected to the needful punishments.
“Those who have lived an eminently holy life arc set free from Hades and dwell on the upper parts of the earth.” And among these, they who have sufficiently purified themselves by philosophy shall live without bodies, throughout all future time, and shall arrive at habitations yet more beautiful than these, which it is neither easy to describe, nor at present is there sufficient time for the purpose. But for the sake of those things which we have described, we should use every endeavour, so as to acquire virtue and wisdom in this life. For the reward is noble, and the hope is great.”
This was the culmination of the hope of the ancients. Socrates himself could hardly rise again so high. He proceeds: “To affirm positively that these things are exactly as
I have described them, does not become a man of sense. That, however, either this or something of the kind takes place with respect to our souls and their habitations, — since the soul is certainly immortal, — this appears to me most fitting to be believed, and worthy the hazard for one who trusts in its reality; for the hazard is noble, and it is right to allure ourselves with such things, as with enchantments; for which reason I have prolonged my story to such a length.” He betrays the wishful nature of his hope when he says: “Though I should be mistaken, I gain at least thus much, that the expectation makes me less uneasy while I live, and my error will die with me.” And he concludes his defence before his judges with this remark: “I am going out of the world, and you are to continue in it; but which of us has the better part, is a secret to everyone but God.”
Plato held the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul’s eternity; for that “the immortal is definite in number, and it is impossible that there should be more than there actually are; so that whatever be the number of souls, all must have existed from eternity.” But the soul itself is bipartite, or rather, double; that which is immortal being derived from the supreme God, and the mortal being created by the inferior gods, and maintained by a constant aggregation. These are respectively the rational and the animal soul.
The former is essential being, and intrinsically good. It must be immortal, “because it cannot be destroyed by its peculiar ill, — moral evil. For an essence can only be destroyed by some ill necessarily attending it, not by any foreign ill; now, the moral evil would cease to be such, if it annihilated the soul, and thereby released it from all ill. ” In this self-subsistence of the soul lay the germ of the restoration theology of which we shall soon discover the fruit. The punishment of the vicious is thus described: “Those who are only careful about bodily pleasures, and hate all philosophical meditation, will feel after death the same aversion for the shapeless and incorporeal, and, as shades, still subject to the corporeal principle, will hover round their graves seeking to recover their lifeless bodies.” Plato held likewise the migration of souls through various human and brute forms.
His doctrine of eternal punishments is thus stated: “Those who have acted unjustly in the extreme, and have through such crimes become incurable, serve as examples to others. I think, too, that the greatest part of these examples will consist of tyrants, kings, and potentates, and such as have governed the affairs of cities; for these through their power commit the greatest and most impious crimes. Homer also testifies the truth of these assertions; for he makes those to be kings and potentates that are punished in Hades through the whole of time, viz.: Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Tityus; but he does not make Thersites, or any other private unworthy individual, oppressed with the greatest punishments as if incurable; for I do not think he could be guilty of incurable offences.” When we recollect that Thersites was the most ill-favoured man in the whole army of Achilles, and as vicious as he was ugly, we may consider the ancient doctrine of future punishment as far more mild than the modern.
His view of the end of all things is desponding. “On the ground that whatever is produced must decay, he admits even that the duration of the divine work itself is limited, and that its period is determined by a perfect number. The way in which he makes the might of the corporeal to be overborne by the reason, is far from establishing the perfect dominion of good. The power of the gods over men is unable to bring all things to perfection.” Hence the doctrine of an eternal vicissitude, of which the so-called Platonic year vas the philosophic poem. And it is doubtful whether any eon, or eternity, of which he spoke, was longer than this year of six thousand suns.
The early censure of Aristotle s doctrine of the soul is already noted. He made a distinction between the nutritive, the sensitive, and the rational soul. The sensitive soul is mortal; the intellect is divine, imperishable, and eternal. It belongs, how- ever, not to individuals, but to all in common. It is individuated by connection with a body, as a plastic or formative power. The developments of body and soul are indissolubly connected; for an organic body formed by nature is an indispensable condition to the existence of the soul.
In this view the statement of Plutarch, that Aristotle taught that “the body alone and not the soul is subject to death, for there is no death of the soul,” proves nothing to the purpose. But since his opinion has been disputed, we should notice the passages that have been cited to show his belief in an individual immortality. One writer quotes him as follows: “Justice is always the attendant of God, to punish those who depart from the divine law; whoever therefore will be blessed and happy [hereafter], ought immediately in the beginning of his life to be partaker of her.” The insertion is here a sufficient confession. Another passage is that in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he says: “There seems to occur to the dead man something both good and evil, just as to a living man, though he has no perception of it; such as honour or disgrace, or the fortunes or misfortunes of friends.”
And again: “The question arises, whether the dead are affected by good or evil. Now it seems that if anything good or evil does reach them, it must be either absolutely small, or at least small to them. Otherwise, be it of any kind or degree, it cannot make those happy who are not so, nor deprive those who are happy of their happiness. The good or ill success of [surviving] friends has, then, plainly, something to do with the dead, but not so as to affect their condition.” Now the notion that Aristotle here speaks of the dead man as having a conscious existence, is expressly forbidden by the expression: “though he has no perception of” good or evil. The whole passage, moreover, is a critique on the remark of Solon, that no man should be pronounced happy during his life-time, since none can tell what reverses of fortune he may meet. And the design is to show that however men may anticipate the opinions or the fortunes of posterity while they live, they do pass, at death, completely beyond their reach; and it may then be said whether they have passed a happy life or not. The dead are spoken of as existing not really, but dramatically. And Andronicus of Rhodes, a famous Peripatetic, thus interprets the sense: “The happiness or misery which befalls nations, affects the dead as differently from what it would do if they were alive, as the same things represented in a tragedy differ from the events them- selves.” In the passage in dispute Aristotle asks whether it would not be altogether absurd to speak of a man as being happy after his death, “especially to those who say with us that happiness consists in an active exercise of the faculties.” He himself employs the illustration from the drama; and because he regarded all events as unreal to the dead, he might well say, speaking of fortitude in enduring temporal evils: “Death is the most dreadful; for it is the end; and beyond it there seems to be for the dead man nothing more, either good or evil.”
It is remarkable that there should have been any doubt on this subject, since the time of Averroes, of whom hereafter. Ritter, summing up the controversy, says: “We must draw our conclusion on this point from the general context of Aristotle’s doctrine; and from this it is clear that he had no conception of the immortality of any individual rational entity, although he did ascribe an eternal existence in God to the universal reason.”
3. THE POPULAR FAITH. THE PIOUS FRAUD.
“Men have doubted their own existence, and all the first truths, as the result of efforts to prove them. Were not the doubts of the philosophers respecting the soul’s immortality a similar effect of misplaced reasoning? And did not the common people, with an unsophisticated confidence, expect an afterlife?”
It might be so, if the philosophers had all been willing sceptics; or if their doubts had been expressed, like the idealism of Berkeley, as the result of their systems. But most of them, from Pythagoras to Aristotle, certainly wished for immortality, if they did not even build their systems upon the assumption of it, and begin to doubt when they asked themselves what was the basis of structures so imposing. Their doubts were those of their honest hours. When they strove to refute the sceptic, or to support the established religious system, then they seemed most confident respecting the afterlife.
We speak of philosophers as patronizing the religion of the state. This may sound strangely to some; but it is only a part of the famous saying of the historian of the “Decline and Fall,” that the ancient systems of religion were “with the people equally true, with the philosopher equally false, and with the statesman equally necessary.” The “pious fraud,” which has so often been charged upon Christianity, was in fact a part of the heathen establishment. This was the “double doctrine,” — the esoteric and exoteric faith, of which the former might be safely imparted to the wise man, but the populace must be instructed in the latter. And the distinction was not disguised.
Thus Timeus the Locrian, an ancient Pythagorean, is rep- resented by Plato as saying: “ For as we sometimes cure the body with unwholesome remedies, when such as are most wholesome have no effect; so we restrain those minds by false relations, which will not be persuaded by the truth. There is a necessity therefore of instilling the dread of those strange punishments [of metempsychosis].” Teles, another Pythagorean, thus consoles one afflicted for the loss of a friend: “You complain that your friend will never exist more. But remember, that he had no existence ten thousand years ago. This, it seems, does not move you; all your concern is because he will not exist for the future.”
In his Dialogues, Plato was entitled to the license of fiction; we shall therefore not insist upon the remark of Socrates, when his pupil read to him his “Lysis:“ “Ye gods! What a heap of lies this youth has placed to my account.” But a passage in his “Republic” contains an explicit, though guarded, sanction of the pious fraud: “If falsehood be indeed of no service to the gods, but useful to men, in the form of a drug, it is plain that such a thing should be touched only by physicians, but not meddled with by private persons. To the governors of the state, then, if to any, it especially belongs to speak falsely, either about enemies or citizens, for the good of the state; whereas for all the rest, they must venture on no such thing.” Plato is also censured by Chrysippus, as not rightly or wisely deterring men from injustice by frightful stories of future punishments. He displayed, not a wrong belief, but a wrong judgment, in supposing such childish terrors could be useful to the cause of virtue. And Strabo confirms the charge, in saying that the Brahmins had “invented fables in the manner of Plato concerning the immortality of the soul and a future judgment in the shades below, and other things of the same nature.”
Aristotle, and after him Cicero, did the same thing, according to the testimony of the latter. “In each of the books,” he says, speaking of his Republic, “I employ rewards, as does Aristotle, in those which he calls exoteric.”
And the Epicureans, who coveted an easy life and thought the prevalent religions detrimental to the social welfare, still humoured the common notions of the gods. They were better than the atheistic fate; for they might be moved by worship and prayer; but destiny was altogether deaf and inexorable. Certain passages of Roman history reveal the same system of fraud. Scoevola, a Roman pontiff, declared that “societies should be deceived in religion.” And Varro, that “there are many truths which it is not expedient that the vulgar should know; and many falsehoods, which yet it is expedient for the people to receive as truths.” Cicero, on the authority of Plato, thought that not to deceive for the public good was wickedness. In the 573d year of Rome, certain concealed books of Numa were discovered; but being found opposed to the established worship, they were ordered to be burned. It was not pretended that they were false; they were treated at their execution with the utmost respect; the fire was lighted by the sacred ministers who served at the altar; they were probably true; but they were unsafe. They must be sacrificed, because the system of the age recognized no supremacy of truth.
This disregard of truth is explained in part by the same state of things which promoted the various forms of Dualism. The notion of a necessity that ruled both gods and men, led to a blind submission to power. And power-worship, it has been truly said, is devil-worship. A necessitous expediency left no place for convictions of duty. Violence and fraud had established the four great empires of Might which are described by Daniel under various beastly forms, and few persons dared to entertain the question whether truth and utility could ever coincide. The rights of conscience, as well as the supreme obligation of religious conviction, were scarcely dreamed of, and were yet to be vindicated by the gospel of Christ. This terrible dominion of the idea of power is most apparent in the question by which Pilate expressed his surprise and perplexity: “What is Truth?“ A dominion of Truth was to his mind an incongruous idea. Such a plea given in answer to the charge of treason seemed quite irrelevant. “Truth! What has it to do with the present business? The question is about the supremacy of Caesar or of a Galilasan pretender; we know of no kingdom of Truth.”
We have given this detailed proof of the double doctrine of the ancients, for two reasons: 1st, to show that the pious fraud is not of Christian origin; though it did begin to corrupt Christianity, when Evil began to be deemed eternal. And 2dly, because it bears upon the question: What was the popular faith respecting an afterlife?
The principal testimonies of a prevalent belief in a future state are the following: “I know not how it is,” says Cicero, “but a presage of ages to come is fixed in the minds of men, and inheres most strongly in those of the greatest genius and most exalted minds.” And Seneca: “When we weigh the question of the immortality of the soul, the consent of all mankind, in their fears and hopes of a future state, is of no small account with us.” And Plutarch tells us it was so ancient an opinion that good men should be recompensed after death, that he could not reach either the author or the original of it. And Jamblichus, that in his time “all the Galatians and Thracians and most of the barbarous tribes taught their children to believe that the soul does not perish, but continues after death; wherefore they should not fear death, but boldly meet every danger.” He adds, that when a former slave of Pythagoras “had taught the Getae these things, and had written for them a code of laws, he was held by them to be the greatest of the gods.” And Lactantius speaks of Democritus and Epicurus as having run mad, almost alone among men denying the immortality of the soul.
These testimonies must be taken along with the fact that infanticide was extremely prevalent. And, as in Christian countries abortion is often practised under the vague impression that the early embryo is soulless, the question arises, whether the faith of the ancients was not a dim sentiment that man was in- deed created for something more than the present life, but which sentiment gave way, by degrees, to despair? With individuals great virtues might produce strong hopes, and great crimes, strong fears. But the common mind, long fed with fables, might become incredulous, indifferent, and the supposed prevalent faith become itself a fable.
Does not Socrates, whose own hopes of a future life were the expression of a high moral sense, tell us of a general unbelief, when he says: “Can the soul, which goes to the presence of a good and wise God, (whither, if God will, my soul shall shortly go,) can this soul of ours, when separated from the body, be immediately dispersed and destroyed, as most men assert?” And this testimony is hardly disputed by the reply which Cato and Cicero made to Julius Caesar, when he opposed the execution of the followers of Catiline on the ground that death is no evil, but that the soul dies with the body. They appeal, not to an actual belief of the people, but to tradition; saying that the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments was delivered down to them from their ancestors, and the ancients held that certain punishments were appointed in Hades. But one of these statesmen thought it criminal not to deceive the people; and he has given different intimations of his own and the popular belief. In his famous argument on the subject of immortality, he strives most of all to show, not that man is indeed immortal, but that, if he is not, death is not an evil. In a letter to L. Mescinius he says: “Even we who are happy should despise death, since we shall have no sense or feeling beyond it.”
And in another letter: “Nor shall I, while I live, suffer at all, seeing I am blameless, and if I shall not live I shall be past all feeling.” To another: “If I am called to die, I shall not be so banished from the republic as to grieve my loss, especially as that condition will be without any sense.” And again: “Since death is the end of everything.” And in one of his orations he avows a contempt for the notion of a future existence, which it is evident he supposed his hearers to share: “And now what evil hath death brought upon him? Unless perchance we regard silly fables, and suppose that he bears the punishment of the wicked in Hades.
But if these are fictions, as all understand them to be, of what else has death deprived him, but the sense of pain?” And in a letter written on the occasion of the death of his daughter, this philosopher who “preferred to err with Plato” in the belief of an afterlife, sorrows as one who has no hope. The same is true of Seneca, who writes to one bereaved: “Death is the release and end of all pain, beyond which our evils do not pass. It restores us to the same tranquillity in which we were before our birth.” And in another letter he says: “I was pleasing myself with inquiring, yes, believing in the immortality of the soul. I could easily fall in with the opinions of great men, promising rather than proving a most desirable thing. I gave myself up to the splendid illusion. I began to weary of myself, and to despise the remnant of my happy life, ready to enter upon that unbounded time, — the possession of a whole eternity, — when suddenly I was interrupted by the receipt of your letter, and lost so fine a dream.” And he elsewhere says:
“Chaos and hungry
Time devour us all.
Inevitable Death the body kills,
Nor spares the soul.”
And, as an ancient moralist, Seneca speaks not for himself alone. Epictetus, whose ethics are regarded by some as worthy to compete with the Christian system, speaking of death, says: “But whither do you go? Nowhere to your hurt; you return from whence you came, — to a friendly consociation with your kindred elements. What there was of the nature of fire in your composition returns to the element of fire; what there was of earth, to earth; what of air, to air; and of water, to water. There is no Hades, nor Acheron, nor Cocytus, nor Pyriphlegethon.” And the philosophic Emperor Antoninus: “He who fears death either fears that he shall be deprived of all sense, or that he shall experience different sensations. If all sensations cease, you will be no longer subject to pain and misery; if you be invested with senses of another kind, you will become another creature, and will continue to exist as such.” And the elder Pliny: “The vanity of man, and his insatiable longing after existence, have led him to dream of a life after death. A being full of contradictions, he is the most wretched of creatures, since the other creatures have no wants transcending the bounds of their nature. Man is full of desires and wants that reach to infinity, and can never be satisfied. His nature is a lie, — uniting the greatest poverty with the greatest pride. Among these so great evils the best thing God has bestowed on man is the power of taking his own life.”
This last witness suggests the true state of the case. Man had long waited for palpable proof of an afterlife of the dead, so that Christ, as the first-born of the dead, was indeed “the Desire of all nations.” Just as now, eighteen centuries after that Resurrection, men are growing weary of faith in it, and eagerly catch at audible indications of life among the dead. But faith failed then, as it is likely to fail again.
We need add but a word respecting the ancient poetry in its relations to a future life. As in that age Truth was cast down from her throne, so likewise the notion of divine justice was utterly perverted. It was a question then, no less than in this day of Bridgewater Treatises, whether the gods were either just or good. The finest tragedy represented them as victims, in common with men, of a sovereign fate. And they often appeared as the slaves of a worse tyranny, — that of their own passions. Eternal torment was sometimes threatened to the incorrigibly wicked for their multiplied crimes; but more commonly, the pains of Tartarus were the award of trivial offences, or some sacrilege which many would think a virtue. The sin of Theseus, condemned to eternal chains, was his intrusion into the sacred mysteries; and that of Prometheus, doomed to 30,000 years’ torture on bleak Caucasus, was the stealing of fire from heaven for the benefit of men. Is the soul’s indefeasible immortality to be inferred from such poetry of such an age?
4. FOURFOLD DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY
Modern philosophy, like the old Platonic, has made men so familiar with the notion of an absolute immortality of all souls, that the eternal existence of a certain class of mankind seems almost inconceivable. It will surprise many to hear that such a doctrine, so far from being without precedent, has a fourfold history. Besides the true Christian doctrine of the immortality of the good, there have been three counterfeit doctrines, each extensively prevalent, and each demanding and suggesting the genuine. These counterfeits are the Stoic, the Gnostic, and the Judaic. Three of the four doctrines answer to the most important faculties of the human mind; and they all answer to cherished sentiments of corrupted or redeemed human nature. Thus in the Stoic doctrine, the Will, as a power of endurance, or as fortitude, is regarded as the highest good and a prestige of immortality. In the Gnostic doctrine, the Intellect is the highest good and the pledge of perpetuity. In the Christian doctrine, the Affections, — that love which is the bond of perfectness, — is the earnest of eternal life.
And in the Judaic doctrine, the boast of nationality, the Ego resting in a birth of noble blood, lays claim to exclusive heir-ship of the world to come. Re- marking that these doctrines, though truly distinct, may be more or less blended in the varied characters of men, we will give their history; briefly for the false, and more fully for the true.
36. The Stoics, contemplating Destiny as the dire mistress of the world, may be regarded as attempting to educe virtue from necessity. Man’s highest virtue was to endure patiently inevitable evils, or to bear up nobly and proudly against them. Their system had a few affinities with the ancient hero-worship, when virtue itself was martial even by name, and when courageous men were exalted to the rank of immortals by an apotheosis. But the virtues of a Hercules were, on the whole, too active for the Stoics. Their notions responded more to the supposed dominion of Might, when men must suffer; hence a slight affinity between them and the patient virtues of the Christian system. But the Stoics were supported by no confident hope, and their patience was spent in suppressing the natural feelings, or in throwing life away when it seemed worthless. Their wise man was one who lacked nothing because he wanted nothing.
They held to a periodical conflagration of the universe. Hence they could only distinguish between the good and the bad as destined respectively to be absorbed and annihilated. Their high moral feeling, however, impelled them to seek a more practical distinction. Hence an ancient writer tells us that “they held the soul to be generated and corruptible, but that it does not immediately perish when it leaves the body, but continues to exist for certain periods; the souls of the virtuous until the dissolution of all things by fire; those of the wicked until such or such times; and that the souls of brutes perish with their bodies.” Cleanthes, one of their leaders, held that the souls of all men continue until the conflagration; but Chrysippus said, “the souls of wise men only; and that the Stoics believed that the souls of the virtuous became heroes.” The very names which they gave to the virtuous man and the vicious man are redolent of their views. But the soul, like every other individual being, was corporeal and perishable. The impersonal All was stronger than any conserving power of virtue, and must conquer. Cleanthes and Panaitius went so far as to establish the soul’s mortality by proof. “Consistently with their whole view,” says Ritter, “the Stoics could not ascribe to individual souls an immortality in the strict sense of the term; still, as they considered them as forming a peculiar kind of body, they were free to assume that it will continue to subsist, after death, until, in the general conflagration of all things, it shall be again absorbed into the whole from which it originally issued.”
Not unlike this doctrine was the mythology of our Teutonic ancestors, who “represented the glories enjoyed by the brave in the hall of Odin as of long continuance, indeed, but destined to have an end, and to last only
‘Till Lok shall burst his seven-fold chain,
And Night resume her ancient reign.‘
when the gods themselves, with all the heroes who were the objects of their favour, shall be overpowered by their adversaries, and finally annihilated.”
37. The Gnostic doctrine of immortality is, perhaps, of most ancient date. It was the aspiration of our first parents to “be as gods, knowing good and evil;“ or, as Milton takes the phrase, — most expressive of Dualism, — “knowing good by evil.” We will not say that the words of their deceiver meant that they should “surely not die;” but it is doubtless true that the love of empty knowledge, whether of good or evil, for its own sake, and without regard to its moral uses, was the sin by which they fell. This is the knowingness that puffs up, which Paul puts in contrast with love, that builds up. And it appears in the intellectual pride, in the admiration of genius, — even when divorced from moral integrity, and in the preference of the sagacious man to the good man, that are so common.
And whether our first parents hoped by dint of such wisdom to anticipate or to secure their immortality or not, it is certain that the so called Gnostics did regard this as the pledge of their special immortality. For such arrogance, as we have seen, the Valentinians were censured by Irenaeus. The censure is repeated by Tertullian, and by Arnobius. Bunsen, who takes a very favourable view of their leader, says he “believed only the souls of spiritual men immortal, as redeemed by Christ. They would receive spiritual bodies, as would the psychical souls who had striven after righteousness by good works; all others would perish, like the matter with which they had identified themselves, and return to the demiurge world, ‘dust to dust.’ “ Here was the vicious distinction between the wise and those who were only good: the former were immortal by nature, by right; the latter, by mere grace and favour.
It was a slightly Gnostic modification of the Christian doctrine, when in the early anthropology the regenerate and complete man was regarded as having mind rather than spirit. The result in the Alexandrian school was that, as all men have a measure of intellect, all will be saved. But in some statements of Judaic doctrine the rational soul is spoken of as alone immortal; as in the passage of Abarbanel before cited. And in a few Jewish passages the Manichaeism of the early Gnostics is made to express the most bitter contempt of the gen- tiles. Thus we are told: “Our Rabbis, of blessed memory, have said, Ye Jews are called men by reason of the souls which ye have received from the Most High. But the people of the world are not called men, because they have not received from the Most Holy and Most High a spirit, but only a soul, from Belial.” The former were immortal, the latter would perish. The same doctrine is repeated by the later Rabbis in various forms.
3. The Judaic doctrine, divested of the Gnostic views just named, was the result of ancestral and national pride. The children of Abraham were the true and chosen people. They were the heirs of salvation, and no others could be saved except by becoming proselytes to their religion. And by salvation they understood an inheritance of immortality in the world to come. It is, perhaps, to this Jewish assumption that allusion is made in John 1:11-13: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name; which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
This Judaic doctrine is censured by Dr. A. Clarke in his note on Psalms 1:5, where he says: “That the impious were never to have any resurrection, but be annihilated, was the opinion of several among the Jews and of some among Christians. The former believe that only the true Israelites shall be raised again; and that the souls of all others, the Christians not excepted, die with their bodies. Such unfounded opinions are unworthy of refutation.” The same doctrine is apparently expressed in the Targum on Canticles 8:5: “Solomon the prophet said, When the dead shall live, the Mount of Olives shall be cleaved asunder, and all the dead of Israel shall come out from under it; yea, even the righteous which die in captivity shall pass through subterraneous caverns, and come out from under the Mount of Olives. But the wicked which die and are buried in the land of Israel shall be cast away, as a man casts a stone with a sling.”
And Grotius, noting the opinion of Kimchi that the wicked are destroyed soul and body, says: “The same is the opinion of R. Bechai respecting the Gentiles; for he will have the resurrection to be the prerogative of the Israelites.” R. Saadiah Gaon also, commenting on Daniel 12: 2, says: “This is the resurrection of the Israelites who are dead, who have part in the life of the world to come; but those who shall not awake are they who have forsaken the Lord, and therefore shall descend into the lowest pit of Gehenna, and be for an everlasting contempt.” By which was understood eternal death. Another Rabbi says that “the fire of Gehenna has no power over sinning Israelites, to annihilate them; “but their father Abraham, by reason of his merits in keeping the law of God, saves them from thence. A similar doctrine appears in the Talmud.”
And Dr. Harmer, speaking of the testimony of Josephus respecting the opinions of the Jews, says that his anxiety to make them appear unexceptionable “would lead him to speak very tenderly, or rather very obscurely, about the subjects of the resurrection, if the Pharisees believed it to be a prerogative of their nation, as they did.” He also gives reason to think that many of the Jews understood the life of the world to come in a literal sense. Which view is con- firmed by the words of Abarbanel: “ But the sons of Israel, since they are just by faith, and by the law, have an inheritance ordained to them in the world to come. And because the intellect or soul is to be stable, eternal, and ever enduring, hence it is said. He shall have a portion for the world to come.” But Abarbanel himself faltered in the application of the doctrine.
5. EARLY CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE.
We have already remarked the fact that the Scriptures say nothing of any eternal life or existence of the wicked, though mankind have said so much of the soul’s immortality. It now remains to show that the early Christians, heralds as they were of the “Word of Life, taught nothing else than the death of the wicked; and that they thus gave the genuine doctrine whose counterfeits we have just seen. The documents which here offer themselves are the writings of the so-called Apostolic Fathers, and other early records.
The epistle ascribed to Barnabas is probably not genuine, though of very early date. It is assigned by Bunsen to the reign of Domitian, in the first century. The phrase “eternal death” is here found for the first time, in the following passage: “The way of darkness is crooked and full of cursing (i.e. altogether accursed). For it is the way of eternal death, with punishment; in which they that walk meet those things that destroy their own souls” (Chapter 20). Here the distinction seems to be made between the punishment of loss, and the punishment of sense, according to the things done in the body.
And it is afterwards said: “He that chooses the other part shall be destroyed, together with his works. For this cause there shall be both a resurrection, and a retribution.” The literal sense of this most important phrase appears also in the so-called Acts of Paul and Thecla: “He alone is the way to eternal salvation, and the foundation of eternal life. All those who do not believe on him shall not live, but suffer eternal death.” The epistle contains an allegory of the land of promise, where it is said: “What signifies the milk and honey? Because, as the child is nourished first with milk and then with honey, so we, being kept alive by the belief of His promises, and His word, shall live, and have dominion over the land” (Chapter 6). In another passage occurs a phrase which we shall meet again: “For the Day is at hand, in which all things shall be destroyed, together with the Wicked One” (Chapter 21).
Clement, bishop of Rome, A. D. 78-86, may be the person mentioned by Paul as one “whose name is in the book of life” (Philippians 4:3). One epistle to the Corinthians ascribed to him was publicly read in many of the churches, and is probably genuine. Mosheim and Neander think it interpolated in some passages of mythical tendency; yet Bunsen regards it as of great importance, “historically, constitutionally, and doctrinally.”
The writer speaks of the destiny of the wicked chiefly in the language of the Old Testament, which is much quoted. He uses no expression that can possibly suggest their eternal existence. The regenerate are spoken of ‘as partakers of the divine nature, in a style somewhat Ignatian: “Wherefore, we being a part of the Holy One, let us do all those things that pertain unto holiness” (Chapter 30). Immortality is spoken of as a gratuity, thus: “How blessed and wonderful, beloved, are the gifts of God; — life in immortality; brightness in righteousness; truth in full assurance; faith in confidence; temperance in holiness!“ (Chapter 35.)
A second epistle, and the “Recognitions” and “Homilies,” ascribed to Clement, are all doubtless spurious. They show incipient traces of the later and now received doctrine. Yet the first of these documents names the “ combat of immortality” (Chapter 7); and the only passage we have seen cited in support of the modern view is the following; where, after referring to Isaiah 66:24, the writer says: “Let us therefore repent, whilst we are upon the earth; for we are as clay in the hands of the artificer. For as the potter, if he make a vessel, and it be turned amiss in his hands, or broken, again forms it anew; but if he have gone so far as to throw it into the furnace of fire, he will no more bring any remedy unto it” (Chapter 8); where a theologian is pleased to say: “literally, can not come to its cry.” The force of which ingenious remark is submitted to those who may judge for themselves.
Ignatius of Antioch was martyred, probably A. D. 115. Of the eight epistles ascribed to him, three are genuine, but interpolated; viz. those addressed to Polycarp, the Ephesians, and the Romans. Why he was called Theophorus (the God-bearer), will appear from the following passages of the account of his martyrdom: “And who is this that bears a God within him? He that hath Christ in his heart. Thou meanest him who was crucified under Pontius Pilate? Yea, verily; for it is written, I will dwell in them, and walk in them.” And when condemned to be led to Rome, there to be the food of wild beasts, he said: “I am the food of God, and am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may he found pure bread.”
In the epistle to Polycarp he says; “Watch, for thou hast already a spirit that sleeps not” (Chapter 1). “Be vigilant, as God’s athlete. The seed is incorruptibility, and life eternal” (Chapter 2). To the Ephesians he says: “As to other men, pray for them, — for there is a hope of their repenting, — that they may be partakers of God” (Chapter 10). And to the Romans: “I do not desire the food of corruption, nor the desires of this world. The bread of God I seek, which is the body of Christ; and his blood, which is love incorruptible and perpetual life“ (Chapter 7).
These passages are from the portions which Bunsen deems genuine. From the rest we may cite the following: “Christ, our inseparable life” (Ephesians Chapter 3). “That He might breathe the breath of immortality into His church” (Chapter 17). “The bread, which is the medicine of immortality, our antidote that we should not die, but live forever in Christ Jesus” (Chapter 20). “But if, as some [the Docetae] who are atheists, that is to say, infidels, pretend, he only seemed to suffer, (they themselves only seeming to exist,) why then am I bound? “ (Trallians, Chapter 10; compare Smyrnasans, Chapter 2.) The phrase “unquenchable fire” is used (Ephesians Chapter 16) without suggestion of the modern view.
Of the various letters written by Polycarp, one only has been preserved, which in Jerome’s time was publicly read in some of the churches. It contains several references to the future state, chiefly to the resurrection. The denial of the incarnation and suffering of Christ is said to be “from the devil;“ and he who “says there shall neither be any resurrection nor judgment, is the first born of Satan” (Chapter 7). But though thus severe, the writer intimates no eternal suffering of the wicked.
This venerable disciple had heard the apostle John, and was martyred with other Christians, probably A. D. 169, at the age of eighty-six. An account of his martyrdom is preserved in a letter from the church of Smyrna, of which he was bishop, to that of Philomelium in Phrygia. It contains allusions to the destiny of the wicked, as follows: “The martyrs, looking to the grace of Christ, despised earthly torments, redeeming themselves in one short hour from the eternal punishment. The fire of the fierce tormenters seemed cold to them; for they had in prospect to escape the eternal and unquenchable fire, and with the eyes of their heart they beheld the blessings reserved for those who endure, which ear hath not heard, nor eye seen, nor have they entered into the heart of man “ (Chapter 2). “Polycarp said [to the proconsul], You threaten the fire that burns for an hour, and is soon quenched. But know you not the fire of the coming judgment, and eternal punishment, reserved for the ungodly” (Chapter 11).
Here we need not insist on the fact that our account of the martyrdom is received at fourth hand. Nor need we urge the fact that the writers of it, orphaned by fierce persecutors, do not name eternal suffering as their doom. Taking the latter passage as the words of Polycarp himself, we remark that Eusebius, who quotes it, uses the phrase “unquenchable fire” in speaking of the martyrdom of Christians. And Polycarp might naturally contrast such a fire, consuming the body, with that which utterly destroys body and soul, as if the one were “soon quenched,” and the other an “eternal punishment.” It avails little, therefore, that a modern divine, citing the document as a letter to the Smyrna saints, renders the word reserved “perpetually fed.” The writers speak of the joy of Polycarp that he was “thought worthy of the present day and hour, to have a share in the number of the martyrs and in the cup of Christ, unto the resurrection of eternal life, both soul and body, in the in-corruption “of the Holy Spirit” (Chapter 14). They speak of his “noble martyrdom, him of blameless life from his earliest age wreathed with the crown of immortality” (Chapter 17). “By his patience he gained victory over the unjust prince, receiving the crown of immortality” (Chapter 19).
The Book of the Shepherd, written by Hennas in A. D. 139 or 140, was read by the churches of Greece as late as the time of Jerome. It is quoted with great respect by Irenaeus. Clement of Alexandria cites a passage as “divinely expressed;” and Origen confesses he thought it “divinely inspired.” Bunsen calls it “one of those books which, like the Divina Commedia and the Pilgrim’s Progress, captivate the mind by the united power of thought and fiction, both drawn from the genuine depths of the human soul.” By the Council of Nice it was deemed almost as an inspired mirror of orthodoxy, and was the great exponent of the religious mind of the second century.
It consists of three parts: 1. Visions; 2. Commands, or Precepts of Christian Duty; 3. Similitudes. In the commands we meet the phrase “shall live unto God,” which is the ever- repeated promise to the believer, and the great reward of obedience. It is doubtless taken from Luke 20:38, and if we have explained that passage correctly, it denotes true, godly, spiritual life, which inherits the world to come, and is alone eternal. A few extracts will illustrate the writer’s eschatology.
“They who are of this kind shall prevail against all impiety and continue unto life eternal. Happy are they that do righteousness; they shall not perish forever” (Vision 2:3). “The fiery and bloody colour signifies that this world [seculum] must be destroyed by fire and blood. But the white colour denotes the world which is to come, in which the elect of God shall dwell; because the elect of God shall be pure and without spot unto life eternal” (Vision 4:3).
“I inquire diligently into all things, because I am a sinner, that I may know what I must do that I may live. Thou shalt live if thou shalt keep these my commands“ (Command i5: 2). “Fear God and thou shalt live; and whosoever shall fear him, and keep his commands, their life is with the Lord (Dressel, they shall live forever); but they who keep them not, there is no life in them” (Command 7:). “He that doubts, shall hardly live unto God” (Command 9). “An evil desire is very horrible and wild, and by its wildness consumes men. A man is ruined by it. For it destroys those who have not the garment of a good desire, and delivers them unto death.” “They that are subject unto (evil desires) shall die for ever” (Command 12: 1, 2).
“In the summer, some trees have leaves and bring forth fruit; others are withered. The world to come is the world’s summer, when the just will show their fruit, and those who are immersed in a variety of worldly business will remain withered and lifeless” (Similitude 3, Bunsen’s paraphrase). Or, “The trees which are green are the righteous, which shall possess the world to come. The wicked, like the trees which thou saw dry, shall as such be found dry and without fruit in that other world. And like dry wood they shall be burned“ (Similitude 4) “If thou defile the Holy Spirit, thou shalt not live“ (Similitude 7). “This kind of men are ordained unto death. These have hope of life in repentance. Their defection has some hope of renewal (resurrection). But death is eternal perdition” (Similitude 6:2).
“If any one shall again return to his dissension (comp. Romans 2: 8), he shall be shut out from the tower, and shall lose his life. Many have altogether departed from God; they have utterly lost life” (Similitude 8: 8). “They who have known the Lord, and have seen his wonderful works, if they shall live wickedly, shall be doubly punished, and shall die for ever” (Similitude 9:18; comp. Jude 1:12).
Thus the Apostolic Fathers. We will next examine the early creeds and Liturgies of the Church.
The so-called Apostles’ Creed is doubtless of very early date, and contains the essentials of Christian faith. It says not a word expressly of the destiny of the lost, but, asserting a “remission of sins,” it leaves us to infer that the unbelieving and un-forgiven have not “life everlasting.” It closes with the hope of that life, and its whole tenor is a serene repose and joy in the majesty and love of God. It is the model of numerous symbols of the Fathers. Of about twenty of these, collected by Pearson, only one, that of Origen, employs extra-scriptural terms to denote the destiny of the lost. This remarkable document will be considered in its place.
A work which Bunsen styles “The Church and House Book“ was composed, he says, “by believing souls whose names are known only to God, and sealed with the blood of the confessors of the faith. It exhibits a testimony of faith in the moral government of the world, practically tried; a testimony to the freedom of mind and to the indestructibility of the dignity of man, against the tyranny of a Nero, and the administration of justice of a Trajan; a light in the midst of the darkness of despairing infidelity, and of a comfortless philosophy among the educated classes. There is nothing which makes this document more venerable than its divine simplicity and childlikeness.”
The following passages contain its doctrine of the last things: “There are two ways: one is the way of life, and the other is the way of death; and there is much difference in these two ways. But the way of life is, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, who created thee, and thou shalt glorify Him who redeemed thee from death; for this is the first commandment.” “Wrath and evil desire, if they be suffered always to remain, arc demons. And when they have dominion over a man, they change him in soul, so that he may be prepared for a great crime; and when they have led him into unrighteous acts, they will rejoice in the destruction of that man.”
“For the day of the Lord draws nigh, in which everything that is seen shall be dissolved, and the Wicked One shall be destroyed with it; for the Lord cometh, and His reward is with him” (book 1, Chapter 2). It gives the phrase: “He eats eternal damnation,” without comment (book 4, Chapter 3). Believers are said to “look for the hope of the Day of Light forever, which shall enlighten us forever in the Resurrection of the Dead. And all ye believers, if ye fulfil these things, and remember that ye teach one another, and instruct the catechumens to perform them, nothing shall try you, and ye shall not mourn forever” (book 4, Chapter 8; i.e. ye shall cease from mourning, forever; compare Daniel 12:3; Revelation 21:4). “If we have sealed ourselves with this [the blood of the Lamb] on our foreheads, we shall be delivered from those who wish to destroy us. And if ye receive these things with thanksgiving and a right faith, ye shall be sanctified, and received into eternal life” (book 4, Chapter 9).
Of the voluminous “Apostolic Constitutions” that have come down to us, Bunsen regards as genuine tradition the Canons of book 8, chapter 48. The only reference to the last things is in the Benediction: “Now God, who alone is unbegotten, and the Maker of the whole world, vouchsafe to you eternal life, through the mediation of His beloved Son, our God and Saviour,” etc.
Tillemont regards the added “Constitutions” as less ancient than the Council of Nice. Cotelerius assigns them to the age before Epiphanius (A. D. 3G8), and thinks them greatly corrupted. These admissions invalidate all argument from the phrase “immortal soul” which occurs in a few passages; yet it may be used in a conditional sense. After the statement that “the continuance in being throughout all ages” is “due to the rational nature of man,” the Sybilline leaves are cited thus:
“Whoever have sinned impiously, These the earth again shall cover; But all the pious shall live again in the world;“ with the remark that “if, therefore, this prophetess herself confesses the Resurrection, and doth not deny the restoration of all things, and distinguishes the godly from the ungodly, it is in vain for them to deny our doctrine (book 5, Chapter 7). The entire collection contains no note of eternal suffering.
The spirit of the early Church Liturgies is given in the following passages: “Make alive the souls of us all, and let not the death of sin have dominion over us, nor over any of thy people.” “May they [the bread and the cup] become unto all of us who partake of them, faith, sobriety, healing, wisdom, sanctification, renewal of soul, body and spirit, communion of the bliss of eternal life, and of incorruption, to the praise of Thy most holy name.“ (Church of Alexandria, cir. A. D. 225). “Enlighten the eyes of our understanding, that we may partake without condemnation of this immortal and heavenly food” (Church of Byzantium, cir. A. D. 300). “Remember, O Lord God, the spirits of all flesh who have Relieved, from the righteous Abel unto this day. Thou thyself give them rest, there in the land of the living, in Thy kingdom, in the delight of Paradise, in the bosom of Abraham,” etc. (Church of Antioch, 4th century). “Thou didst make man, of an immortal soul and a corruptible body; the one out of nothing, the other of the four elements. Leading him into the Paradise of delight, Thou didst grant him the control and use of all things, forbidding only the taste of one tree, in the hope of that which was better; that if he should keep the command, he might gain immortality as the reward of it. Yet caring for him. Thou didst call him unto regeneration; loosing the bond of death. Thou didst announce to him life by resurrection.”
“The blood of Christ, the cup of life.” “Partaking of the precious body and blood of Christ, to the profit of soul and body, the preserving of holiness, the forgiveness of sins, and the life of the world to come” (Church of Antioch, close of 3d century). “That those who eat and drink may partake health in this world, and may attain the crown of eternal life in the world to come” (Spanish Liturgies).
The phrase “immortal soul“ as above noted is remarkable, because it is frequently employed against the early heretics. They were nearly all Gnostics, denying the Incarnation and the Resurrection. With the exception already named, they all held what would now be called the immortality of the soul. But they held it in such a form that it seemed rather a philosophy than a matter of faith. Theirs was in fact the ethical theology which dispenses with the importance of the historic facts of redemption. Thus Hippolytus says that one of them, Basilides, “teaches the doctrines of Aristotle the Stagyrite, not those of Christ.” This will explain the censure of the heretics in the Apostolical Constitutions, where Simon Magus, Dositheus, Cerinthus, Basihdes, Marcus, Menander and Saturninus, are reckoned as “atheists,” who say that “there is no Providence; that we are not to believe in a Resurrection; that there is no judgment nor retribution; that the soul is not immortal; “and where it is said that“ the Basmotheans deny Providence, and say that the world was made by spontaneous action, and take away the immortality of the soul” (book 6, Chapter 10, 6). But it is afterwards said: “They fancy that from the dead they shall arise, spirits without flesh; who shall be condemned for ever in eternal fire. Fly, therefore, from them, lest ye perish with them in their iniquities” (book 6, Chapter 26).
But the conditional sense of the phrase “immortal soul” may be inferred with most reason from the first case in which it occurs in a Christian work. This is in the much prized epistle to Diognetus, written about A. D. 135, but by whom is not known. It is commonly ascribed to Justin Martyr; but Bunsen thinks that it may have been written by Marcion, less heretical than his reputation, though he was a disciple of Cerdo, a Valentinian; and that the last section of the extant epistle was added by Hippolytus. If Justin was its author, his Platonism will explain the phrase; if Marcion, it can express nothing more absolute than the views of Valentinus. It is found as a part of the following similitude: “What the soul is in the body. Christians are in the world;“ — diffused through it; in it, yet not of it; invisible; hated by it, yet unharmed; loving it in pureness; shut up in it, yet upholding it; made better and nourished by maltreatment. “ The immortal soul dwells in a mortal tabernacle; and so do Christians dwell by the side of that which is perishable, while they wait for immortality in Heaven” (Chapter 6). The author had before said that Christians are “put to death, and they come to life again” (Chapter 5), with evident allusion to Paul’s expression: “as dying, and behold, we live;“ i.e. in the resurrection. In another passage men are spoken of as having “ proved unworthy of life;“ awaiting “punishment and death;“ and redeemed by the gift of “the Just for the unjust, the Imperishable for perishable men, the Immortal for mortals;“ by whom we “attain life,” who is “our Glory, our Strength, our Life“ (Chapter 9).
The destiny of the unregenerate is twice named: “Some of these [the philosophers] say that God is fire — call that God, to which they themselves are hastening“ (Chapter 8); and in the closing exhortation not to fear martyrdom: “When thou canst despise that which appears to be death here; when thou dreads that which really is death, a death which is kept in store for those who will be condemned to that eternal fire which will punish unto the end those whom it receives; — then shalt thou admire those who can bear patiently the earthly fire, and bless them when thou thyself hast tasted that fire.”
But it will be said that in the documents thus far examined nothing is said explicitly of annihilation. For argument’s sake, this may be granted. The absence of all mention of immortality or eternal sorrow for the wicked, in these books, sustains our assertion that this is not a doctrine of Revelation. And these books speak less precisely (though very plainly) of the doom of the wicked, for two reasons: 1. The Gospel was not designed to be a negation, but a message of life; which men greatly needed. 2. The conflict with the doctrine of natural immortality did not assume a philosophic form until the middle of the second century; and then began a manifest commixture of Christian and Platonic doctrine, the progress of which will be traced when we come to speak of Justin Martyr and his followers. But in the writings of two persons, containing the most earnest protests against the corruptions of philosophy, we find the doctrine of ’destruction” in unmistakable terms.
Irenaeus, a disciple of Polycarp, and bishop of Lyons, was martyred A. D. 202. His principal work, preserved chiefly in a Latin translation, is a refutation of existing heresies, principally the Gnostic. We have also the title of a work he wrote, addressed to Florinus, on the “Monarchy,” designed to show that God is not the author of evil. The affectionate address to Florinus, preserved by Eusebius, gives the best view of the character of Irenaeus.
In his “creed” he speaks of the final judgment thus: “Wicked spirits, and angels that have transgressed and become apostate, and the impious and unjust and lawless and blasphemous among men, will he [Christ] send into everlasting fire. But upon the just ... he will graciously bestow life, and grant them immortality, and gain for them eternal glory.”
His view of the nature and destiny of the soul is most fully stated in the following passage, directed against the denial of creation and providence: “They who say that souls which lately began to be cannot long continue to exist, but they must be either unbegotten and immortal, or must be born and die with the body, — let them know that God alone, the Lord of all, is without beginning or end, ever and truly the same. All things made by Him, because beginning their existence, are thereby inferior to their maker. But they continue to exist, and endure for length of years, according to the will of their Creator, God. Hence, as their beginning, so likewise their continued being, is His gift. For as the heavens, the sun, moon and stars, so likewise souls and spirits, since they began to be, all continue so long as God wills their being and continuance. As the spirit of prophecy witnesses:
‘He spake and they were formed; He commanded, and they were created; He established them forever, even forever and ever.’ And again it said of the salvation of man: ‘He asked of Thee life, and Thou gave him length of days forever and ever; ‘the Father of all making a grant of continuance forever and ever to those who are saved. For life is not of ourselves, nor of our own nature, but a gift of God’s favour. And therefore he who preserves the grant of life, and renders thanks to Him who bestows it, shall receive length of days forever and ever. But he who rejects it, and proves unthankful to his Maker for creating him, and will not know Him who bestows it, deprives himself of the gift of duration to all eternity. And therefore the Lord speaks thus to such ungrateful persons:
‘If you have not been faithful in that which is least, who will commit much unto you?’ signifying that they who are unthankful to Him for this short temporal life, which is His gift, shall justly fail to receive from Him length of days forever and ever. For as the animal body is not life itself, but partakes of life, so likewise the soul is not itself life, but receives the life bestowed upon it by God. Whence it is said: ‘The first man became a living soul;’ teaching us to distinguish between the soul, and the life of the soul. Souls therefore receive their life and their perpetual duration as a donative from God, continuing in being from non-existence because God wills them to exist and to subsist. For the will of God should have rule and lordship in all things; all else should yield and be subservient thereto. And of the creation and duration of the soul, let so much be said.”
In another passage, speaking of the Incarnation, he says: “He who was the true bread of the Father, gave himself to us as milk, sharing our humanity; that we, being as it were suckled by the breasts of his flesh, and inured by such nursing to eat and drink the Word of God, might be able to receive the bread of immortality, which is the Spirit of the Father.” And again: “The incomprehensible and invisible God offers himself to men as visible, and comprehensible, and receivable, that He may give life to those who receive and see Him by faith. For as His greatness is unsearchable, so is His goodness unspeakable, whereby He gives life to those who see Him. For to live without life was impossible; but the substance of life comes by- partaking of God; and to partake of God is to know God and enjoy of His goodness. Men therefore will see God that they may live, being made immortal by the vision, and attaining unto God.”
In two instances Irena3us has been claimed as expressing the common view of immortality. But the scope of one passage, in which he is speaking of the resurrection, shows that he names the soul as immortal, not absolutely, but in comparison with the body, which dies and is dissolved; not so the soul, nor the spirit. The other passage is directed against the Gnostics, who held that the Demiurge had not power to bestow immortality. And in the context he remarks that things which are by nature immortal, need no kindly help, to live forever.
One hundred and one years after the martyrdom of Irenaeus, Arnohius published the profession of his faith. He was a rhetorician of Sicca, in Numidia, under the Emperor Diocletian. He had been bitterly opposed to Christianity; for which reason, according to some accounts, he was at first refused baptism by the bishop of his
place, supposing that his conversion was insincere. But the writing of his work against the heathen religions removed all such scruples, and he was then received to the communion of the Church without question. For his learning his writings are commended by Jerome as worthy of study, along with those of Origen, Tertullian, Novatian and others. The same father tells a story that Arnobius had been moved by a dream to embrace the Christian faith; upon which Neander remarks that he “appears like one who had been led to the faith after a long protracted examination, and not by a sudden impression from dreams. His work does not show the novice, who was still a catechumen, but a man already mature in his convictions, if he was not orthodox according to the views of the church.”
Neander speaks also of the “ free, independent manner in which he seems to have come to Christianity, through the reading of the New Testament, especially the Gospels.”
From a few critics Arnobius has received faint praise. One of his editors thinks him manifestly heterodox and little acquainted with the New Testament, because he does not name the “everlasting fire.” Another commentator endeavours to prove his orthodoxy in the modern sense, by citing the passage in which he speaks of “unquenchable fire.” Before we give his views of the destiny of the lost, it is sufficient to reply that they were not even censured until long after his day; and the opposite view was not made an article of faith for 1200 years.
“Do you smile,” says he, “when we tell of Gehennas and certain inextinguishable fires, into which we know that souls are hurled by their enemies [the evil demons]? But does not your own Plato, in his book on the soul’s immortality, speak of Acheron, and Styx, and Cocytus, and Pyriphlegethon, where he says that souls are whelmed and sunk and burned? Who does not see that what is immortal and un-compounded can feel no pain, and that which feels pain cannot be immortal? Plato is authority for what is very like the truth. For though the mild and benevolent man thought it inhuman to condemn souls by a capital sentence, yet he thought it nothing improper that they should be thrown into rivers, roaring with sheets of flame and noisome with reeking whirlpools. For they are hurled down, and, reduced to nothingness, they vanish away in the abortion of an eternal destruction.
For souls are of a middle nature, as Christ has discovered to us, and such that they can die if they know not God, or be delivered from death if they embrace His gifts and favours. And (what men did not know they may now understand) this is the real death of man which leaves him nothing. What we see is but the separation of soul and body, not his utter destruction. This, I say, is the true death of man, when souls that know not God are consumed by long continued torment, by a fierce fire into which certain cruel enemies shall cast them, who were unknown before Christ and detected by himself alone. Wherefore we should not be deceived or deluded with vain hopes, by that which a new class of men, elated with an extravagant opinion of themselves, tell us: that souls are immortal, next in rank of dignity to the supreme God, derived from him as Creator and Father, divine, wise, inspired with knowledge, and free from stain of gross matter.“
We have said that in the Scriptures the phrase “to know God” is not a definition of “life,” but indicates the way of life. To this point Arnobius says: “Souls were formed not far from the yawning jaws of death, yet such that they might become long lived by the gift and beneficence of the Sovereign Ruler, if they but endeavour and strive to know Him, (for the knowledge of Him is, as it were, the leaven of life, preservative against dissolution) and, laying aside their wildness and inhumanity, cherish gentler sentiments that they may be prepared for that which shall be bestowed upon them.”
Arnobius proceeds, with keen satire, and with lively description of human nature as it is, to refute the arguments then and now current for the soul’s immortality. Is man divine? Why is he half animal? Is the soul a thing of reason? Let man show himself rational. The arguments from human skill, from the sciences and the fine arts, from man’s hopes and fears, are duly considered. Also the argument from the nature of the soul as a simple substance; and from its supposed reminiscences of a pre-existent state. So likewise the practical tendencies of this or that belief. What is immortal must be ever free; what reason for alarm, if such a soul should revel in vice?
“And what ground of hope, if, as Epicurus held, the soul must die? The golden mean is a mingled hope and fear, based on the doctrine of a soul that may either live or die. Are souls indeed a divine and royal offspring? bow unroyally they behave! The notion of a pre-existent state is met with a long tissue of questions why man is reduced to his present state. And if God created souls not only where they are, but such as they are, is He not the author of evil? But are there too few good men to allow the belief that they alone will live? Then by what rule of induction do they immortalize the race? Yet the badness of man does not disprove the goodness of God.
For “this we do hold and know; on this one clear and manifest truth do we take our stand, — that all the gifts of God are for the benefit and happiness of all; most full of delight, love, joy, and gladness; yielding pleasures incorruptible and ever-during; freely offered to the wishes and earnest efforts of all; and to be excluded from them is destruction and death.” But “God compels no one. He alarms no one with an imperious terror. For our salvation is not necessary to Him that He should either gain or lose, if on the one hand he shall make us gods, or shall let us, in dissolution and decay, come to naught.”
If any would pass by these words of Arnobius, as not expressing the opinions of his age, to whom should appeal be made if not to Athanasius, whose very name is redolent of immortality, and who is commonly styled the Father of Orthodoxy, as he was the master-spirit of the council of Nice?
This appeal is attempted in a late citation of a book published among the works of Athanasius. The citation is unhappy because the words quoted do not express the modern view so decidedly as others in the same book. But it is more unhappy, because the book itself is deemed undoubtedly spurious, by the best critics.” And not only did Athanasius not know the book, but it will be hard to show that he held its doctrine. In a few instances only does he seem to call the soul immortal, when, evidently accommodating his argument to those who denied immortality, he says: “If the soul moves the body, much more must it have power to move itself; and, possessing self-motion, it must live after the death of the body. How can it be that when it is freed from the body, it shall not have a still clearer knowledge of immortality?
For if, when bound to the body, it lived a life independent of the body, much more will it live after the death of the body. And it shall not cease to live, through the God who framed it thus, by His Word, even our Lord Jesus Christ. And therefore does it consider and contemplate things immortal and eternal, because it is immortal. And as the senses of the mortal body are occupied with things mortal, so must the rational soul behold things immortal, and be itself immortal, and live forever. For the thoughts and conceptions of immortality never leave it, but remain in it; being an incentive as it were, for the securing of immortality. “This looks as if Athanasius were telling what is the proper end and aim of the soul, but not its destiny. He had already said: “God made man in His own image, giving him the knowledge of His own eternity, that by the grace of Him who gave it, and by the power of the Paternal Word, he might rejoice and dwell with God, living a happy and truly blessed, even an immortal life.” And he concludes thus:
“O thou lover of Christ, rejoice and be of good hope! Because immortality and the kingdom of heaven is the fruit of faith and piety towards him, if only thy soul be adorned with his precepts. For as eternal life is the reward of those who walk in His ways, so, to those who depart from Him and walk not in the path of virtue, there is great shame and remediless doom ( a pardonless danger), in the day of judgment; for that they knew the way of truth, but did the thing contrary thereto.”
In another treatise he speaks of the original estate of our first parents as a life in paradise, free from grief and pain and care, with the promise of immortality in heaven. But if they should sin, and become vile by alienation from God, let them know that they should suffer corruption in death according to their nature, and should no longer live in Paradise, but should die in banishment, and remain in death and corruption. Which also the Holy Scripture signifies: ‘In the day that thou eats thereof, thou shalt surely die.’ “What can this mean, if not that they should not only die, but remain in the corruption of death?” Then, alluding to the Incarnation, he proceeds: “God desired man to continue in in-corruption. But men neglecting and departing from the knowledge of God, and devising and regarding that which was evil, incurred the threatened condemnation of death. They remained no longer such as they were created, but contracted corruption according to their own devices, and came under the power and dominion of death. For by transgression they reverted to their native condition; so that, as from non existence they began to be, they must now in due time suffer the loss and destruction of their being. And that justly; for if, having once the nature of non-being, they were called into being by the presence and goodness of the Word, when they divested themselves of the knowledge of God, and turned aside to non-entities, (for evil things are not entities, but good things are entities, since they are of God, who truly is,) it followed that they must be also divested of the nature of existing forever. That is, they must perish, and remain in death and corruption. For man is by nature mortal, seeing he was created from non-being. Yet, as made in the likeness of the true Being, to be preserved by the knowledge of him, he might have escaped the force of corruption, and remained immortal.”
The scope of the argument requires us to refer this passage to something more than man’s physical nature. In the same treatise the divinity of Christ is inferred from his power of giving life to man, and because he is very life itself. And at the close the judgment of “eternal fire” and of “outer darkness” is put in special contrast with in-corruption and immortality.
Thus Athanasius. He never speaks of the wicked as being immortal, or as suffering forever. A few other passages more naturally indicate the views so apparent in Arnobius; and the absence of all explicit statement of the destiny of the lost, shows at least that he did not regard the modern view as an article of faith.
6. MAN’S INTERMEDIATE NATURE.
Before we examine the changing and diverging history of Christian doctrine, we should note more fully one of the most marked and most widely accepted results of the early Christian philosophy. We refer to the doctrine of the intermediate nature of man, of which the reader will have observed some statements in the passages just given from Irena us, Arnobius, and Athanasius. We have already intimated this as the true doctrine of the soul’s nature, in replying to the question, how can the soul be immortal at all, if it is not so by nature. And, lest any should think we are playing fast and loose, or that we are unduly burdening the faith of men, when we say that the soul is absolutely neither mortal nor immortal, we will cite various expressions of this view from writers who had been nearly all philosophers, and v/ho still held the three most different views of the end of the wicked; variously believing as men do now, some that the ungodly would perish, others that they would suffer, others that they would be saved — forever.
Arnobius states the view most frequently; and most clearly in the following passage: “If souls are of a middle nature (qualitatis mediae), such as can die, how can they lose this middle quality and become immortal? If we say that we do not know, and have simply believed what we heard from a Mightier One, how shall we be taxed with credulity, for thinking that to the King Omnipotent nothing is difficult, and what is impossible to us is possible and easy to Him? And, moreover, do not you who doubt that souls are of a middle nature, held midway between life and death, regard all the gods, angels, da3mons, or whatever else be the name of the beings commonly supposed to exist, — as of a middle nature, subject to change in a doubtful destiny? And he proceeds to show that the gods, even if they are claimed to be immortal, are so, not by their own nature, but by the will and favour of the Father of the gods.
The elements of the same view we shall find in Justin Martyr, in words nearly the same as those of Irenasus. It is given more clearly, though crudely and with error, by his disciple, Tatian, as follows: “The soul is not in its own nature immortal, O Greeks, but mortal; yet it is able not to die. For it does die, and is dissolved with the body, if ignorant of the truth; but rises again with the body at the end of the world, receiving death in immortality for its punishment. “Whereas the soul that receives the knowledge of God, though dissolved for a time, does not die.”
Theophilus of Antioch states the doctrine thus: “Someone will ask. Was Adam by nature mortal? By no means. Immortal? Not thus, either. What then — nothing at all? I answer, neither mortal nor immortal; for if the Creator had made him from the first immortal. He would have made him a god. If mortal, then God would appear as the author of death. He made him, then, capable of becoming either; so that by keeping the command of God he might attain immortality as his reward, and become a god. But if he should turn to mortal things, and disobey God, he would be himself the author of his own death. For God made man free and with power of self-control.”
Lactantius says: “The other animals look downward, because they are of the earth, not having immortality, which is from heaven; but man stands erect and looks upward, because immortality is offered him, though it comes not unless given from God. For there would be no difference between the just and the unjust, if every man that is born were made immortal. Immortality, therefore, is not a law of our nature, but the wages and reward of virtue. For this reason God seeks to be worshiped and honoured by man as Father, that he may attain virtue and wisdom, which alone impart immortality.”
Augustine applied the same doctrine to man’s bodily condition, thus: “Before man’s sin the body might be called mortal in one respect and immortal in another; that is, mortal because it was capable of dying; immortal because it was able not to die. For not to be able to die, as God created some immortal natures, is one thing; to be able not to die is another thing.” Upon which a modern writer remarks: “A thing maybe said to be immortal conditionally, supposing such and such conditions performed; and in this sense we say, God made Adam immortal; for he had a power to sin, and so a power to die; he had a power to stand, and so a power to be freed from death. Augustine’s expression of posse non mori is known by all.”
In the fifth century, the same view is stated by Jemesius, who from a Neoplatonist became bishop of Emesa. He says: “Since the soul is not yet known in its essence, it is not suitable to determine respecting its energy. The Hebrews say that originally man was made evidently neither mortal, nor immortal; but on the confines of either
nature; so that, if he should yield to the bodily affections, he should share also the changes of the body; but if he should prefer the nobler affections of the soul, he should be deemed worthy of immortality.”
Theophylact says; “But the angels, although they be immortal, yet are so not by nature, but by grace; and therefore they have not immortality as their own, but participate of immortality.”
And Nicholas of Methone, so late as the twelfth century, whom Neander regards as the most learned theologian of his age, speaks as follows: “It is not every soul that neither perishes nor dies, but only the rational, truly spiritual and man’s intermediate nature.
divine soul, which is made perfect through virtue by participating in the grace of God. For the souls of irrational beings, and still more, of plants, may perish with the things which they inhabit, because they can not be separated from the bodies which are composed, and may be dissolved into their elements. .. . When any thing created is eternal, it is so not hij itself, nor in itself, nor for itself, but by the goodness of God; for all that is made and created has a beginning, and retains its existence only through the goodness of the Creator.”
The same doctrine is contained and adorned in these words of Jeremy Taylor: “Whatsoever had a beginning can also have an ending, and it shall die, unless it be daily watered from the streams flowing from the fountain of life, and refreshed with the dew of heaven, and the wells of God; and therefore God had prepared a tree in Paradise to have supported Adam in his artificial immortality. Immortality was not in his nature, but in the hands and parts, in the favour and super additions of God.”
Such was the view of the most cultured and philosophic minds, abandoning their old hope of immortality in the soul’s inherent nature. But this doctrine of man’s middle nature was gradually departed and corrupted, to end in the modern doctrine of man’s mixed nature, of body mortal, and soul immortal, each in the absolute sense. This notion seems to have been matured as early as the time of Pelagius, against whose view of physical death as natural the Synod of Carthage framed its canon in the twelfth century. Upon which the scholiast Balsamon comments thus, applying to the body only what former writers had asserted of man’s entire being: “God made man neither mortal nor immortal; but midway between greatness and humility; and having made him master of himself, and with power of free-will, he left him to choose either virtue or vice, and to receive either immortality or mortality.”
Such has been, until the most recent times, the doctrine of the Cliurch, Protestant as well as Catholic; of which hereafter.
7. THE ORIGIN OF THE CONFLICT.
The doctrine of the middle nature of man is, we think, that which alone explains a probation of man for life or death, or which makes death, either of body or soul, a possible penalty of divine law. Its natural result and application is also that which appears in our argument. But directly crossing the philosophic doctrine of man’s nature and dignity, those Christians who first thought it out might fail of carrying it out consistently to its results. They did thus fail. They stood within reach of the prize that should assure life to the long despair of men; that should guard the promise against abuse; and that should bequeath to the Church a Theodicy which was hinted in the words we have cited: “and that justly.” They touched this prize, and handled it, but they did not heartily grasp and secure it.
We come now to the turning point of our history, whence opinion began to diverge on either side of the right line we have been pursuing, to the confessedly fearful doctrine of eternal woe, and to the confessedly hazardous doctrine of a final salvation of all.
About the year 138 a woman of Rome, who with her husband had led an abandoned life, became a Christian. She endeavoured to reclaim her husband, but without success. She must now, if she would observe the law of Christ, seek a divorce. In revenge, her husband informs against her as a convert. She asks time to arrange her domestic affairs, when she will submit to a judicial investigation. Incensed at the delay, he accuses also her Christian teacher, who confesses his faith, and is condemned to death. Another person avows to the prefect his conviction of the injustice of such a proceeding, is accused, confesses, and dies. Another still remonstrates, and meets the same fate.
The triumph of tyranny is little favourable to meditation on the end of Evil; especially in a mind of ardent temperament, fervid with the thoughts and impulses of a recent conversion.
Such a one was Justin Martyr. This early defender of Christianity, whose first Apology was occasioned by the persecutions just named, and was addressed to a philosophic Emperor, had been a Platonist. He still wore the philosopher’s pallium, or cloak, and bore the name of “the Philosopher.” He hoped for the salvation of upright heathens, such as Socrates, by their virtual faith in Christ as the source of all divine illumination. He claimed for the truths of philosophy and of Christianity a common source, ascribing the former to a diffused traditional revelation from God. It is a favourite argument with him, that the Greek sages were indebted to the Jews, the chosen people, for doctrines which they held in common with the Christians. Thus, in his “Exhortation to the Greeks,” he alleges that Plato received from the Hebrew prophets his doctrine of the punishment of the soul in a future body, which he regards as involving the belief of a resurrection (Apology, chapter 20). In the same treatise he names as truths held in common by the philosophers and the Christians, the doctrines of the divine origin of the world and creation of man, of the soul’s immortality, and of judgment after this life (Chapter 8).
He had escaped the Platonic form of Dualism. But that he brought the principle of Dualism into his Christianity, is clear from the following passages. He says: “To lay before you in brief what we expect, what we have received and do teach: Plato and we are agreed as to a future judgment; we differ in that Minos and Rhadamanthus are his judges; Christ is ours. For the souls of the wicked, united to the same bodies, will be punished with eternal punishment, and not for a period of a thousand years only, as Plato asserted. If then any one shall tell us this is incredible or impossible, he must go on from error to error, until the fact shall prove us to be in the right” (Chapter 8). Again: “Each one is going on to eternal punishment or salvation, according to the merit of his deeds. If now all men knew these things, would any one choose vice for a season, knowing that he goes to eternal condemnation by fire? And not rather, by all means, restrain himself and adorn his soul with virtue, so as to attain the blessing of God, and avoid His punishment? (Chapter 12).
Again: “When we teach a general conflagration, what do we more than the Stoics? When we assert that the souls of the wicked are punished in a state of sensibility after death, and that the souls of the virtuous escaping those punishments, pass a happy life, we seem to assert no more than your poets and philosophers have done” (Chapter 20). Again: “Christ has foretold to us that he [Satan] with his host and the men who follow him, will be sent into fire to be punished for a boundless duration” (Chapter 28). And again: “He [Christ] shall raise up the bodies of all men who have ever lived; those of the worthy he will clothe with in-corruption; those of the wicked he will send, in eternal sensibility, with evil daemons, into eternal fire. But with what sensation and punishment the wicked will suffer, hear such statements as these: Their worm shall not be quiet, and their tire shall not be quenched; and then shall they repent when it will avail them nothing” (Chapter 52). And in his second Apology, writ- ten probably a short time after, Justin uses similar language, adding that he is not employing the empty alarms and affrights of the so-called philosophers, and would not drive men to the love of virtue by terror, as might be supposed (Chapter 13).
Here the use of the plural (punishments) instead of the singular, is to be noted, as also a disquieted if not burdened faith. “O, if men would only believe what impends over them!” is the saddening reflection of his mind, the rising cloud that began to be gloom the Christian’s sky.
Yet he never calls the soul immortal. The reason of this is very apparent in his “Dialogue with Trypho,” from which some have inferred that when he wrote this Dialogue he held the immortality of the righteous alone. We are not ‘prepared to say that this became his settled faith. We think, rather, that this seemed to him probable, and relieved the distress that is manifest in his Apologies. This might be true, though in one or two expressions he should give another view. But let us read his own words.
After a discussion of the soul’s pre-existence and eternity, he represents the aged Christian with whom he converses as saying: “But if the world was created, it must follow that souls were created also, and that there was a time when they were not; for they were created for the sake of men and other living creatures, even if you should say that they were created separately, and without their proper bodies.” Justin. — “This has the appearance of truth.” C. — “Therefore they are not immortal.” J.— . “No, they are not, seeing it is evident that the world was created.” C. — “However, I do not say that all souls will die; for that would be good news indeed to the bad. What then? Why, that the souls of the righteous remain in some better place, but the evil and wicked in a worse, waiting until the time of judgment. And so the former, being worthy to appear before God, shall not die anymore; and the latter shall be punished so long as it shall please God that they exist and be punished.”
It is well known that in this passage the Greek phrase for “all souls” is in itself ambiguous; the words may also mean “any souls.” We decline this translation as not demanded by the words immediately following; for Christian, we think, does not mean that annihilation would be gain to the wicked as their special doom, but either as painless, or as a common lot of man. This translation is also less consistent with the subsequent expressions; one person who makes it betrays a strong bias in rendering the term “worse” “a place of misery and torment;” and the translation we have given is approved by the best authorities.
To the last speech of Christian, Justin replies by asking if this is not the same with that which Plato darkly intimates in his Timasus; referring to a passage in which Plato speaks of the special origination by the supreme God of the creatures whom it behoves “to be of immortal rank, being called divine, taking the lead among those who ever follow a just example.” And Justin remarks: “God alone is uncreated and incorruptible, and there- fore he is God; but all other things besides him are created and corruptible. For this reason souls both die and are punished. For if they were uncreated, they could not sin, nor be guilty of folly; nor could they be timorous, and then bold again.”
He then digresses into an argument for monotheism from the principles of the philosophers, to which Christian replies: “I neither regard Plato nor Pythagoras, nor indeed any of their way of thinking. For that this [which he had before said] is the truth, is evident from hence. The soul either has life in itself, or it receives it from something else. But if it has life in itself, it would be the cause of life to something else, and not to itself; as motion may rather be said to move something else, than itself. That the soul lives, no one can deny. But if it lives, it lives not as being itself life, but as receiving life. Now, whatever partakes of anything, is different from that of which it partakes. But the soul partakes of life, because God wills it to live; and just so too it will no longer partake of life, whenever He does not desire it to live. For it cannot live of itself, as God does. But as the personal man does not always exist, and body and soul are not ever conjoined; but, whenever this harmony must be dissolved, the soul leaves the body, and the man is no more; so likewise whenever it is necessary that the soul should no longer be, the vital spirit leaves it, and the soul is no more, but itself returns again thither, whence it was taken“ (chapters 4-6).
These passages, compared with those previously cited, show an unsettled opinion; which may appear also in the following, where he speaks of eternal punishment without naming it as conscious suffering. Thus he says that Christ became man, that “that wicked serpent which did sin from the beginning, and the angels that have become like him, might be destroyed and death despised, and finally at Christ’s second coming cease from those who believe and live according to His will, and afterwards be no more; when some shall be sent unto the condemnation and judgment of fire to be punished unceasingly, and others shall dwell together in in-corruption, and immortality, free from pain and sorrow” (Chapter 45; compare 100).
Again: “If they should choose such things as are well pleasing in His sight. He would j lace them in a state of in-corruption, where they should not be liable to any pain or punishment; but if they should do that which is evil. He would inflict such punishment upon them as He should think proper” (Chapter 88). Again: “He shall raise up all mankind, and shall make some incorruptible, immortal, and free from pain, and place them in an eternal and indissoluble kingdom; but shall consign over others to the punishment of eternal fire” (Chapter 117). With these should be compared the expression in the second Apology: “God delays the breaking up and dissolution of the world, so that evil angels and daemons and men may cease to be, for the sake of the Christians, who are, in His mind, the [final] cause of nature” (Chapter 7). Here we cannot, with Semisch, regard the phrase as an “inconsiderate hyperbole,” but rather as betraying a latent persuasion of Justin’s mind.
Yet a single passage in the Dialogue forbids the belief that this was his settled opinion, while it discovers a most crude and contradictory exegesis. He says: “We have learned from Isaiah that the members (limbs) of those that have transgressed shall be devoured by the worm and by the unceasing fire, remaining ever immortal that they may be a spectacle to all flesh” (Chapter 130). This is quite as good reasoning as the similar arguments from parallel passages, which we have already examined. Taken together with other facts it justifies the re mark of Bunsen, speaking of the Christians of this period, that “scarcely any one of the eminent men who might have become good scholars, understood Hebrew; none had a clear idea of the laws of interpretation, and of the limits between exegesis and speculation, fact and idea. Thus all, more or less, fell into the abyss of allegorical mysticism, which is a declaration of exegetical bankruptcy, with a certain amount of intellectual capital to be spent in making it good.”
8. RESULTS IN THE EASTERN CHURCH.
Tatian, the Syrian, regarded his master Justin as “a most wonderful man.” But after Justin’s martyrdom he was, according to Irenaeus, elated with pride, and ambitious to promote a peculiar form of doctrine. Eusebius mentions a current saying that he made bold to put the sayings of Paul into more elegant language. He was also bitterly censured as blasphemously asserting that Adam, sinning not ignorantly, was not saved.
His doctrine of the soul appears to be a compound of the opinions of Justin and of the Gnostics. In his “Discourse to the Greeks“ he says man was made “an image of immortality, in imitation of his Maker; so that, as God hath immortality, man likewise, receiving a divine portion of God, might have that which is immortal” (Chapter 10). Again: “The spirit is not pre- served by the soul, but itself preserves the soul. Far the Word is the divine light, and the soul without understanding is darkness. Wherefore if it be alone, it inclines toward matter, and dies with the flesh. The spirit of God is not received by all, but descending upon those who live justly, and embracing their soul, renders it akin to itself” (Chapter 22). Again: “The heavenly spirit, together with the soul, will attain to the putting on of immortality instead of mortality, which other souls did not know of” (Chapter 35). But he is not always consistent with himself. “ We recognize,” he says, “ two kinds of spirit; one of which we call the soul; but the other is nobler than the soul, — the image and likeness of God; each of which was given to men at the first, that they might at the same time have a body, and be masters of it” (Chapter 18). This spirit as a power of “immortality for the sake of punishment,” he may have regarded as imposed upon those who did not otherwise receive it. This inconsequence in the reasoning of the early apologists may explain the opinion of a German writer, that all of them understood by the mortality of the soul simply its inferior and dependent nature, and not its actual liability to death for sin.
Tatian is known as the leader of the sect of Encratites, whose ascetic views were a practical Manichaeism. His extravagances are doubtless due in part to a wild and fanatical temper. But his deprecation of marriage was, perhaps, only too consistent with the notion that a friend or a child might suffer forever.
The Apology of Theophilus addressed to Autolycus, consists of three books which appear to have been written at different times. The progress of the argument shows, we think a progress of doubt respecting the destiny of the lost.
In the first book he says: “When thou shalt have put off mortality and put on immortality, thou wilt worthily see God. For God shall raise up thy flesh immortal, with thy soul; then, having become immortal, thou wait see Him who is immortal, if thou believe on him now. And then wilt thou know that thou hast unjustly reviled Him” (Chapter 7). “Whom do thou obey, if thou wilt, believing Him; lest, disbelieving now, thou be persuaded then when compelled by eternal punishments.” Which punishments he claims that the poets and philosophers stole from the prophets, to sanction their own teachings. Evil doers “shall at last be held in eternal fire. Since, my friend, thou hast said. Show me thy God, — this is my God; and I counsel thee to fear Him, and to believe in Him” (Chapter 14).
In the second book he cites Genesis 2: 7, with the remark: “Whence the soul is called by many immortal“ (Chapter 19). Man was placed on probation, “that, growing, and finally attaining perfection, and being manifest as a god he might thus ascend into heaven, in the possession of eternity. For man had been made intermediate; neither absolutely mortal, nor altogether immortal; but capable of either; just as the garden where he was placed was, for its beauty, intermediate between earth and heaven” (Chapter 24). Death was a merciful provision; “ God be- stowed it as a great blessing upon the man, that he might not remain for all time in sin; but he banished the transgressor from paradise, as in exile, that w hen he should by this punishment in due time expiate his sin, he might be reinstated.” Death is reconstructive: “Just as a vessel, if, when finished, it has some blemish, is recast and made over, so as to be new and whole, — death does the same for man; for he is, after a sort, broken in pieces, that in the resurrection he may appear sound; by which I mean, pure, just, and immortal” (Chapter 26). In the next chapter he reasserts the middle nature of man, in the words before cited. In a single instance he speaks of the just man as escaping “eternal punishments,” and proving “worthy of an eternal life from God” (Chapter 34). But at the close, quoting the poets and the Sybilline leaves at large, he says much of punishment and death, but nothing of eternal pain.
The third book opens with a noble argument from the Christian life and example. The doctrine of metempsychosis is called the reproach of this world’s wisdom (Chapter 7); but scarcely a word is said of man’s immortality or of his destiny.
The germs of restoration theology which we find in Theophilus are still more apparent in Athenagoras. We know little of his history; but according to Philip) of Sida, he was a catechist at Alexandria, before Clement.
A marked feature of his writings is the prominence he gives to that which is positive, in the doctrine of salvation. Man is saved for an infinite good. The nearest approach he makes to the modern doctrine of punishment is in the following passage of his “Embassy for the Christians.“ “Knowing that when released from this life, we shall either live another nobler life, not earthly but heavenly (since we shall dwell before God and with God as heavenly spirits, embodied, yet not fleshly, free from all change and suffering of soul); — or, if we share the ruin of others, a worse life, even in fire (for God did not create us like sheep and cattle, to serve a purpose and then perish and disappear); — we are not likely to give ourselves up to sin, or to provoke the displeasure of the great Judge” (Chapter 31; al. 27).
He sometimes speaks of the soul as immortal, and he censures the notion that it dies with the body as licentious (Chapter 36). In his treatise on the Resurrection, he says: “This corruptible shall put on in-corruption. That each one may receive the things done in the body, whether good or bad“ (Chapter 18). The wicked will be punished in another life, because this life is too short for their just recompense (Chapter 19). But the judgment is not the final cause of the resurrection, for then there could be no resurrection of those dying in infancy (Chapter 14). The resurrection is in general not injurious, but highly advantageous to man (Chapter 10). It is only a change of our being, and that for the better (Chapter 12). It effects a continuity of existence, and thus is just as much according to reason as that we should exist at all (Chapter 13). Man was created, not for the benefit of the Creator, nor of any other creature, but for himself; his own life is a proper end, and therefore it should not be after a while consumed and become extinct. Whence nothing can occur to man as a reason why he should cease to be (Chapter 12). “The multitude of those who fall away from the end that behoves them cannot set aside the common lot of mankind; the individual must be judged for himself, and each man rewarded or punished by the measure of the good or evil acts of his life” (Chapter 25).
In the system of Athenagoras the immortality of the soul is certainly of nature. “We shall find that with his successors, by reason of an ever free will which the Greek Fathers all maintained, that which we call grace came to be regarded as man’s due.
Clement of Alexandria, like Justin, embraced Christianity as the result of his free, philosophical inquiries. Seeking the aid of various teachers, he finally took up his abode in Egypt, where he met with Pantaenus, an eminent but devout Gnostic, who had penetrated most profoundly into the spirit of Scripture. Clement made Gnosis auxiliary to Christian doctrine, vindicating true philosophy as accordant with true faith; thus opposing both the rationalizing sceptics, and the unreasoning believers.
Clement does not speak of the soul as immortal, perhaps because this was a Gnostic style of expression, in which Christians did not yet freely indulge. In one instance he speaks of the soul as saved, by present grief, from “eternal death.” Elsewhere he defines the death of the soul as consisting in sin or ignorance. Punishment is the correction or amendment of the soul. “The chastisements of God are salutary and instructive, leading to amendment, and preferring the repentance of the sinner to his death; especially as souls in their separate state, though darkened by evil passions, have jet a clearer discernment than they had whilst in the body, because they are no longer hindered by the flesh.” Amendment is effected by the so-called “discreet fire,” called by the Latin Fathers the ignis sapiens, of which he says: “We mean that the fire sanctifies, not the flesh, but the sinning soul; not that gross, all-devouring fire, but the fire of wisdom, diffusing itself through the soul. To this fire, purifying the condemned, he refers the conflagration spoken of by the Stoics, and divers passages from Plato and from a philosopher of Ephesus, probably Heraclitus.
Replying to the objection against God’s goodness from His threatening, he says: “There is nothing that the Lord hates. For he can hate nothing, and, at the same time, will that it should exist. Nor does He will anything- not to exist, and yet cause it to exist. Nor does anything exist, if He wills it not. If, then, the Word hates aught. He wills it not to be. But naught exists, of whose existence God is not the cause. Therefore God hates not anything.”
The restoration theology of Origen is well known. He regarded all intelligent beings as originally alike, and human souls as fallen from a pre-existent state. All individual differences result from the agency of free will, which may estrange the creature from God, but itself abides, and may effect the repeated rise and fall of all finite beings. It followed that no salvation is absolutely final, but evil is an eternal vicissitude.
As with Clement, and afterwards with Archelaus, in the dispute with Manes, this doctrine of a general salvation was, in the system of Origen, partly constrained by the Gnostic objection, that the Demiuge was a malign being. But it was still more closely connected with his view of the natural immortality of the soul, as related to God, to which he attached great importance in his system. Confessing the doctrine to be dangerous, he states the doctrine of eternal punishment, or rather punishments, in a hypothetical way.
A signal instance occurs in his “Confession of Faith;” the first in which the nature and destiny of the soul are told in extra-scriptural language. He says: “ Now that the soul hath its own substance and life, it shall receive according to its merits when it departs from this world; to possess eternal life and blessedness, if its deeds have secured this inheritance; or to be given over to eternal fire and punishments, if the guilt of its sins shall bring it to this doom.”
Hippolytus should be here named as belonging to the Eastern Church, though he was Bishop of the Harbor of Rome. He was a disciple of Irenaeus, and a friend of Origen. His language respecting the destiny of the wicked is too poetic to decide his belief, especially when compared with what he says of the righteous. “Unquenchable and eternal fire,” he says, “awaits them; and a certain fiery worm, that dies not, nor destroys the body, but foaming from the body in ceaseless pain, abides.” Again: “By this knowledge ye will escape the approaching threat of the fire of judgment, and the dark lightless eye of Tartarus, never illumined by the voice of the Logos, and the ebullitions of the overflowing lake of hellish fire, and the ever-fixed, threatening eye of the avenging angels of Tartarus, and the worm which winds itself without rest round the foaming body to feed upon it. This thou wilt escape, having been taught to know the true God; and thou wilt have an immortal body, together with an imperishable soul, and wilt receive the kingdom of heaven. Having lived on earth, and having known the Heavenly King, thou wilt be a companion of God, and a fellow heir with Christ, not subject to lust, or passions, or sickness. For thou hast become God. For whatsoever hardships thou didst suffer when a man, He gave them to thee because thou was a man; but that which is proper to God, he has declared he will give thee because thou art deified, being born again an immortal.”
Bunsen remarks that Hippolytus “evidently intends, in this piece of rhetorical description, to emulate the celebrated myth, which in the Gorgias we find placed in the mouth of Socrates, respecting the judgment and the state of the soul after death. Nor do I think that it ever entered the mind of Hippolytus to attribute any authority to his rhapsody. But in progress of time some of his phrases got into the liturgies of the Churches, and were then canonized by those who canonized liturgies and rubrics. Hippolytus dreamt of no such thing; for the Gentile tales he substituted a Christian talc founded on some of the symbolical expressions in the parables and the Apocalypse, or on certain phrases in some apocryphal work, availing himself also judiciously of a beautiful line in Pindar or in Plato. Why should he not do so? “Was it his fault that later dark ages misunderstood such innocent poetry?“
The opinions of the Greek Fathers now begin to form an almost unbroken history of restoration theology. The views of Origen were held by Gregory Thaumaturgus (A. D. 243), who was for eight years his pupil, and became bishop of Neo-Caesarea; perhaps by Diomisius, bishop of Alexandria (A. D. 247), another pupil of Origen, to whom he inscribed his discourse on martyrdom; certainly by Pierius and Theognostus, distinguished teachers of the Alexandrian Church (A. D. 282); probably by Metliodius bishop of Tyre (A. D. 290), at different times an admirer and an opponent of Origen, but the latter without censure of his restoration theology views; certainly by Pamphilus, presbyter of Caesarea (A. D. 294), and Eusehius (A. D. 320), who opposed the censures of Origen, and conjointly wrote in his defence; by Titus of Bostra (A. D. 362); probably by Basil (A. D. 370); certainly by Didymus of Alexandria; perhaps by Gregory Nazianzen; certainly by Gregory Nyssen (A. D. 371), Diodorus of Tarsus (A. D. 378), and Theodore of Mopsuestia (A. D. 394); probably by Synesius (A. D. 410); certainly by Maximus (A. D. 662), and by Nemesius (A. D. 490) and Nicholas of Methone (A. D. 1069), who admitted immortality to be of grace, but supposed it to be the actual for- tune of all men.
9. RESULTS IN THE WESTERN CHURCH.
The Latin Fathers, as compared with the Greek, generally speak less of the essential freedom of the will, and attach greater importance to the necessities of government, both human and divine. To their writings, the Church doctrine of eternal suffering is mainly due. Yet even among them, besides the manifest evil effects of this doctrine, we shall find such tenderness for the views of Origen, and occasional tendencies to them, as show that their own views were felt as burdensome. We shall find Gieseler justified in his statement, that “the belief in the unalienable power of amendment in all intelligent beings, and in the limited duration of future punishment, was so general even in the West, and among the opponents of Origen, that it seemed entirely independent of his system, to which, doubtless, its origin must be traced.”
Tertullian of Carthage (A. D. 200-220), was of a fierce and fiery temper, and became, as we have observed, a Montanist, advocating and systematizing the principles which led to the doctrine of celibacy and of penance. He was the first, so far as w e know, who expressly affirmed, and argued, that the torments of the lost would be co-eternal with the happiness of the saved. His doctrine of eternal punishment is the obverse side of the notion of the ignis sapiens, before noted. He says: “The philosophers know the difference between secret and common fire. That which serves for the use of man is of quite another nature from that which ministers to the justice of God, whether it hurls thunderbolts from heaven, or belches forth from the volcano; for it burns without consuming, and repairs what it preys upon. The mountains remain, though ever-burning; the man who is struck by lightning is not reduced to ashes by the fire. Here is a witness of the eternal fire, an emblem of judgment perpetually feeding its penalty. The mountains burn and endure; why not guilty men, the enemies of God?“
Another passage shows an apparent relish of the doctrine: “You are fond,” he says, “of your spectacles. But there are other spectacles; that day which is disbelieved, derided by the nations, the last and eternal day of judgment when all ages shall be swallowed up in one conflagration — what a variety of spectacles shall then appear! How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many kings, and false gods in heaven, together with Jove himself, groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness! so many magistrates who persecuted the name of the Lord, liquefying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in raging fire, with their scholars whom they persuaded to despise God, and to disbelieve the resurrection; and so many poets shuddering before the tribunal, not of Rhadamanthus, not of Minos, but of the disbelieved Christ! Then shall we hear the tragedians more tuneful, in the expression of their own sufferings; then shall we see the dancers more sprightly, amidst the flames; the charioteer all red-hot in his burning car; and the wrestlers hurled, not upon the accustomed list, but upon a plain of fire.”
Milman confesses “it would be wiser for Christianity, retreating upon its genuine records in the Kew Testament, to disclaim this fierce African, than to identify itself with his furious invectives, by unsatisfactory apologies for their unchristian fanaticism.” But the best apology may be found in his own more hopeful views, when he says:
“Yet there is in the soul that original good, divine and genuine, and which is properly natural to it. For what comes from God is not so much extinguished, as obscured. There are some very bad and some very good, and nevertheless all have one kind of soul; hence in the worst there is something good, and in the best, something bad. Accordingly, when the soul has come to the faith, regenerate in a second birth by water and heavenly grace, the veil of its former corruption is withdrawn, and it sees its own light clearly.” Which seems to warrant Neander’s remark that “ he regards Hades as the common intermediate state, where there is a presentiment of happiness and of punishment, and whence every person according to the measure of his purification from all sin, will be raised, earlier or later, to a participation in the millennial glory. Every sin, even the least, must be atoned for by a delay of the resurrection; and from this tenet afterwards arose the idea of a purifying punishment, an ignis expurgatoris.
This is the brighter side of the ignis sapiens. The darker side was offered again by Minucius Felix (A. D. 210), in an Apology, addressed to a heathen friend, Octavius, probably soon after his own conversion. He illustrates the nature of the fire in the same way as Tertullian, and adds a theodicy: “None but a profane man doubts that they are deservedly tormented as impious and unjust, who know not God; since to ignore the Parent and Lord of all is no less wicked than to injure Him.”
Cyprian, the successor and devoted admirer of Tertullian, whom he called “the master,” was martyred A. D. 250. The following passage shows the temper of the man: “Gehenna, ever burning, will prey upon the damned, a devouring punishment of burning flames, torments that can have no respite or end. Their souls will be preserved with their bodies for the pain of endless tortures. Then shall he who made a brief spectacle of us be himself a spectacle forever, and the transitory joy of cruel eyes in our persecutions shall be repaid with a perpetual vision, according to the Holy Scripture which said: ‘Their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched; and they shall be a spectacle to all flesh.’“ He intimates no restoration, but the doctrines of penance and of purgatory are apparent in his writings.
In Cyprian’s time, and mainly by his influence, the ecclesiastical system was developed. The Church with her ordinances was the organ of Christ’s salvation. Her baptism and her communion were the keys by which heaven was opened and shut again. It was natural that the Church should be crowded by multitudes seeking to escape from endless woe, yet more willing to escape by penance and ceremony than by obedience and love. But such could not endure tribulation; and reviving persecution created a new class of men, the Traditores, who denied their faith and gave up the sacred writings at the bidding of the magistrate. And when the storm was past, they fled to the Church again. Should they be rejected, as apostates? But how then could they be saved from the un-consuming flames? A kind bishop must admit them. Corruption grew apace, and reform was needed.
The reformer came, — Novatian, a Roman presbyter, of extensive learning, of blameless life, and whose doctrinal soundness is acknowledged by all save those interested in denying him the honour of martyrdom. He was heretical only because he disturbed the order of the churches that needed renovation, and because Cathari, or Puritans, were multiplying. He refused the grace of God to those who had forsaken and denied it. This explains the epithets freely bestowed upon him, “deserter of the Church, enemy of mercy, slayer of penitence, teacher of pride, corrupter of truth, destroyer of charity,” and worse names, from Cyprian and others less mild.
The courage of Novatian may be explained in either of two ways. He perhaps thought the faithless “confessor,” the re- turning traditor, might be saved without the Church. But very probably he feared endless woe for no man. A letter to Cyprian is ascribed to him which speaks of eternal punishments; he, however, was not likely to address that prelate as a “most blessed and glorious Father. The “Rule of Faith” which has come down to us as his work is probably genuine, doubtless as severe as his own views’. This contains no explicit statement of the destiny of the lost, though that subject is touched occasionally. Its prevalent tone is that of the writings of Athenagoras. In one instance the soul is called immortal, with a citation of the first clause of Matthew 10:28 (Chapter 25). Remarking that man cannot kill the soul, the writer says: “The power of death is broken when the author of immortality intervenes” (Chapter 15, 25). He calls the Paradise of Adam the world of eternal life, to which the faithful shall be restored by the Spirit working in them “for [their] eternity, and unto the resurrection of immortality, allying them with His own eternal divinity” (Chapter 29). He defines immortality as “not seeing death,” and as closely allied with divinity, inferring the divinity of Christ from his bestowing immortality on men (Chapter 15). He speaks of a dissolution of all things, that a greater world may be given us (Chapter 2). He cites ‘Romans 11:36, with the remark that in the judgment all things fall back, as it were, unto God (Chapter 3). God’s anger is for the good of men, that by His threatening they may be recalled to virtue (Chapter 5). Fallen man was driven from the tree of life, “not from God’s ill will, but lest, living for ever without forgiveness through Christ, he should continue in immortal sin, unto punishment” (Chapter 1). The world hastens to the day of judgment by fire (Chapter 8); and those who blaspheme have no forgiveness, either in this world, or in that which is to come (Chapter 29).
We have another treatise ascribed to Novatian, on “Jewish Meats.” It contains no allusion to human destiny; but its subject may indicate an acquaintance with Jewish doctrine, of which presently. The citations heretofore made from Lactantius (A. D. 306), suffice to show the doctrinal relations in which he held the eternity of evil, and the inconsistencies of his great genius.
Ambrose of Milan (A. D. 374) held the doctrine of his day without question, though in milder spirit than Tertullian or Cyprian. We shall have but a word to say of him, in relation to the principles of toleration and their subversion in his time.
The doctrinal questions created by the notion of eternal suffering all appeared in the Augustinian and Pelagian controversy, which the Church still inherits. The difference between Augustine and Pelagius is most manifest, we think, in the question of a crisis in man’s history. Augustine affirms that bodily death is of sin; but eternal death is hopeless misery. The freedom of will, which on his conversion he had ably defended against the Manicheans, is now asserted with qualifications. “Free will is indeed as much free will after sins as it was before sins: “ but it is only a constitutional freedom, which sin has deranged. The sinner retains only a freedom to sin. In this fatal liberty consists, in part, his punishment. “By the greatness of the first sin we have lost the free will to love God.”
Failing to complete this theodicy by any formula of infinite guilt, Augustine sought a general relief in exalted views of the Divine Sovereignty, to which the reaction of his mind from Manichaeism was most favourable. Then he plants the divine justice deeper than the depths, and resorts to mystery. Pressed by his opponents, he excuses the case of man’s condemnation by citing Paul’s words respecting a great salvation: “O the depths!“ (Romans 11: 33.)
Pelagius on the other hand asserts the natural death of the body, and that man’s resurrection is not in consequence of Christ’s resurrection. But while we are not involved in Adam’s sin, the free individual is exposed, by his actual sin, to eternal death. In this view he pressed the doctrine of eternal punishment even more rigorously than his opponent.
But each party was embarrassed with the case of infants. Julian thus addresses Augustine: “Here, most holy priest and most learned orator, thou fabricate something more mournful and frightful than the brimstone in the valley of Amsanctus, or the pit of Avernus. God himself, you say, who commends his love towards us, who even spared not His own Son, but hath given him up for us all. He so determines; He is himself the persecutor of those that are born; He himself consigns to eternal fire, for an evil will, the children who, as he knows, can have had neither a good nor an evil will.” To which he replies: “We may justly conclude that infants dying without baptism will be in the mildest punishment.” Yet “there is no middle place, so that he who is not with Christ, must be with the devil.” But Pelagius could only say: “Where they do not go, I know; but where they go, I know not.”
By an expedient of the Church which settled a long controversy, infants were saved from original sin by the earliest possible baptism; and adults were saved from sin committed after baptism, otherwise unpardonable, by extreme unction. But what should be done for unbelievers? Here was the almost resistless temptation to the employment of force for the salvation of souls. Every earnest man that had a heart must fall before it; and such a man was Augustine. The precedents cited, and the comparisons made, in his letter to Boniface on the correction of the Donatists, are an explicit justification of the exercise of civil power for the restraint and extirpation of heresy and the saving of those who err. He deprecated extreme measures, and seems to have hesitated; but he was persuaded by the apparent success of the secular argument.”
This state of things and other facts which we will add, warrant the strong words of a cautious writer: “The regeneration of the Church was in that age hypothetically possible, and was actually attempted; yet it utterly failed. The men whose intelligence and expansion of mind should have taught them to listen to reproof, and who should have entertained — if it had been but for a moment — the suspicion that the course of things might be unsafe, these, with n headlong intemperance, rushed upon the objectors and triumphed. Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome, the three illustrious leaders of the age, joined their giant strength and gave to the Church the plunge that sent it down to the abyss. Whatever of degrading superstition, whatever of sanguinary fanaticism, whatever folly, whatever corruption, whatever cruelty, belonged to the religious condition of Europe under the sway of Hildebrand, may be assigned (as a true consequence) to the part taken and the course pursued by the great men we have named: — the fate of mankind through a long night of ignorance and malign tyranny was sealed when Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome combined to crush dissent.”
When the terror of an infinite evil was divorced from a warm feeling of humanity, it led at once to the celibacy and other forms of sour asceticism which already prevailed. When it was connected with a zeal for the honour of the Church and its de- fence against the heathen religions, it engendered the most virulent fanaticism. And to parties within the Church it could only give a rancorous fierceness. Some of these effects have been vividly yet fairly portrayed by the author of “Hypatia.” The female philosopher of this name, it is well known, owed a violent death to the rage of a Christian mob instigated by Cyril. The effect last named is illustrated in an election for the bishopric of Rome in the middle of the fourth century, when 127 corpses of Christians were found killed by the opposite party near a Basilica. That the principles of persecution are strictly due to the terrible doctrine in question, is confessed by the abettors of the Inquisition, of whom we are told: “Certain it is, that the Court of Inquisition, as established in many countries, as far as it differs from civil courts of judicature, is declared, by the authors and maintainers of it, to be the nearest imitation of the Divine Tribunal; and it is avowedly founded upon and justified by the doctrines of reprobation and of eternal torments.” And Burnet tells us what was the plea of the bloody Queen Mary: “As the souls of heretics are to be hereafter eternally burning in hell, there can be nothing more proper than for me to imitate the divine vengeance by burning them on earth.”
Jerome (A. D. 392), the author of the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, was perhaps the most learned of the Fathers. In his controversy with Rufinus he strenuously opposes the error of Origen, and he advances the Tertullian doctrine of the ignis sapiens. But he allows the expression that “before God no rational creature can perish perpetually;“ the sense of which is doubtful. And in his commentary on Isaiah I16: 24, he says: “Those who believe that punishments will at some time come to an end, and, though they be long continued, the torments still have their period, employ these proofs (viz. Romans 11: 25; Galatians 3: 23; Micah 7: 9; Wisdom 12: 1; Psalms 30: 20). Which passages they adduce, asserting that after torment there will be rest; which is to be concealed from the knowledge of those to whom fear is useful, that in dread of punishments they may cease from sin. Which we ought to leave to the knowledge of God alone, who employs not only mercies but torments, and knows whom, how, and how long He ought to judge.
Let us then say, as becomes our human frailty: ‘Lord, rebuke me not in thine anger, nor chasten me in my wrath.’ And as we believe that the torments of the devil and of all the infidels and impious who say in their heart, ‘There is no God,’ are eternal, so they think that the Judge gives sentence with mercy upon the sinful and impious as well as Christians, whose works are to be tried and purged by fire.” And on Isaiah 24: 22, 23, he says: “ We must know that human frailty cannot penetrate the judgments of God, nor conjecture concerning the greatness and measure of His punishments, which are left to the will of the Lord.” The extent of the doubt of which Jerome speaks is apparent from the words of Augustine: “In vain do some, yea, very many (immo quam plurimi), pity with human sympathy the eternal punishment of the damned, and their perpetual unremitting torments, and believe it will not so be; not indeed denying the Scriptures, but, by some method of their own, modifying the severer declarations to a milder sentiment, taking them as uttered more for effect than for exact truth. For, say they, God will not forget to be compassionate, nor in his wrath restrain his mercies.” For which doubts he seems to have a tender respect when he says: “Now with our compassionate friends we must debate the case and dispute peacefully.”
The doctrine of eternal suffering was, however, retained by the Church, subject to very important modifications in its application. Church ordinances, as devices for salvation from infinite evil, were multi- plied. The terrors of final ruin would be naturally portrayed in the most vivid colours, as if the flames of hell, burning more fiercely, should find fewer victims. Yet, for the most of those dying unfitted for eternal life, they were softened into a fire of purgation and a harsh method of salvation. Thus between the two sides of the fire eternal its terrors almost vanished. The sentiment of a hymn that belongs to the fourth century became the sentiment of a supposed age of severe doctrine:
“The avenging Judge his wrath restrains,
The penitent receives;
Of the ungodly he but few
To death eternal leaves.”
10. JEWISH AND MEDAEVAL DOCTRINE.
We have, in a former argument, and for argument’s sake, granted that the Pharisees held the immortality of all, and the eternal misery of the lost. But this supposition rests entirely on the testimony of Josephus, and his testimony we have seen questioned. “Some of the learned,” says the writer before cited, “have remarked that he has even expressed himself in such a manner as might lead his readers to imagine that the Pharisees believed rather a transmigration, than a proper resurrection.” And he speaks of “ that solicitude of his to make his representation of the opinions and practices of that nation, in those writings that were designed for the perusal of the unbelieving Gentiles, as little exceptionable to them as possible, which appears in various instances, and has been particularly remarked by the curious.” Pocock, on the same subject, says: “If we have not cited Josephus, it is no wonder; since in giving the views of the sects he names respecting the other world, he seems to have used words better suited to the fashions and the ears of the Greeks and Romans, than such as a scholar of the Jewish law would understand, or deem expressive of his meaning.”
Another writer observes: “It must be owned that in his ac- count of the Scripture times, he has taken a bold liberty to vary from the Bible, to add, alter, retrench, and even sometimes contradict it; which is a fault for which no other apology can be made but that he was of the sect of the Pharisees and gave too much credit to their trifling traditions.” The same writer shows that the whole account given by Josephus of the visit of Alexander to Jerusalem (Antiq. 1. 11, 100: 8, § 5) is unquestionably fabulous; and is at a loss to determine whether he was him- self the author of the story, or was imposed upon in taking it as a tradition or a narration of some other Jewish writer
And a commentator on the passage of Nemesius before cited, quoting the opinion that death in a good old age is of nature (Antiq. 1. 1, 100: 2, § 20), says: ‘“But Josephus was pre-eminently inclined to accommodate his accounts to the understanding of the Gentiles.” And Bretschneider: “ His extant writings . . . would be more valuable if he had separated their views from the modifications which he has seen fit to give them, out of respect to the Grecian readers for whom he wrote.” The language of a late authoress is perhaps too expressive of indignant feeling, when, with respect to the personal history of Josephus, she bestows such epithets as “ traitor,” “apostate,” “grovelling sycophant,” “fulsome flatterer,” “sordid, craven tool of the pagan foe,” “whose book is a glaring monument of his own perfidious infamy and falsehood.” Yet his conduct during the terrible siege of Jerusalem justifies the severest censure. And the doctrine of the soul which appears in his writings is so Platonic that we could not expect him to do honour even to the Jewish doctrine of a resurrection. To the passage already cited, in which he speaks of the soul as “a portion of the divinity that inhabits our bodies,” we may add that in which he makes Titus say: “those souls which are severed from their fleshy bodies in battles by the sword, are received by the ether, that purest of elements, and joined to that company which are placed among the stars; they become good daemons and propitious heroes, and show themselves as such to their posterity afterward.”
In justice to Josephus, however, it should be said that the “ Discourse concerning Hades,” which commonly figures as a part of his translated works, and which gives so extravagant and idle an account of eternal punishments, is undoubtedly spurious. It does not appear in the best editions of his works.
Dismissing Josephus as an unreliable witness, we should take the brief testimony of Tacitus, whose veracity is unimpeached. He tells us that among the Jews “infanticide is a crime, and the souls of those dying in battle or by torture are eternal; hence a love of offspring, and contempt of death.” A certain resemblance between this passage and that just cited gives some support to the opinion that Tacitus derived his history of the Jews from Josephus. Be that as it may, and be the errors of Tacitus however great, his honesty is unquestioned; and the language in this passage is peculiar in that it clearly denotes the immortality of a class. Hence one of his editors has remarked the fact that “certain Jews have supposed that the souls of the ungodly are utterly cut off, and perish like the brutes; to which, perhaps, Tacitus alludes.” And the learned Selden has adduced the same passage in his account of the Hebrew legislation where he gives a full account of the same doctrine.
But since Josephus cannot, and Tacitus will not, prove the doctrine of eternal suffering to be a Jewish tenet, to be sanctioned by the silence of the Great Teacher, we should certainly expect to find it fully taught, if any where by the Jews, in the Talmud. This body of Jewish tradition consists of a Mishna, upon which there are two forms of Gemara, or commentary; whence the distinction of the Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmud, the first written about AD 300, the second about AD 500. In the Mishna we find no mention whatever of the immortality of the soul, or of eternal pain; though exclusion from the world to come, and from eternal life, is frequently named. That such an one is “worthy of the world to come,” is a common phrase. In the Gemara the destiny of the wicked is described most fully and clearly as follows: “Those who sin and rebel greatly in Israel, as well as Gentile sinners, shall descend into Gehenna, and there be judged during twelve months; at the end of which the body is consumed, the soul is burned up, and the spirit is scattered beneath the feet of the just, as it is said in Malachi 4:3. But heretics, and informers, and traitors, and Epicureans (infidels), w ho deny the law of God and the resurrection of the dead and depart from the way of the congregation, and those who terrify, and those who sin and cause others to sin, as Jeroboam the son of Nebat and his companions, — they shall descend into Gehenna, and there be judged for ages of ages. Of these speaks Isaiah, 66:24.”
Here an unlimited suffering is named, not as the rule of judgment upon the wicked, but as the exception which confirm another rule. And the exception is not repeated. But the rule is famous, as appears from the following passage: “There are five things of which the period is twelve months; — the judgment of those destroyed in the deluge; the judgment of the Egyptians; the judgment of Job; the judgment of Gog and Magog; and the judgment of the wicked in Gehenna; as it is said, Isaiah 66:23.”
The eternity of hell is expressly denied as follows: “Rabbi Simon ben Lakish has said, There will be in the future no Gehenna, but the holy, blessed God will bring out the sun from its tabernacle, and will punish the ungodly therewith, but sanctify the righteous. As it is written in Malachi 4:1: “For behold the day cometh which shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, together with all that do wickedly, shall be as stubble, and the coming day shall burn them up.”
There are two or three Talmudic passages that will allow the modern doctrine of future punishment, though they do not demand it. Thus it is said: “Thy justice is as the mountains of the Lord. How are these mountains described? They have no end; and so likewise the reward of the just in the time to come has no end. Thy judgments are a vast abyss. How is that abyss described? It is unsearchable; and so likewise the punishments of the wicked in the time to come are unsearchable.” And the words of R. Johanan, before cited: “If He be angry with me. His wrath is eternal; if He bind me. His bands are eternal; if He slay me. His slaying is eternal; and I cannot appease Him with words, nor assuage Him with a gift. Moreover there are two ways before me, and I know not which way they will lead me.” But those passages prove no immortality of the soul when compared with the numerous passages in which Gehenna appears as a gradually devouring but finally consuming fire.
There are in the Talmud traces of restoration theology, though mainly in behalf of the Israelites. Thus in the passage before cited: “The fire of Gehenna does not prevail against the sinners bf Israel so as to consume them.” And again: “The house of Shammai said, There are three classes in the day of judgment, — the perfectly just, the perfectly wicked, and the inter- mediate. Those of the first class are written in the .book of life; and those of the second class are inscribed and sealed to Gehenna; according to Daniel 12: 2. The intermediate descend into Gehenna, and cry out, and afterwards ascend according to Zechariah 13: 9.”
We find no indication that the eternity of hell-torments was ever an accepted Jewish doctrine; though by individual Rabbles it was asserted, with infinite puerilities. Nothing of the kind appears among the so-called fundamental articles of the Jewish faith; nor in the catechism or liturgy of the modern Jews; while the resurrection of the dead is named continually: “Blessed be the Lord our God, who raises up the dead.” And in the accounts that we have of the sense attached by various Rabbles to the Chereth, or excision, of the O. T., of seven different opinions there is but one that seems to contemplate an eternal sorrow; upon which Abarbanel,
who professes it, comments feebly, thus: It is excision not of body only, but “ of the soul, because in the world of souls it is far removed from the glory of the Divine Majesty.” He then compares it to the branch of a tree, receiving there from “nutriment and life,” and adds: “But this is not a mere privation of the soul, or total destruction; for it is a spiritual substance, self-subsistent, and by nature incorruptible. But excision is punishment and great pain of soul, which may be greater or less. And after punishment, it receives also pleasure and delight; as it is said, For there is hope of a tree,” etc (Job. 14: 7).
From this account it may appear a fair question whether the famous persecution of 3faimonides, in the twelfth century, grew so much out of his doctrine of annihilation, as out of his seeming denial, or disregard, of the twelve months’ torment before annihilation. He was born at Cordova, A. D. 1131. He is commonly styled the “Eagle of the Doctors,” and his first name, added to his fame, has given rise to the saying, “From Moses to Moses there was none such as Moses.” An eminent scholar has remarked that the same might be said of him which was said by Pliny of Diodorus Siculus, that “he was the first of all his tribe who ceased to be a trifler.” He was skilled in all languages, master of all branches of philosophy and science. His active life was spent in Egypt, where he died, A. D. 1205, and was buried in Upper Galilee, Jews and Egyptians bewailing his death for three whole days, with a grievous lamentation, known as the “Lamentum Lamentabile.”
His great work, which excited the most general opposition, was the More Nevochira. This was denounced as rationalistic by the traditionalists of his day, who held that the precepts of the Law had no foundation in reason, but were of purely arbitrary authority. To offer a reason for any command of God, seemed to them an impertinent and impious confusion of things sacred and profane. The opposition was most violent in France and in some parts of Spain, where it was scarcely repressed by the influence of an eminent Rabbi, David Kimchi. Gentle methods could not save him to the Jewish Church. His enemies, “those seditious men who could be reached neither by argument nor by considerations of mildness and humanity, were silenced by the thunder of anathema and excommunication.”
But, for the special opinion we have named, we are told that all the synagogues of Gaul interdicted against him the sacred rites, on the ground that he opposed the authority of the Talmud in which the wicked are said to be tormented in the fire of Gehenna during twelve months. Whereupon R. Nachmanides, a friend of his, addressed to the rulers of the synagogues a long letter, in a style of elegant propriety, in which, after speaking modestly and humbly of himself and highly complimenting the piety and learning of the Gallic Rabbles, he very ably vindicates Maimonides from the charge of heresy, and interprets his opinion in the sense that he who suffers the punishment of excision is reduced by the fire of Gehenna, after twelve months’ torment, to perish at last into nothingness.”
Maimonides was of course charged with denying the immortality of the soul, though he constantly speaks of the righteous as living for ever. H’ was defended against the charge long after, by R. Manasseh ben Israel.
With some difference in minor points, the general view of Maimonides respecting the final punishment of excision is asserted by the following Rabbles: Nachmanides, who names three particulars, and calls the third excision “still more severe, by which the body is cut off in this life, and the soul in the life to come; R. Bechai; D. Kimchi, who agreed with him fully, and is pronounced, by J. Pye Smith, one of the best Jewish interpreters; Jehuda bar Elai; Solomon Jarchi; Joseph Albo; Manasseh ben Israel; perhaps also by R. Gershom (A. D. 1290).
It is a common remark with Maimonides and other Rabies, that extermination is the greatest of all punishments. Which view is carried so far by Ebn Latiph, that, referring to a distinction of the wicked as the Community of Fools, “who sin without knowing better, and the Community of Evil-doers, who have the sense to know that they sin, — he says that the spirits of the former shall not survive the twelve months’ torment, which is “perfected punishment, and excision absolute, and perdition and corruption, which is never reversed, and is the greatest among all punishments;” but the latter are only punished by a great evil seizing the soul, their sorrow aggravated by the company of like souls, and all their woes to be eternal. Upon which we will not insist; but aside from so bold an opinion, the history we have given justifies the argument of Dr. Bentley, when he says; “O dismal reward of Infidelity! At which nature does shrink and shiver with horror. What some of the learned Doctors among the Jews have esteemed the most dreadful of all punishments, and have assigned for the portion of the blackest criminals of the damned, — so interpreting Tophet, Abaddon, the Valley of Slaughter, and the like, for final extinction and deprivation of being, — this Atheism exhibits to us an equivalent to heaven.”
If we would study the philosophy of persecution, we have a suggestive chapter in the experience of Averoes, the Arabian philosopher, sometimes called “the omniscient.” Whether the followers of Mahomet had more set their hearts on their eternal Paradise of fond delights, or on the endless torment of the wicked, on which the Koran dilates so largely, — as their cousins, the Jews, would maintain the twelve months’ agony, — it is certain that Averoes’ doubts of a proper immortality created a panic. He was celebrated for his personal virtues. He ate but once a day, of the plainest food, and he often passed whole nights in study. Occupying a judicial station, he displayed unwonted integrity and humanity. He spent a great part of his wealth in donations to learned men, both friends and foes. He wrote a vast commentary on the works of the Stagyrite, to whose authority he was blindly devoted. His Aristotelian doctrine of the soul was the head and front of his offending.
For this error he suffered the severest hardships and indignities. By the caliph he was denounced as heretical, his goods confiscated, and himself banished to the Jews’ quarters of the city of his abode, Cordova. He fled to Fez, was discovered and imprisoned. In a council of lawyers and divines it was argued by some that he deserved death; but milder opinions prevailed. He was placed at the gate of the Mosque, that the devout Moslems might spit in his face on the way to their prayers. Professing penitence for his heresy, he was allowed to return to Cordova, where, after years of poverty, in evil times and in remembrance of his civic virtues, he was made once more governor.
The name of Averroes, however, has much more to do with this history, than as an illustration of the persecuting spirit. He was the great commentator on the works of Aristotle, “the Philosopher,” and his writings had become the standard of philosophic, we had almost said of Christian, orthodoxy. To this paramount influence of one who was doubtless the greatest thinker the world had yet known, the most vigorous resistance had been made, for the express reason that he taught no after life; and when the Stagyrite was installed as the great teacher in the schools of Christendom, this serious defect must be got over as best it could. Hence the great effort, then as now, to show that he was orthodox and did teach a life to come. And now that the great light of Arabia pronounced him heterodox, his influence must be put down. Averroism was a new heresy to be refuted; and against it Aquinas, “the Angelical Doctor,” wrote one of his books. Scholastic philosophy was divided on the great question; the “Thomists,” or followers of Aquinas, affirming the soundness of the philosophic form of faith, and the “Scotists” denying it. Duns Scotus declared the soul’s immortality not provable by the light of nature, and rested its evidence solely on Revelation; he thought those who reposed the burden of this faith elsewhere than on the word of Christ, unworthy of the Christian name; he, with his followers, thought Nature here furnished probabilities, but not proofs; she could persuade, but she could not assure; her pupils might believe, but they could not know, as do they who recognize a Redeemer.
It may surprise many that the apostasy of an Arabian Peri- patetic could so affect the parties of Christendom. What had Franks to do with Moors, that Averroes should spend his breath to say “he would rather his soul should be with the philosophers than with the Christians?” or that Erasmus should wish that a certain great work “had been written against the impious and thrice accursed Averroes?“ The reason is soon told. The learning of the world was once Arabic; and Christendom owed to the sons of Ishmael debts of literature and theology, which are not yet discharged. An able writer remarks upon the times of which we are speaking: “ The works of many of the most distinguished Moorish authors became the text books of the Christian schools. Thus the works of Avicenna and Averroes, on logic and metaphysic, were studied in the Sorbonne, then the chief school of theology in Christendom; and it is to this cause that we owe the very doubtful benefit of the scholastic philosophy of the middle ages. ‘This scholasticism,’ says Mr. Berrington, ‘was the genuine philosophy of the Arabian schools in the common questions of human research, and accommodated, in those of theology, to the specific objects of the Christian code. Surprised we must be, observes Denina, when we learn that our ancestors derived, from those very Mohammedans whom they perpetually reviled, the greater part of the doctrine which, during many ages, was taught in the Christian schools. Such was the doctrine of the Divine Being and His attributes, grace and free will, human actions, virtue and vice, eternal punishment, and heaven. Even the very titles of the works of the Arabians and Schoolmen on these subjects are so similar as to induce a suspicion that the one must have been copied from the other.’“
The Church was now fully committed to a philosophic faith, and bent her energies to the harmonizing of faith and reason upon that basis. Of reasoning, such as it was, she had plenty; the faith must be created by authority. Leo the Tenth issued his bull instructing the philosophers not to teach the mortality of the soul. The distinction which had been made between the deductions of reason and the decrees of the Church, incurred censure, and was declared untenable by the Lateran Council, A. D. 1513, when also the proper immortality of the soul was finally declared an article of faith.
But nature will not be forced; and the Stagyrite, though instructed so carefully, would now and then speak out his old ways of thinking. Just before the day of emancipation from this bondage the Averroist drama was re¬enacted, with variations suited to the character of a believer. Pomponatius, born at Mantua, A. D. 1462, became an eminent Peripatetic, holding the ethics of Aristotle, while he avowed that immortality must be taught in another school. As a moralist he affirmed that one should do right not for the sake of reward. “Virtue is never so perfect as when it brings no dower with it.” And if the good man is already recompensed, where is his claim to an afterlife, and where out of the Scriptures is his proof of it? But, with Plato, Pomponatius held that “the legislator, intent on public good, may establish the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; thus, seeking the common weal rather than truth, he may draw man- kind to virtue.”
From such language it has been wrongly inferred that he him- self denied a future life. Rather, he would ask the Schoolmen to be consistent; and, perhaps in scorn of a prevalent hireling Christianity, he loved to speak of virtue as self-sustaining. But he firmly maintained the doctrine of an afterlife, as a revealed fact. On principles of reason, this was an insoluble problem, like that of the eternity of the world. No rational arguments can demonstrate either that the soul is mortal or that it is immortal. We must, with Plato, refer the question to the decision of God. The divine verdict is as light itself compared with the darkness of our philosophy. Where- fore, past all doubt, we must declare the soul immortal; but not after the method of the wise men of this world, who in their conceit of wisdom have become fools; for he who follows their path must ever wander, I think, and wander into uncertainty. On the charge of denying the immortality of the soul, Pomponatius was summoned before the Inquisition. He confessed that he did not believe in the current proofs of the doctrine. He perhaps challenged his judges to show a faith in the Gospel equal to his own. By the influence of friends he escaped condemnation; but his book was burned.
11. MODERN HISTORY.
The attempt to reduce the glorious hope of immortality to a dogma and an edict, was met by Luther with a vigorous recalcitration. “I permit the Pope,” says he, in 1520, “to establish articles of faith for his faithful followers; such as that the bread and wine are transmuted in the sacrament; that the divine essence is neither generative nor generated; that the soul is the substantial form of the human body; that himself is the Ruler of the world, and King of Heaven, and God on Earth; that the soul is immortal; and all the numberless prodigies of the Roman dunghill of decrees.”
We have already seen that Luther doubtless held the early Christian doctrine of the intermediate state. This fact, together with the above expression may only show that he held the view we have given of man’s middle nature. And it was enough for Luther to state the problem of an afterlife, without solving it. He soon found that it was an ample work to vindicate the freeness of God’s grace, and the freedom of man’s thought, against the authorities of a thousand years. Moreover, such were the popular notions of the age respecting Satan, and such was the native temper of Luther’s mind, that he might be less burdened than most persons with the doctrine of eternal evil. The great Adversary was not then conceived as he appears in the “Paradise Lost,” — a princely dignitary of wickedness, — but as the Mephistopheles of German story. “It is somewhat remarkable,” says August!, “that the devil of the middle ages seems to have lost much of his terror and hideousness, and to play rather the part of a cunning impostor and merry fellow, more like a fawn who excites laughter rather than fear.”
Luther was just the man to assault such an Adversary with an inkstand. It was neither his work nor his care to prove him mortal. His faith was like Banyan’s, — rising higher for every trial to which it was subjected; it was positive, not a bundle of negations. Like Bunyan, he rarely speaks of eternal misery. And in theology he was fond of paradox. Yet in that brave heart there was a struggle respecting the justice of God and the destinies of men, of which the world knows little. In that remarkable book, his treatise “De Servo Arbitrio,” which we have cited for its absolutist theology, he shows himself no stranger to the Conflict of Ages. A few passages will show how he sought to decide it. He says:
“This, forsooth, offends most of all that ‘common sense’ or ‘natural reason,’ that God of his own mere will abandons, hardens, damns men, as if He who is declared to be of so great mercy and goodness were pleased with so great and eternal sins and torments of the miserable creatures. Unjust, cruel, intolerable has it appeared to think thus of God; whence so many and so great men, for so many centuries, have stumbled.
And who would not be offended! I myself stumbled, not once alone, even to the depths, the abyss of despair, until I knew how salutary v/as that despair, and how near unto grace. Here men have sweat and toiled, to vindicate the goodness of God and to impugn the will of man; they have made distinctions between God’s ordained and his absolute will, between necessity of con sequence and of the consequent/ and many others like these. But nothing is gained by them, except to impose on simple people by empty words and the oppositions of science falsely so called. That thorn still remains fixed deep in the hearts of men both simple and learned, whenever they think seriously on the subject; so that they must feel the difficulties we do, if they believe the foreknowledge and omnipotence of God.”
Again he says: “Here God is to be honoured and revered, most merciful as he is toward those whom he justifies and saves, when they are most unworthy, and something, at least, is to be conceded to his wisdom, so that he may be believed just when he seems to us unjust. For if his justice were such as could be pronounced just by human capacity, it would certainly not be divine, and would differ in nothing from human justice. But since he is the alone God, altogether incomprehensible and inaccessible by human reason, it is right, nay it is necessary, that his justice also should be incomprehensible.” Again he says, in the passage already cited: “Thus doth He conceal his clemency and mercy beneath his eternal wrath, his justice beneath injustice. Here is the highest degree of faith, — to believe that he is merciful who saves so few and damns so many; to believe that he is just, who, of his own will, makes us necessarily damnable, so that he should seem, as Erasmus says, to be pleased with the torments of wretched beings, and worthy of hatred rather than of love. If, therefore, I could in any way comprehend how that God is merciful and just who shows so great wrath and injustice, there would be no need of faith. But now, since it cannot be comprehended, there is room for the exercise of faith, while such things are asserted and proclaimed; just as when God slays, faith in life is exercised in the hour of death.”
Here is the very blindness of faith which it cost Maimonides so much to oppose. It was the inheritance of long ages of darkness, which Luther must share for a while with the men of his time. But in the same treatise we see his mind struggling against the tyranny which had imposed the bitter bondage, in the following passage: “You must feel yourself in some measure awed in the presence of a succession of learned men, and by the consent of so many ages, during which flourished scholars so conversant in sacred literature, and martyrs illustrious by so many miracles. To all this must be added the more modern theologians, universities, bishops, and popes. On their side are arrayed learning, genius, numbers, dignity, station, power, sanctity, miracles, and what not. On mine, Wickliffe and Laurentius Valla, and, though you forget to mention him, Augustine also.
Then comes Luther, a mean man, born but yesterday, supported only by a few friends, who have neither learning, nor genius, nor greatness, nor sanctity, nor miracles. Put them all together, and they have not wit enough to cure a spavined horse. What are they? What the wolf said of the nightingale, — a voice, and nothing else. I confess it is with reason that you pause in such a presence as this. For ten years together I hesitated myself. Could I believe that this Troy, which had triumphed over so many assaults, would fall at last? I call God to witness that I should have persisted in my fears, and should have hesitated until now, if truth had not compelled me to speak. You may well believe that my heart is not rock; and, if it were, yet so many are the waves and storms which have beaten upon it, that it must have yielded when the whole weight of this authority came thundering on my head, like a deluge ready to overwhelm me.”
The same feelings are expressed at a later date, as follows: “O, what pain it has cost me, though the Scripture is on my side, to defend myself to my own heart for having dared singly to resist the Pope, and to denounce him as Antichrist! What have been the afflictions of my bosom! How often, in the bitterness of my soul, have I pressed myself with the papist’s argument, — Art thou alone wise? Are all others in error? Have they been mistaken for so long a time? What if you are yourself mistaken, and are dragging with you so many souls into eternal condemnation? Thus did I reason with myself, till Jesus Christ, by His own infallible word, tranquillized my heart, and sustained it against this argument, as a reef of rocks thrown up against the waves laughs at all their fury.”
The Calvinists and Arminians accepted the notion of eternal evil, and revived the controversy of Augustine and Pelagius. The Socinians denied it, and with it the divinity of Christ, for which it had been made a great argument. The following words of Calvin to Socinus show how the infinite terror which sanctioned the principle of compulsion in Augustine’s day, was again at work. “I seriously warn you of what I have before declared, that unless you correct in season this luxurious inquisitiveness, it is to be feared you will bring on yourself heavy calamities. I should be perfidious and cruel, if, under the mask of tenderness, I indulged what appears to me a most hurtful vice. I had rather, therefore, you should be a little displeased with my harshness, than not reclaimed from the curiosity which flatters and bewitches you. The time I hope will come, when you will be glad you are so roughly awakened.” But to the praise of Calvin we shall show that on certain points he allowed opinions deemed unsafe by many of his followers. And Socinus himself shared the old error, approving the restraint and even the imprisonment of heretics.
In his treatise on the “Authority of the Scriptures,” Socinus laments that so few professed Christians understood the hope of life in the Resurrection, as the distinctive Christian motive and support of virtue. For the sake of immortality as the free gift of Christ, he could and did endure many evils — exile, the loss of goods, violence and insult. Of his followers we may believe the testimony of Bayle, replying to the charge of Jurieu that his doctrine subverts the foundation of morals. He says: “It is matter of public notoriety, that in respect to morals, no sect has approached more nearly to the simplicity and strictness of the early Christians than the Socinians.”
Since the Socinians were known as a Christian community, the doctrine in question has been held by no large class of men until recently. But John Locke began his defence of the “Reasonableness of Christianity“ by protesting against the doctrine of an immortal death; and his controversy with the Bishop of Worcester is well known to the readers of the Essay on the Understanding. His Grace supposed that the common faith in an after life is endangered, if the philosophic proof of immortality is abandoned. Locke’s reply is in the spirit of Pomponatius. Our hope of eternal life rests on the promise of God, and not on the subtleties of men. The reply is warmly approved by Le Clerc; and in the same style Archdeacon Blackburne has said: “The more anyone is convinced of the immortality of the soul from the principles of Aristotle and Des Cartes, the less will he concern himself about the Gospel ac- count of futurity.” But, though Locke was a great heretic in his day, he has lately been set down as orthodox, thus: “Practically he was a spiritualist, and recognized the great facts of our spiritual and moral nature, as well as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.”
The history of the doctrine of immortality owes something to Warburton, of whose ability Thomas Chalmers has spoken in the highest terms. He says: “The first name that occurs to us of one who conjoined original strength with acquired scholarship, is Grotius. Cudworth had both, Chillingworth had both, Brian Walton had both, Stillingfleet had both, Samuel Clarke had both. Warburton had pre-eminently both.” In his principal work Warburton does not directly express an opinion respecting the destiny of the wicked. But he approves the faith of Locke in the Gospel, speaks of the revolt of reason at the thoughts of everlasting punishment, designates those who hold the prevailing view as “the unmerciful doctors,” and asks: “Doth annihilation impeach that wisdom and goodness which God displayed when he brought the soul out of nothing? “ The great value of his work is its portraiture of the despair, and incidentally, of the “double doctrine,” of the ancients, which should check our proneness to read history backward and to extol antiquity and philosophy to the disparagement of the Gospel.
The only service rendered by the learned Henry Dodwell is his defence of the middle nature of man. The reply of Samuel Clarke found a still more able rejoinder. But Dodwell burdened the doctrine of gratuitous immortality with his High Church conceit that the soul is actually immortalized by the pleasure of God, to punishment or to reward, through baptism: and that the Bishops only had this immortalizing power! Yet, somehow, in his opinion, no unbeliever in a Christian land could “hope for the benefit of actual mortality!“
Isaac Watts should here be named as having held that infants dying without baptism are annihilated. He deserves praise for his exposure of a flagrant instance of pious fraud, by Thomas Burnet, who had advised the preacher of the Gospel, in sly Latin, “to use the common doctrine and the common language“ concerning future punishments, whether he thinks them eternal or not. Watts thought the exposure of such guile less scandalous than its concealment, and translated the passage. Barnet was a restorationist.
During the last century the doctrine of life in Christ only found earnest advocates in Samuel Bourne, J. N. Scott,’ John Taylor, author of a Hebrew Concordance, and in the editors of Goadby’s Bible. It was perhaps held by Edward King, the able writer of the “Morsels of Criticism,” 1788. In 1817, a “Member of the Church of England” supported it in a work in which he tells us that he had sought a corroboration of the received doctrine in two discourses from different divines, and he then began to doubt who never did before. We find allusion also to a work by Fontaine, “The Immortality of the Wicked,” which we have not seen. The doctrine has been advocated more recently by J. P. Ham, with marked ability, though with views from which we dissent; by H. H. Dobney, in a work republished in this country; and by Edward White, to whose work we have alluded. It is offered by Sir James Stephen and by Abp. Whately in passages which we have cited. It is ably treated in a late work on the “Duration of Evil,” and in other brief treatises. On the other side have appeared the “Athanasia” of J. H. Hinton, and the “Doctrine of Rewards and Punishments“ by Dr. Hamilton. This work is one of the volumes growing out of the Congregational Lecture of London, and while we criticise its argument we are happy to commend its style as masterly in its kind, — sententious, and stately.
In Germany the question has received but little attention; and, as is well known, Restoration Theology is there the prevalent style of opinion. We find, however, allusion to a treatise published in 1782, in support of the doctrine we hold. In the “Theodicee” of Werdermann (1784), the following expression is here worthy of notice, though it may not state a conviction respecting any future destiny. He says: “This, then, would be the fall of an angel, — sin against the Holy Ghost; its punishment, damnation, which ends only with the entire cessation of existence” (I. 189). The principles which underlie this doctrine have been more recently maintained by C. H.
Weisse, Professor in the University of Leipsic, in his “Esoteric Doctrine of Immortality,” a critique on certain Pantheistic developments, and in other treatises to which we have alluded.
In our own country the doctrine in question has been advocated by Elias Smith, though among his followers it is not unquestioned. It was ably supported by the late Dr. Bancroft, of Worcester. It is apparently made the basis of an argument by Jared Sparks, who, however, disclaims it as having a properly Unitarian history. Dr. Channing, speaking of the pains and penalties of moral evil, makes the following remarks: “How long they will continue, I know not. Whether they will issue in the reformation and happiness of the sufferer, or will terminate in the extinction of his conscious being, is a question on which Scripture throws no clear light. Plausible arguments may be adduced in support of both these doctrines. On this and on other points revelation aims not to give precise information, but to fix in us a deep impression, that great suffering awaits a disobedient, wasted, immoral, irreligious life.”
The recent discussion of the subject in this country was occasioned by the publication of Six Sermons on the question: “Are the Wicked Immortal?“ — by George Storrs, editor of the “ Bible Examiner.” These discourses have passed through numerous editions, and, with other publications that have been issued, have begun to command general attention and no small respect for the, to many, new doctrine. The most considerable argument which ha appeared in reply is the truly eloquent discussion of Dr. Post, in the New Englander, whose articles were secured with a view to their republication with a reply; a design which we hope may be soon carried into effect. A return of the like courtesy, earnestness, and appreciation of the difficulties encountered, could not fail to improve the spirit of doctrinal controversy.
Our historical argument, as we have ventured to name it, is al- ready long drawn out. But it would be incomplete if we did not, in conclusion, allude on the one hand to the Restoration Theology which so many persons now either rejoice in or deplore; and on the other hand, to what we have called the esoteric doctrine of a future life that has appeared in Germany. This is not confined to Germany, nor to sceptics. In France it appears in the Pantheism of Le Roux, who tells us that the human soul is eternal; for whatever exists or lives is eternal, being created from eternity. “You live, therefore you are eternal.” The common thinking of England and America is not yet sufficiently unpractical to be very pantheistic; we have yet to see whether the half truth that duty is its own reward, and needs no heaven for its encouragement, will in these countries be made the watch- word for taking leave of God, and futurity, and duty itself.
But in Germany the doctrine of immortality has so far forsaken the Gospel that some of the ablest interpreters and preachers speak of man’s nature and man’s hopes in the style of the ancient philosophers. Thus De Wette tells us of the soul, “its immortality, or more correctly, its eternity,” which, as he explains himself, has an equal relation to the past and the future. And according to Schleiermacher, religion is the sense of the union of the individual with the Universe, with Nature, or, in the language of the sect, with the One and All. It is a feeling; it has nothing to do with belief or action; it is unconnected with morality; it is independent of the idea of a personal God. The idea of a personal God is pure mythology. And the belief and desire of personal immortality is “wholly irreligious,” as being opposed to that which is the aim of religion, — “the annihilation of one’s own personality,” “ the living in the One and All,” “ the becoming, as far as possible, one with the universe.” We need not wonder, when such things are said by those who were probably Christians in spite of their errors, if others wax witty and wicked, as does Goethe, the acknowledged prince of German literature, in the following speech occasioned by allusion to Tiedge’s Urania, a religious poem. “I found stupid women,” he says, “who were proud of believing in immortality with Tiedge; and I was obliged to submit to be examined by many of them on this point in a very conceited manner.
But I scandalized them by saying I could be well content, that after the close of this life we should be blessed with another, but I would beg not to have there for companions any who believed in it here. For in that case, what vexation would await me! The pious would come round me and say, Were we not in the right? Did we not predict it? Has it not happened? And so there too I should be bored without end. It is for the higher classes, and especially for w omen of quality, who have nothing to do, to busy themselves with ideas of immortality. But an able man, who thinks that there is some- thing to be done here, and who, therefore, has every day to strive, to fight, and to work, leaves the future world to itself, and is active and useful in the present. Ideas of immortality, moreover, are for such as have not attained the best fortune here; and I would wager that if Tiedge had had better luck, he would have had better thoughts.”
We need not speak of the cavilling Pantheism of Feuerbach, whose work entitled the “Essence of Christianity“ is designed to explain how God and Man, Deity and Humanity, are one and the same. But when Strauss, whose “Life of Jesus“ makes the Saviour a myth, tells us, as the result of his “Doctrine of Faith,” that “the idea of a
future world is the last enemy which speculative criticism has to oppose, and, if possible, to overcome,” we are led to ask. How can the idea of immortality combine the highest responsibility with the highest attractiveness and value? Must it not be in the assurance of endless personal existence through faith in Him whose personal presence on the earth gave it new joy, and who alone has brought life and immortality to light?
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ERROR.
“Unless you understand a man’s ignorance, you are certainly ignorant of his understanding.” — Coleridge.
The very terribleness of the received doctrine of the divine penalty is often made an argument for its truth. How have men come to fear eternal misery, if there be no such thing? How can the delusion, if it be such, be accounted for? Would the God of all truth thus deceive men? They may lie for Him, but we know that He will not lie for them. Would Satan put such a cheat upon us? Why should he fray away from him, with infinite terrors those whom he would fain seduce and destroy? Have men, then, deceived themselves? Why should they, though ever so fond of delusion, affright themselves with such gloomy forebodings? Are they in love with misery? Why have they “thus ever tortured themselves for nought? Why have they indulged in those terrific inventions of fancy, handing down, from age to age, and from generation to generation, a useless, yet most tormenting anxiety?”
These are pertinent questions; and they are not fully answered by referring to the great precedents of error in the history of mankind. None of the old corruptions of heathenism, nor of the protested errors of Romanism, are like the doctrine of eternal and escapeless woe as the destiny of the majority of men. The notions of infant damnation and of torment by literal fire, now discarded by almost all Protestants, are indeed cogent examples of what exploits of terrible error man can achieve. But either of these may be deemed mere aggravations of a terror that is real, — the blackened shadows of a substantial truth. And it is not enough to say that malignity has disposed men to believe one another liable to eternal woe; for kind men have feared this for themselves. Nor is it enough to say that superstition accounts for the doctrine; for the most Christian communities and the largest and most fearless minds have cherished it. Yet a most eminent divine has ventured the remark that “even now, after eighteen centuries of Christianity, we may be involved in some enormous error, of which the Christianity of the future will make us ashamed;” and we think the terrible doctrine in question may be explained as an error; and that its derivation from the workings of a fallen nature may even illustrate the saying, that “ the laws of disease are as beautiful as the laws of health.”
1. THE REFLEX INFLUENCE OF THEODICY.
None of the theories of divine justice which we have examined, could, indeed, create the original error. Their office has been to justify and sustain an existing doctrine. But the support they have rendered might establish the opinion in the minds of the wavering, and even persuade the faith of the sceptical. Some of the theodicies are, moreover, expressions of sentiments lying deep in our common nature, which have contributed, we think, to produce the doctrine. These will be noted as we proceed.
2. FAITH IN SECOND CAUSES.
In the combination of the two theories of man’s dignity is il- lustrated the nature of philosophy, as distinct from faith in the continuous power and goodness of God. A “nature of things” seems nearer to man than God is; and he is prone, at whatever hazards, to rest his hopes upon it. The creation which is derived from God is also separated from Him. Projected into being, it subsists without Him. His continued care and power seems needless for it, if not burdensome to Him. He may leave all various things to their various laws. Our confidence in these is flattered by our own power of self-action, the autonomy of our personal being. We no longer live, and move, and have our being, in God; we might even survive Him.
This mingled reliance on Nature, and distrust of its Author, vitiates our proper philosophy. That ceases to be a conception of things possible; we must conceive many things as necessary. The must he seems to us more reliable than the maybe. Destiny is better, if not grander, than privilege. So we turn God’s laws — the free methods of His constant love — into fetters for His hands. If He promises eternal life, there must be an immortality somewhere, that binds the promise together; and to the forces of nature on this side of God, we add such things as we can imagine on the other side of God; and with our bark thus undergirded and over girded, we can trust immortal hopes, and immortal fears, too, upon it. This extravagance and per- version of philosophy, we think, explains many such expressions as this: “We have before us life and death; and while God ever invites every man to choose the good, the immutability of His counsel forbids Him to change the laws against which we may dash ourselves into every wreck of self-conscious misery, if we determine to create for ourselves evil.” It is illustrated, also, in those theodicies which find in the soul itself a law of eternal sinfulness or eternal sorrow.
3. THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL.
Men are prone either to overlook the infinite difference between these, or to reason from one to the other. The first error is illustrated in the common use of the word “everlasting” in a limited sense, and in the careless use of the word “infinite.” Thus we often meet such phrases as “infinite stupidity and ingratitude,” “infinite perverseness,” “infinitely sorry and ashamed,” “infinitely suitable,” — excusable as hyperboles, but producing utter confusion when employed in theological discussion. And because the difference between time and eternity is forgotten, most of those who have debated the question of the origin of evil have not touched the difficulties of its eternity. They have rarely thought that the temporal might be also, and significantly, temporary.
And very often it is expressly argued that if sin exists at all, it may, by parity of reasoning, exist forever. For time, it is said, is a part of eternity; both are subject to the same laws; a moment’s space and infinite duration are the same in kind; what may be done in the one may be done in the other.
This view rests partly on the assumption before named, that continued existence lies in the nature of things, and not in the divine good pleasure. It follows that temporal evil may be eternal evil in a natural course, if not terminated by the arbitrary will of the creature, or cut off by a miracle of the Creator. And both views are apparent in the same theodicies.
Man is prone to regard the immaterial and invisible, as im- mortal and eternal. They elude his grasp. His power cannot arrest them; why should he presume to limit the duration of their being? But in the unseen world are evil spirits, — fallen angels; is not evil eternal in them, and in all who shall prove to be like them?
The existence and agency of evil spirits, which has furnished the great occasion for popular superstition, has encouraged not a few of the theological errors we have noted. “If they have survived their fall temporarily, why may they not do so eternally? If they are permitted to tempt men temporarily, why may they not tempt some or other of God’s creatures eternally? Does not God preserve them in being for such a purpose? “Thus the difficulties created by the delay of the divine judgment are taken to show that evil is part of the divine economy. And the false theology is confirmed by a philosophy forgetful of the case of brute souls, and by an exegesis forgetful of the destruction that awaits Satan and his works. It is forgotten that evil angels and demons have not yet received their final doom. If, in terror of this, the demons are spoken of by one evangelist as crying out: “Art thou come to destroy us?” and by another, “Art thou come to torment us before the time?” — the varying express- ions are made into an argument of eternal indestructibility and torment without end. The recorded fact offered as the great example of the destiny of all evil, — the vengeance of eternal fire visited upon Sodom and Gomorrah, is transferred to an unseen world, and erected into a dominion of eternal evil.
4. THE MYSTERY OF SIN.
This has given similar, if not greater, occasion for the belief of its perpetuity. The inexplicable is even more alarming than the invisible. Hence we are told that “it is absurd to limit the scope of an unknown cause. But the present existence of evil is a mystery no human intellect has ever sounded.” The abyss seems like an infinite depth. And indeed, sin, baffling all explanation, does observe no law; it defies all control; it knows no limit save the compulsion of a higher power or its own self- exhaustion. Especially as a mystery does it affect all that is fearful in darkness. As blackness is the symbol of its guilt, so darkness is its covert, the hiding of its power. It comes like a thief — no one knows when or how. “We dread its encounter, as of a deadly foe at midnight. With all the armour of righteousness, we know not where to strike the Adversary, but, having done all, can only stand against his wiles. The course of evil is capricious. It cannot be met in open field, nor watched with spies. It is ever false and deceitful. It may seem asleep or dead; but only again to surprise and alarm mankind, until it is finally destroyed.
The mystery of Evil gives it a certain mock divinity. The black art expresses something of its meaning and power. The evil eye — the magic spell — the incantation — whatever seems to produce effects unmeasured by a cause, is a type of it. And here it has been well remarked, “The old saying that Satan is an ape of God, has its most significant truth. It is the presumptuous assumption of evil to be in its way self causing as God, absolutely to make its beginning from itself and only to pre- suppose itself.”
This untraceable lawlessness of Evil has obviously contributed to the doctrine of it as an eternal vicissitude, to be prevented only by its being bound, like Prometheus on Caucasus, in so rigorous a punishment that it shall lose all power of infection or escape. It is forgotten that it has no being of its own, and subsists only as a perversion, in the imperfect, and therefore as temporary. It is like God only in the affectation of independence, which it can only attain by perishing.
It is easier to destroy than to create. The formation of the world is described as a six days’ work of God, which man spoiled by the act of a moment. Weeds and thistles grow of themselves; what is useful requires culture. Deterioration is natural; improvement comes of care and effort. Vice is indulgence; virtue is self-denial. There is nothing good but it is costly, and the Destroyer has a light task, because the road downward is easy, the path onward and upward is ever difficult.
“When Eitter observes that we may not call evil a wonder, for that it is much rather the very opposite of the miracle, I perfectly agree with him. The miracle as miracle, God works without the world; evil as evil the creature works without God. As the miracle is the secret of God, so is evil the secret of the world. The miracle in fact only happens on account of evil; God presents His holy secret to view, only that the world may forsake its ungodly mystery, and turn itself believingly to Him.”
The following remark of Maurice, is pertinent here: “What is the worship of a good Being, when the evil dwells professedly side by side with Him? The latter becomes inevitably the God. The character of the whole service is leavened and moulded by his character. Let the theories respecting the relation of the two beings towards each other be what they may, Ormuzd becomes really the servant of Ahriman. The Magians were in truth his priests, even when they were nominally bowing to his rival.”
Again, evil is unscrupulous. It can employ all possible methods to effect its ends. Truth and falsehood, the lie direct and the lie indirect, the virtues and the vices of men, all God’s work that is yet imperfect, — is ready for use in the hands of the Adversary; and, though he may often overreach himself, he is not hastened by zeal nor hindered by conscience as good men are. By violence or by fraud, by the shortest course and by the most circuitous and intricate methods, he may come at his designs. The plot, and the attack by storm, are all his own.
Moreover, all evil is as irreparable as it is easy of accomplishment. The good that is destroyed may be replaced, but the labour for this would have doubled it. The consumed dwelling may be rebuilt, yet itself is wholly lost; and no insurance policy, no future industry or economy, can expunge the account of loss. So when morals are corrupted and souls destroyed, the loss is as eternal as the truth of history. Good may grow out of it, as bountiful harvests grow upon the battle field. Its place may be supplied, by the Power that can raise up from the stones children to Abraham. Still heaven is defrauded, the consummation of its glory delayed, and God is robbed. And no penalty, or atonement, or act of omnipotence, can undo the devil’s work.
This mean advantage of Evil over Good affects our theology. It gives us a quick resentment, like that of the child, or the sav- age, angry at injurious things. It fills us with fear, to think the labour of years may come to nought in an hour. And when evil takes the form of wickedness, and man or devil appears as the enemy of all good, our indignation knows no narrow bounds. The evil, if unchecked, would subvert the world. It takes hold on infinity. Power alone is wanting, or the Creator would be dethroned. We extend our notion of evil as it is, — often great and overwhelming, — to the conception of it as it might be, and shudder before the creation of our own fancy. We forget that evil is limited, without and within, and that God is not alarmed. We devise methods and theodicies for the restraint or prevention of wrong, which mend the evil case by marring it worse.
The misconception of the nature of evil as strictly irreparable has led to false views of punishment and of atonement. Penal suffering has been regarded as making amends for sin. The latent conviction that this is impossible has extended the notion of punishment, in vain pursuit of satisfaction, through eternity. Then, when the sinner was thought exposed to endless suffering, resort was had to the divine and infinite nature of Christ, and His temporary suffering was deemed a better mode of satisfying the demand of justice. This theory of the Atonement, matured by Anselm, and at first inferred from the doctrine in question, has in turn become one of its main supports.
For, assuming the infinite suffering of Christ, it has been asked, Why should so large a price be paid for man’s redemption, if death alone were the penalty of his sin? The value of the soul must correspond to the expense incurred for its salvation. “The expiatory offering of the Son of God,” we are told, “is a mystery at least as great as any involved in the doctrine of eternal punishment; and the awe which a serious contemplation of it is adapted to produce passes into actual pain, unless we take some grand and awful view of the object which was to be effected by it. To think of the eternal Father slaying his well beloved Son for any purpose is amazing; but to think of His doing so for a slight one is altogether appalling and impossible. The immortality of the soul stands in the fullest harmony with the vastness of the price that was paid for its redemption, and the eternity of future punishment with the infinite costliness of the ransom. It would afford a devout heart but little satisfaction to adopt a view which would represent the most Blessed as tender to His rebellious creatures, at the cost of representing Him as cruel to His Son.” The same argument appears in one of our hymns:
“When God, the Mighty Maker, died for man the creature’s sin.”
On the other hand many Christians have been pained to hear the infinite satisfaction of Christ employed as an argument of His divinity, regarding it as an occasion of Socinianism. And it is truly painful to hear the atonement referred to a tremendous exigency, and not to the free love of God, willing to bestow upon our dying race an infinite good. Happily, we have not known the proper sufferings of Christ to be employed as a theodicy, as have been the “long continued sufferings of God” and the general fact of Redemption, by that form of argument which charges the unspeakable gift of God as an infinite debt against man.
8. THEOLOGY OF THE FEELINGS.
It may appear strange that a lively abhorrence of evil should in any way promote the belief that it will be eternal. But a question often asked of those who deny endless suffering will verify, if it does not explain, the paradox. “Have you thought of the evil of sin?” And then, with a suggestion of one or two theodicies, we are told that the limitation of punishment (i.e. suffering) makes sin appear a trifle.
There is a reason for this. Pure feeling spurns all bounds and limitations. Undetermined by the reason, it will not know its own object definitely, but ever apprehends the indefinite and the infinite. In the estimate of personal guilt it refuses all limit, as penitent confession refuses all justification or even extenuation. This is apparent in the remarkable words of Edwards: “I know not how to express better what my sins appear to me to be, than by heaping infinite upon infinite, and multiplying infinite by infinite. I go about very often, for this many years, with these expressions in my mind, and in my mouth: “Infinite upon infinite! Infinite upon infinite!’ When I look into my heart, and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell.” The same feeling, which knows no moderation of self-love, scorns the limitation of others’ guilt. Thus two zealous disciples of Christ desired to sit, the one on his right hand, the other on his left, in his kingdom; not thinking that such honour might be other, or even greater, than Heaven could bestow upon them. A few days after, in a fervour of indignation, they would have called down fire from heaven upon a little town in Samaria, for the special sin of rejecting Jesus as about to give the Jews the preference (Luke 9:53). Suppose, now, that the disciples had learned to talk of infinities as freely as modern Christians do. How easily might they have constructed a theory in which the poor villagers would be guilty of dethroning God and ruining the universe. And then the fire from heaven must be of the philosophic kind, the ignis sapiens, lest it should unwisely devour too soon, and divine justice suffer loss.
But are we sure that if either the villagers had thought of such a crime, or the disciples of such a punishment, Christ would not have prayed: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”? The guilt would not have been infinite, nor the imprecation just, because each would have been an expression of indefinite, unrestrained feeling; — passion over- flowing all bounds, yet neither of them infinite; — the sin no larger than a poor villager’s capacity, and the indignation very blind and of narrow limits.
The hyperbole of the emotions, however, has its place in human theology, especially in discourses of practical religion; and we find it in the revelation of the divine character and emotions, where many strong expressions and apparent discrepancies can be explained only as accommodations to human forms of thought and speech. It was natural that a theology of the feelings, assuming the infinite importance of everything related to God, — as we see in the Rabbinical saying that “upon every letter of the Law are suspended mountains of sense,” and in the frequent practice of giving to every text all its possible meanings, — and multiplying the expressions of the infinite, should insist on the largest possible meaning of the revealed words. And as soon as the language of the feelings is adopted as that of the intellect, the work of error is done.
We may here name as one of the perpetuating causes of error, a disinclination to consider, or to re-consider, the doctrine of the divine penalty. The subject is necessarily painful, whatever be the doom of the lost. It is not directly a practical subject; and since duty, and not punishment, is man’s concern, and consequences are with God, it may seem trifling, or impertinent, to think much about the penalty of sin. Much less should we set our hardihood to the work of measuring it, as though we might be pleased to endure it. And when our fellow men seem not to fear it, we make the most of its terrors, so as, if possible, to alarm them. Then we deprecate the more any theory that seems to mitigate it. If there is any doubt, we take refuge in faith and mystery, and the error abides.
9. EXEGETICAL CAUSES.
We have already seen that most of the supposed proofs of the received doctrine from Scripture, rest on the assumption of the soul’s immortality. In other passages metaphor and drama are interpreted literally, by a process which betrays the theology of the feelings. The ignorance of Hebrew, and of the laws of interpretation, which we have noted among the Fathers of the Church, united with other causes, would make the danger of their misinterpretation of the divine sanction almost certain. It was hardly to be expected that the schools of philosophy should so prize the rude language of a despised and dispersed nation, as to make the proper use of their sacred books. And to this day the New Testament fails to receive the light which it should from the Old Testament. Having already read its history backward, from our own preconceptions, and from what is “brought to light” in the Gospel, we are loath to go back two thousand years to correct any error in the data of our doctrine respecting the world to come.
10. THE SENSE OF HUMAN DEPRAVITY.
The mystery of Sin gives us a keen sense of human depravity as a thing utterly perverse and impracticable. Ye cannot reason with the bad man. lie knows no argument but force, and that can never make him better than he is. That a finite creature should thus baffle all good influences, seems impossible. We pronounce the heart of man not only destitute of all holiness, but as bad as it can be; then man is not only utterly perverse, but infinitely wicked. Amazed and stupefied, we conceive a higher power of evil, incarnated in the human personality, or working behind it, as a diabolic adversary working through man against God. Our just apprehension of Satan as an actual prince of this world is itself too prone to pass into Dualism. But we get little relief, when we turn from him to his subjects, — “the children of disobedience.” The very feebleness of the human rebel against God overwhelms our reason, more than the splendid audaciousness of the fallen angel. In the contest between the finite and the Infinite, and by the measure of temerity, the less the sinner the greater the sin. Is it not infinite?
11. LACK OF FAITH IN THE POWER OF GOODNESS.
We often hear of “the omnipotence of love.” Gentleness can subdue the heart that is callous to every other influence. Kindness can melt down the soul, when the obligations of law and duty are unfelt, and reproof and punishment only harden. And the present triumphs of human goodness are all eclipsed by the love of God in Christ, reconciling a hostile world to himself.
But to say that the power of the Gospel lies in its peculiar nature as a message of love, is one thing; practically to believe this, is quite another thing. The early Christians did believe it, and rightly understood Christ’s words — “If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me,” — to mean, not that lie would effect a universal salvation, but that the Gospel, supplanting the law of the Jew and the logic of the Gentile, should be the power and the wisdom of God, for the changing of man’s nature. But the trial of their faith came. Jerusalem was destroyed; Christ returned not yet from heaven; persecutions abounded; and — what was harder to bear — sceptics began to scoff and gibe, asking, “Where is the promise?” To meet the new difficulties, there were, says Bunsen, “two ways open: that of practical, and that of theoretical or speculative Christianity. Why did not all serious Christians choose the former? “The answer is, love waxed cold; the special nature of the Gospel was forgotten; and the human, carnal methods of defence and propaganda began to be employed. The message of life was reduced by turns to a creed, a theology, a civil law and polity. The name of the “Gospel” was retained; but the idea of Justice had sui planted that of Grace. Now, as ever, human nature confides rather in the former.
The Christian’s better experience often subjects him to a strange disbelief. The new convert wonders why all who have heard the Gospel are not melted into gratitude and love. The persistent impenitence of multitudes seems to belie the power attributed to it. The inference made by the disappointed faith is two-fold: 1st, The defect of the Gospel must be supplied by a “law-work,” which must be done ever the more thoroughly as it seems less effective. 2dly, By way of reaction an enhanced deduction is made of the sinfulness and desperate wickedness of the impenitent. The sad surprise of the Christian is explained by a guilt of mankind not understood before; and the persuasion of this is aggravated by his own growing sense of God’s goodness, and of man’s ungratefulness. In grief and despair he thinks more of God’s wrath, and less of His love.
A prevalent hope of the Church respecting the general effect of the Gospel, contributes in its way to the severe deduction. It is easy to expect the conversion of the world so long as we look to heathen lands where the Gospel has met no signal failures. But over against this hope the ungodliness in Christendom appals us. The obstacles it throws in the way of missionary success, dishearten us.
12. DRACO.
It was a lively expression of a popular orator in Athens, that the laws of Draco were written, not with ink, but with blood. And it has been the misfortune of his name to be reproached as if he had devised a penal code unjust for its severity, making no distinction of crimes because, as he said, the least crime deserved the heaviest penalty of death. By some writers he is represented as not only unwise but weak, and his code as the failing experiment of a lawgiver of no capacity.
But in fact Draco only wrought the legislative views of his time into a system. “He did not,” says Grote, “meddle with the political constitution, and in his ordinances Aristotle finds little worthy of remark except the extreme severity of the punishments awarded. But we are not to construe this remark as demonstrating any special inhumanity in the character of Draco, who was not invested with the large power which Solon afterwards enjoyed, and cannot be imagined to have imposed upon the community laws of his own invention.
He was in fact the first to introduce mitigating distinctions in regard to homicide. The court of Areopagus seems to have been forbidden, by something connected with that spot — legends, ceremonies, or religious feelings — to take account of extenuating or justifying circumstances in the taking of human life; and to relieve this evil, Draco appointed other courts — the Ephetos — to sit at other and different places.” These courts might be compared with the cities of refuge provided by the Hebrew lawgiver, as places of security from the avenger of blood, in an age when private revenge could not be done away.
The law s of Draco, then, were not the caprice of an individual. They were not a singular example, if compared with those at the Locrian Zaleucus. They were not new. They are not yet acquainted; and we shall have something to say of their recent appeal. They were in fact expressions of a sentiment in human nature itself.
When society is to be protected, and law to be made a terror to evil doers, and crime wholly prevented if possible, men do not think of stopping to measure and limit Penalty. Indignation at wrong as simply and only wrong, the thought that he who commits one crime may commit any other, and the hope that the severest possible penalty may prevent the need of its execution, — make such a penalty appear equally just and merciful. And if so in human governments, why not much more so in the divine?
13. THE NOTION OF PUNISHMENT AS SPECIALLY MORAL
“While the infinite demerit of sin is so often asserted, the possibility of infinite merit is as commonly denied. Thus Fuller asks: “Does not the merit of obedience sink, and the demerit of disobedience rise, according to the excellence of the object?” There must be some reason for this opinion in human nature, and we think it is found in a higher consciousness of evil than of good. The distinctions of right and wrong are most fully understood by man in his sense of guilt. While we must hold that an unfallen race might have dispensed with this sad instruction, and think that the vanity and boundless pride of fallen men in their few virtues is a proof of it, yet in fact man’s common experience now is a “knowledge of good and evil.”
The effect is, that as by the Law is the knowledge of sin, so, conversely, by sin is the knowledge of Law. In its inner sub- stance, the Law is holy and benign; but our condition is an outlawry, and our instruction must be from without, inward. Thus we come at the Law first in its outward form — hard, repellent, frowning, smiting. We are out of its Paradise, and the way thither is guarded by “a flaming sword which turns every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” Hence penalty, and not reward, appears to us as the sanction of Law. Penalty is to us the life and soul of Justice. In common speech the terms “retribution” and “judgment” are almost confined to their penal sense; though, happily, as we have seen, the “judgment” of the Holy Scriptures denotes quite as often the vindication of a righteous cause, and the conduct of a righteous life.
This notion of Law as a letter that kills and not as a spirit that quickens, — as a dead form and not as a method of life, — is also strengthened by an acquaintance with the poverty and weakness of human governments. Civil authority can dispense penalties more freely than rewards; it has greater power to curse than to bless; it can kill, but it cannot make alive. Too naturally we transfer the conceptions derived from its special capacity for evil, to the polity of the unseen world.
The error is made complete when the divine attribute of Justice is apprehended, not as the rounded and beauteous symmetry of the highest goodness, but as a mere form of splendour, to be displayed as much in the inflictions of eternal wrath, as in the blessings of eternal love.
An able writer has remarked that high moral culture, without the Gospel, strengthens the sentiment of justice as essentially a law of penalties. How incomparably worse will the case be, when the Gospel itself— the gratuity of eternal life — is made a principal occasion of an eternal wrath and a deathless death!
14. NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE EVIL.
It is an open question whether man is more affected by the hope of pleasure or by the fear of pain. This question, we think, can never be answered, until it is considered that outward good and evil are realized as such only by an inward sense. And the varieties of this sense are such, in kind and degree, that one man’s pleasure may be another’s pain. The paradise of unthinking indolence is the ennui and torture of the active mind.
Absence of pleasure is a negative evil. That this may have meaning and force as a motive power, requires a due activity of the sentiments. If they are dormant, the impulse of pain and cogent fear may quicken them into life, though it cannot create them. But to the healthy and active soul the loss of good appears as a positive evil. Want is pain, because it is felt, as hunger and thirst are felt. The want is clothed in living form and with glowing colours, by the power of fancy. Privation is torment, and death itself, as cutting off all hope of joy forever, makes the torment eternal. Hence the Scripture drama of Death as man’s last and greatest enemy.
In spiritual things, this law of the quickened sense may seem not to hold. The carnal mind has no sense whatever of spiritual good, as such. Imperfect Christians and deceived professors keep up a decent appearance of life, mainly by dint of fear. Then unspiritual motives come in vogue, and are constantly plied, in exhortation, and discourse, and theology. If death is not feared, the fear not of death must be employed. The smoke of the pit soon beclouds the sky and shuts out the blessed light of day. And when no Shekinah of divine glory is seen, the night becomes familiar, and nothing less than an ever lurid flame is a sufficiently fearful hell, from which deliverance in death would be salvation. The darkness comprehends not the light, and death is made the measure of life. Hence a thousand such expressions as this: “An ‘eternal redemption’ we regard as involving an equally eternal enslavement. Heaven is only heaven while there exists a hell.”
15. ANCHORITE CONCEPTIONS OF THE HEAVENLY STATE.
A fallen race may be forgiven many errors in the attempt to divide between the proper and the perverted sentiments of their nature. And no wonder if they often go from one extreme to another. The doctrine of the highest good, too, is yet unsettled. Does it consist in happiness, or in holiness, or in their union? What is the comparative value of each? And what is the relation between them, which makes happiness to be a support and reward of virtue, and leaves virtue unbought and disinterested? This problem is perhaps yet unsolved, save practically, in the life of virtue itself.
The ancient philosophy, which abhorred matter and pleasure in common, and sought a pure empyrean of emotionless thought, was a practical failure. The Chiliasm of the early Church was a failure on the other side, repeated by the Munster fanatics, and often since. Both errors have been multiplied in the monastic system. The question is still a vexed one, What traces of our common humanity will be retained in the glorified state? The other problems have come in here, and we must know how the great ideas of holiness, blessedness, and the hating of evil, are correlated in the minds of the saints. With a just loathing of our vile body and its surroundings, perverted into a slight Manichaeism, it was easy first to de-humanize Heaven, and then to in humanize it. The first error appears in the conjecture that Heaven may “ in mercy extinguish their social susceptibilities.” The last error is found in the notion of the augmented bliss of the saved in viewing the state of the lost.
16. SELF-SUSPICION.
Ever with meekness and fear should the Christian give a reason for the hope that is in him; whether to the sceptic, denying Christ’s power to save, or to his own conscience, in the inquiry respecting the integrity of his personal faith. Since godliness is in fact profitable unto all things, and self-deception ever too easy, the disciple cannot be too jealous lest he be following the Master for gain.
But the godly jealousy may be perverted into a slavish fear. What means the custom long prevalent, of asking the candidate for admission to the Church, whether he was willing to be damned, — whether, if divine justice should take its course, he could still praise and adore his Maker? Practically, the question was incongruous; for man was created and redeemed just in order that he might not die. But in theory it had its value, as implying that God is glorious in all His doings — ever adorable, though one perish under His frown.
But suppose a Christian, inquiring whether annihilation or eternal misery is the doctrine of God’s word, asks himself which he would prefer? Failing to answer impulsively, as thousands have done, with a suffrage for immortality at all hazards, he is overwhelmed with the surpassing fearfulness of eternal misery. Perhaps, in his terror, he utters an involuntary prayer to be saved from such a doom. But why be startled, why shudder, if there is no such anguish? Whence came so fearful a thought? Does the conception imply a fact, or is it a creation of fear? And was the terror inspired by self-love, or by a sense of guilt? Has Christ redeemed him from such a penalty? What would be his feelings in view of such a salvation? And what would be his feelings if such should finally prove to be the penalty, or if he should finally fail of such a salvation?
What wonder, if the Christian should suspect some of his shuddering were quickened by the sense of guilt? or that his love of happiness partook too much of selfishness and sin? or if he should think it presumptuous to accredit the less fearful penalty? or if he should, by a lofty effort of faith, accredit the more fearful penalty, and resolve to improve the view as best he could? Doubtless many noble minds have ended the dire conflict in one or other of these ways; and the mental qualities which make their opinion in fact worthless, give it special influence over the minds of others.
But self-suspicion, in this grave question, may take one of two other forms. There are many who have not attained a full assurance of Christian hope, and have not so felt conviction of sin as to reject all limitations of its guilt. They have never thought of themselves as worthy of eternal suffering. * If that be the penalty of God’s law, they do not greatly fear it. If annihilation is not the penalty of sin, they are pretty sure of being saved at last. With them, to believe the worst is to hope for the best.
Others fear they shall yet fall under temptation, and fail of the grace of God. They need every possible motive to ensure their perseverance. To make the doom of the lost less dreadful would be to make temptation less fearful. They prefer the alarms of endless woe, lest they should be found tampering with death.
Thus many Christians; and multitudes who hope someday to become Christians, deprecate the abatement of any terror that may help them at the “convenient season.” The most abandoned, who yet retain their self-love, may even most earnestly desire manifold “powers of the world to come,” to ensure their eternal enjoyment at last. It is like them to do so: the reckless are ever running heavy risks, hoping that the larger venture will more surely win the prize.
Extremes meet; in contrast with this recklessness is offered the safe-side argument, which Christians are too prone to employ against the sceptic. Pilate’s question is often asked in this form; “If the soul may die, instead of suffering forever, what is the gain in men’s believing it? If the doom they fear is unreal, their belief does not make it true.” Doubtless. Yet the truth of God should be preferred to error; and the postponement of it to supposed expediency, and to a make-belief, as it is a sign of the tall, so also, we think, it has helped the progress of error in this great question. Aside from this gravamen, we humbly hope that our account has honoured, even more than it has impugned, man’s fallen nature.
HARMONY OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE.
The prevalent view of the divine penalty has entered so largely into the theology of the past centuries, that a denial of its truth seems to involve a great change, if not a reconstruction, of the Christian system. This seems the more likely, because the view we offer has not uniformly kept orthodox company; and especially because, for three centuries past, it has been much associated with Socinian views. And to many it will appear little better than Universalism, and a stepping stone thereto.
We believe that it involves no reconstruction of the doctrinal system, but a change of its key note; producing a real harmony where now is discord; and immensely facilitating the defence of the peculiar and essential doctrines of Christianity.
In order, if possible, to assign this doctrine its place in theology, let us begin by restating the advantages which we think are already proven in its favour. They are:
(6.) A nobler view of the Dignity of Human Nature; a view exempt from the hazards of the received doctrine; vindicating the work of Christ as a real salvation, and not a mere martyrdom; and exalting the salvation itself as not half negative, — a salvation from an in- finite evil, — but a salvation for an infinite good.
(7.) A true Theism; harmonizing the Sovereignty of God, in the permission of Evil, with the Trial and Triumph of human Faith.
(8.) A valid Theodicy.
(9.) A subordination of Reason to Revelation; the former being the science of the Possible or of the Probable, awaiting the assurance of man’s best hopes by a witness from on high.
(10.) A consistent method of interpreting the Scriptures; assuming as first truth of natural theology what is explicitly so assumed in the Bible; taking its commonest words in their natural sense; relieving it of a fearful mystery which it does not warrant; and offering it as a proper Gospel to the faith and love of men.
The reader has already observed that we oppose, no less than the notion of eternal evil, the so-called Ethical Theology. Its half-truths, its fundamental errors, and its occasions, we shall endeavour to point out in the following discussions.
1. OF PROVIDENCE.
First among the causes of the errors common to all mankind, — the Idols of the Tribe, — Bacon names the proneness to assume a greater uniformity in nature than really exists. The doctrine of an absolute immortality, and most of the arguments for it, are instances of this. The proofs have been mainly meta- physical and logical; quite worthless, if any exception to the rule were allowed. Logic is never so potent as when it finds a universal negative. It scorns mere probabilities and assurances; it will have cogent necessities. No measure of goodness, either human or divine, satisfies its demand. It is not content until it finds a nature of things. Hence we are told:
“Immortality is as much a property and determination of man’s nature as reason, or any quality besides.” It is thought to be in no sense ours, if it is not a law and a part of our being. In the philosophy even of some devout men, created existence must contain the power of self-perpetuation, — of surviving the creative Power, if that should cease. With others, God must uphold all things by general methods, so that the goodness or badness of the moral agent can neither insure, nor cut off, the eternal length of his days. Thus we are launched into being, and no longer the Creator, but Destiny, is our Preserver. We may outlive the goodness of Providence toward us; and, because evil Providence there is not, subsist forever in a calamitous immortality, by some Improvidence mightier than the eternal Father. What wonder, if relief from these difficulties is sought, now in the doc- trine of the development of the universe from an original creative impulse, God finishing His work in its beginning, for a repose never to be disturbed by care or prayer; and now in the doctrine of God as “ perfect Father and perfect Providence,” in which it is hard to see how the sins of men do not become God’s own, and how the evils that exist are not just what should be, in the youth of our eternal progress.
2. OF GRACE.
In few ways has our theology suffered more than by the almost exclusive use of the word “grace” in its secondary sense. We are ever speaking of “ the Christian graces,” and of God’s “ grace” as if it were a particular influence of His Spirit to produce them, forgetting the primary, common, and most significant scriptural sense of the word, — gratuity. Grace is a free-gift; a grant of that which cannot be claimed by right; favour bestowed on the undeserving. It is the antithesis of claim, right, merit, desert, debt, payment. Thus in civil and legal relations. And in the higher moral relations of man to man, and of man to God, it is contrasted with justice; it is gratuity allowed in the face of demerit; it is favour to the ill-deserving. It is mercy. Its radical sense of free-gift appears in the structure of rich words in various languages. It is forgiveness; pardon; condo- nation; donative. It has a choice adverb, gratis. It is also an act of amnesty; remission of debt, or sentence due. It is the great and interpreting word of the gospel, the best answer to the inquiry, what is the good news? the first word of the evangelical greeting, — Grace, Mercy, and Peace.
The word itself is a protest against all theories of constraint or necessity, legal or natural, in earth or in heaven. Whatever is truly given, is to be given freely, and freely received. Compulsion at any moment of its history is fatal to its nature. Its essence is the expansion, its law, the attraction, its art, the methods — of love. And because God is omnipotent goodness and love, urged by no necessity and bound by no claim in the universe, his whole creation may be regarded as his first gift, the beginning of his grace.
But God is also just; and the principle of justice appears as the rule of his creation. The constitution of every being that he creates should be a provision, if not for happiness, at least not for misery. God cannot justly half form a creature — with faculties that yield only pain. The sentient creature has a right not to be made woefully imperfect. The moral being, made for immortality, has a right to be so formed that no derangement of his powers, incurred by less than infinite personal guilt, shall bring immortal pangs. It is just that accident or guilt, that impairs living faculties beyond the power of self-recovery, should bring them down to a common grave. Of such faculties each is due to the others. The part is due to the complementary part. It still remains true that the whole existence is of grace.
The principle may be modified by a single consideration. Possibly various orders of being are differenced by the possession of more or fewer of a certain range of faculties. Hence the loss of one faculty might leave a being perfect in a lower order. Man might, perhaps, be de-rationalized into a very perfect brute. But natural history, we think, has proved no trans- mutation of species; whence death, and not degradation, appears as the appropriate penalty of sin.
The principle we have named, of the part as due to the gratuitous whole, will explain many misstated truths in the controversies about the various measures of grace. Did God owe to man “redemptive grace,” “preventing grace,” “assisting grace,” “sufficient grace?” Acute men have offered such contradictions as good reasoning. Thus Leibnitz: “Since necessity is incompatible with punishment, we may infer that sufficient grace ought to have been given to all men.” Such confusion of things that differ tends to annul the very idea of grace.
The perversions of the doctrine of grace may be divided into three classes: the juridical, the licentious, and the fatalist.
39. By the juridical perversion we mean that which makes the draft on the divine grace, to eke out the vindication of the divine justice. Of this, several species have appeared in our examination of the theodicies. The reader will have observed that they mostly pertain to the Arminian style of theology. The more Calvinistic theodicies generally avoid this error, because they insist on the infinite guilt of temporary sin. If that were admitted, the doctrine of a crisis, in the history of the individual if not of the race, followed of course; and it was consistent for the Calvinist to style his views of the Redemption “doctrines of grace.” In common with the Arminian, however, he attempted to carry one infinitude too much; in the recession from the unendurable burden appeared the notion of infant annihilation, until now the doctrine of a crisis is nearly abandoned, in the theodicy of eternal sinfulness, which involves the denial of grace.
40. Of the licentious perversion there are two occasions: the doctrine of an absolute immortality in man; and the doctrine of absolute power in God. According to the first, sin is not fatal, and an immortal vigour either forbids immortal danger. Or empowers an invincible wickedness. Thus whether the gift of immortality be original or redemptive, it incurs eternal abuse. According to the second doctrine, which we have called Absolutism, God may do evil that good may come; evil is a part of the divine economy; why should it not be of the human? why should there not be sin, that grace may abound?
3. Of the fatalist perversion there are also two occasions: the doctrine of Evil as an eternal necessity, in whatever form; and the denial of human liberty. According to the former, the Redemption itself, the plan of grace, is not free on the part of God. It is of constraint, exigency, and emergency; needful to Him for the avoidance or the mitigation of the supposed eternal etc. Various features of this perversion have appeared ahead; others will appear in the discussion of the Atonement. Accord- mg to the latter the supposed grace is not free on the part of man. It is imposed on his acceptance. This incongruity is expressed in the old phrase, “efficacious grace;” as if we might speak of “efficacious gratuity.” Moreover, without freedom there is neither praise nor blame; acts have no moral character; we may do as we please, or rather as we must. Thus extremes meet, and the notion of freedom wanting is as licentious as that of freedom eternal even to sin.
3. OF DEATH.
We have already noticed the early Christian doctrine of man’s intermediate nature, — his creation neither as absolutely mortal nor immortal, but for life with a liability to death. This doctrine was held so uniformly by those who held the three most different opinions respecting the final destination of those dying impenitent, and it formed so marked a contrast with the views of the Platonists and of the Gnostics, that it cannot well be explained except as a natural after-thought of the Revelation. But the doctrine, we remarked, is now departed and corrupted. The doctrine of man’s mixed nature has taken the place of it. The soul is strictly immortal; and although the body has been long regarded as subject to death by sin, and that may be called historically the Church doctrine, yet of late many Christians are telling us that the body is naturally mortal; its death is a debt of nature. Sin has not made us subject to dissolution and decay; it has only made dissolution painful, and death fearful. Death would have had power over us, to send us to the grave, if we had been sinless; but he would have been our friend. His servants, corruption and the worm, would have done a good and a proper work, when life had begun to totter with age. But sin and sickness have made him our enemy; he treats us no longer kindly, but rudely; with rough hands he tears us, shrieking, away from many fond embraces, ere life is half-ended, or even fairly begun.
We style this the Pelagian view, not invidiously, but as a fact of history; and we have tried to give it every advantage in the statement of it. It follows, that either the eternal state is to be a disembodied state, that of pure spirit, as the rationalists hold, and the resurrection is that of spirit alone; or else physical dissolution and resurrection were the law of man’s nature, and the so-called “redemption of our body” is now to accomplish, with whatever modifications, substantially the same that the law of nature would have wrought.
In behalf of the other view, that death is of sin, we should here state that without sin man would doubtless have been capable of suffering, the nervous system being, as now, his guardian. But not his only guardian. For along with his right to the tree of life, man may have lost a higher instinct, like the intuitive sagacity which even now gives many a person of delicate moral sense a profound knowledge of character and warning of moral danger. This spiritual instinct might also have enabled man, better than any marvellous brute instinct, to thread his way through the labyrinth of this earth’s physical dangers. Thorns and thistles might have grown naturally as how; but not to the detriment of man. His art, or that which was better, and which would have hastened the progress of all art, might have avoided, or subdued them. He should have been “in league with the stones of the field; and the beasts of the field should have been at peace with him.” Accidents, if any there were, which no sagacity could prevent, might have crushed the sinless body, but not the life. And ever, instead of death and dissolution, the psychical body should have been “swallowed up of life,” by a transformation of which the chrysalis is the type, and the translation of Enoch and Elijah the imperfect examples; since the tabernacle of God might have been with, or near to, men; and the perfected state should not have been a removal from the sinless kindred of earth.
Was all this originally impossible for mankind? But does not our choice lie between it and the woeful history of man, in whole or in part, as it is?
In the rationalistic view, while the body must crumble, the soul cannot. And from its imperishable nature we have endeavoured to show that its unimpaired nature, not diseased by the plague of sin, and its eternal power of self-recovery, logically follow. The doctrine of man’s mixed nature, substituted for that of his intermediate nature, is the supplanting of Christian views by Platonism and Gnosticism.
In non designed support of the rationalistic view, it is argued both that bodily death is not penal because it is of nature, and that the extinction of the soul could not be penal, because it could only be of nature. Says one: “ If man be not physically immortal, if immortality be not a physical constituent and determination of his being, — not his appendage, but his nature, — we may inquire, how can its forfeiture be penal? “ And he proceeds with dialectic argument to maintain that what is not strictly of man’s nature cannot be his, and cannot be lost; which by another writer is stated as a moral argument, thus: “Forfeiture is punishment, when it is the withdrawal of a right — of that which is one’s own, — not merely the refusal to extend a gift or gratuity. Human government, for instance, that aims at the prevention of crime rather than the satisfaction of justice, does not content itself with saying: ‘If your conduct is virtuous and meritorious, we will bestow upon you honours and emoluments; but if you commit crimes, we will simply not bestow them: will simply let you alone — do nothing for you — do nothing to you.’ The loss of an attainable or proffered heaven is not properly an atonement.
For it was never the soul’s right, property, or prerogative. The withdrawing of life was simply the discontinuance of a gratuitous boon, and not to be was simply not to suffer — a mere negation of all punishment, as well as of all favour.”
Upon the dialectic or metaphysical form of the argument we remark that its boldness illustrates what we have said of faith, seeking support in a nature of things. The creation of man for immortality goes for nothing. And we reply, that, by parity of reasoning, the loss of heaven cannot be penal. Eternal life must be a “physical constituent and determination” of man’s being, or its forfeiture cannot be a punishment. Exemption from pain must be a “physical constituent and determination” of man’s being, or the suffering of pain cannot be penal. In other words, God must bind himself, in our very frame and constitution, not to punish us, ere He can have power to punish us!
The second form of the argument is valid simply as showing what no one ever denied, that positive guilt deserves positive suffering, or that not to feel pain cannot be the penalty of crime. But it is open to several objections. Like its dialectic equivalent, it ignores the idea of a creation for a priceless good. It also ignores the famous distinction between felt penalty, and the penalty of loss. It forgets the weak advantage of human governments, that can let their subjects “alone,” and do them no great harm. Whereas, when God pursues the “let alone policy,” the anathema is fatal; when He withdraws His upholding hand, we perish. Again, it would equally prove that capital punishment is capital impunity, and that posthumous indignities and bills of attainder are not penal; for they rarely add to the pain of dying, and death is the end of pain. But if premature death of the short-lived body may be penal, why not the eternally premature death of the soul? Finally, the argument assumes that there can be no forfeiture of that which is not legally due; thus, at a single stroke, annulling the Scripture doctrine of grace — the first truth of the Gospel. As if eternal life were a reward of virtue, which man may actually earn, creating debts in heaven, as the sinner does in hell, which God can never pay. And as if an infinite bounty of grace could be in no sense ours, because it is not deserved, only offered or given; and as if no falling short of that which God proffers could be loss or forfeit. Whereas the Scriptures ever speak of death as debt, remitted in the free gift of life. “The WAGES of sin is death; but the gratuity of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ, our Lord.”
We should here notice the argument in a recent article on “ Perpetual Sin and Omnipotent Goodness,” which expresses, if we mistake not, a very prevalent view, and which is akin to the theodicy we have styled“ a law of nature,” though it is not strictly the same. After a most able statement of the proximate solution of the origin of evil, as incidental to the discipline of new-created beings, (which, however, is carried almost too far, so as to involve the certainty of sin,) the writer speaks of the perpetuity of sin very briefly, and mainly with reference to the sinning angels. That God should annihilate them, he says, “or abate any measure of the tokens of his displeasure, would be a weakness and a reproach to himself in his own right. He is only doing by the fallen angels now [?] as ever, just what is due to himself. He can do no less in holding them to their misery, and do right.”
The governmental argument which the writer prefaces to this statement, has, we think, been answered. The main argument rests, we think, on the assumption that immortal being is of nature, and that God is not bound to interpose for the relief, even in death, of those who sin; rather, he is bound not to interpose. We might reply that if death be the proper penalty of sin, the judgment may be executed by forces pre-ordained, and then there need be no interposition. But if such forces are not provided, then justice is as much bound to interpose, lest punishment exceed its limit, as lest it fall short of its due. This lies in the very idea of justice; and the heavens might as properly fall for its excess as for its dereliction. Indeed, an eternal suffering not justly incurred by the sins of time would be calamity, rather than penalty, and in that view might indicate the “weakness” of a Ruler who should not prevent it.
And aside from reason and Scripture, we may safely appeal to the natural instincts of mankind, to show that death is evil and may be penal. The deaf mute certainly cannot have a higher instinct here than the more favoured individuals of the species. Yet such an one, telling his experience, says: “I had terrible dreams about death, which stimulated me to take some possible means to save my life from being destroyed, by hiding myself under the ground. I had always regarded death with painful terror and superstition; it seemed to me to be an unnatural and ghastly thing, and a sort of punishment inflicted on bad human beings. Before I came to be educated, the subject of death affected my thoughts and feelings. I considered it to be the most dangerous of all calamities, and some- times dreaded it. I generally thought that J should never die, but live for eternity.” Such persons, v/e are told, had no idea of the soul, nor of any spirit whatever; yet these testimonies “might be multiplied indefinitely,” and “to most of the uneducated deaf and dumb, death is truly the King of Terrors.” But the terror is strictly that of death. Can it be less evil or less penal to the angels, or to men who hear the words of eternal life?
We have seen the difficulties which the old Christian doctrine of man’s intermediate nature offers to relieve. To many, who affect explicitness, this doctrine will appear a thing indeterminate; a playing of fast and loose with words that certify nothing; an artful evasion. We wish with them no quarrel of words; let them state, in better terms, by what condition of nature man is a probationary creature. Do they think his moral character may be undetermined, between eternal sainthood and eternal fiendishness? Or his moral constitution unsettled, between end- less bliss and ceaseless woe? But by what rule can a quality be undetermined, and not a nature? Have they found a dividing wall between substance and attribute? How can man’s will waver on the verge of an endless destination, and not his being? Will they say that God cannot create a being capable of eternal existence, yet liable, under His power, to perish quite away? Would this savour too much of mutability, in the creation or in the Creator? Then let them be consistent; let them discard all doctrine of probation; let them say that whatever will be, must he; that nothing is intermediate, undetermined, but all is absolutely fixed. Let us accept the Mohammedan fate, resign ourselves to a Destiny that has locked all events in adamant, and say, Whatever is, is right.
Upon the rationalistic, and now fast prevailing theology, rather, may be fixed the charge of playing fast and loose. It cannot say whether there has been a failure and a recovery in . the history of man. Its Fall and Redemption are a thing of degrees. There has been no crisis, no turning point, nothing to decide the future course of man beyond the capacity of self-salvation. He has, perhaps, not done quite as well as he should have done. But if he has run below his level, he can rise to if again. If he has deteriorated a little, he can improve. Mean- while his sufferings have not fallen far behind his derelictions, or if they gather in a flood, they can never whelm or destroy him. By a law of his being all punishment is inevitable, and remission of sins impossible. And besides this law of nature there is no judgment. The passage from one life to another is of nature, and yields no critical result. Every evil done or suffered has brought its discipline of good. Through whatsoever devious paths, Progress is the eternal law of our being.
Such is the Ethical Theology of our day, in its last, we think its consistent results. We admit its truth, or rather half-truth, that so long as life lasts, reward and penalty are natural and not miraculous. Aside from this, its results are manifest, and with the sceptical school they are plainly avowed. There has been no catastrophe in man’s history. We are not a fallen race. God did not make man very good, and he at once begin to be very bad. There was no occasion why God should repent and be grieved at heart for the conduct of those whom he had made. And the book that pretends to give account of his dealings with and for man as fallen, is not from him. Be it so! Then the new theology has its sad dilemma. It will not pretend that human history has done honour to human nature. Either man has done much worse than he should have done, or God made him much worse than he should have made him!
The theology is readily allied with a denial of the divine Providence, and exemplifies the law of retribution which it avers. Professing to be most ethical, it becomes the argument of those who fear no judgment beyond the present, — “scoffers, walking in their own hists, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.”
Those Christians who now deny the intermediate nature not of soul alone but of body, should not be too confident that they can silence the new theology. The Church doctrine of bodily death which they reject, is a lingering, languishing protest of the crisis in man’s history. This alone shows the resurrection of Christ to be a crisis of redemption. And hence the argument of Paul for a crisis yet to come, and a future reign of righteousness: “ Because He hath appointed a Day in the which He will judge the world in righteousness, by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised him from the dead.”
5. OF ORIGINAL SIN.
With the current view of immortality the proposition that infants are saved by grace is strictly untenable, and by many is no longer asserted. The old theodicies of the existence and guilt of all in Adam, and of the imputation of his sin to all his posterity, are absolutist and arbitrary, annulling the idea of grace with that of justice. The common notion now is that infants are saved by their innocence, or by the so-called grace of Christ, which justice, however, demands; so that in either case their salvation is of debt. A sinful or criminal nature, which alone can be supposed to deserve eternal suffering, implies a sinful volition; which in the case of infants must logically involve pre-existence, either chronological, as Dr. Beecher supposes (and in which view his argument is a consistent deduction from the prevalent doctrine), or timeless and dateless, as deduced by Dr. Muller.
But death is a calamity which may be either penal, or may befall the guiltless. And all may be said to die in Adam, since death, either with or without personal guilt, seems to have entered the world and to have extended to all men, through the first man. In this view, we may either suppose the term “sin” to be taken in its primary sense of failure, missing the mark, or in a forensic way it may be taken in the old sense of the world “guilt,” i.e. liability to sentence, and the divine justice is not impeached. Infants are neither strictly deserving of, nor qualified for, eternal life. They are characterless, in that they have done neither good nor evil. Yet their existence, with that of the race, was forfeited in Adam; no more unjustly than the health, the length of life, even the existence of every child is put within the power of the parent. But the single forfeit makes even infant being, much more eternal existence, to be of grace. Does not the passage in Romans 5:12-21, sustain this view?
We have used the phrase “original sin,” as expressing the doctrine of native depravity. That doctrine may well be rejected with the notion of natural exposure to escapeless woe. But in the view that the offspring of a fallen race are unfitted for the original destiny of that race, the doctrine in question may perhaps be well reconsidered. May not the bias to evil be illustrated by the ill temper of brute animals, derivable from the birth as personal guilt cannot be? And though holiness can no more than sinfulness be transmitted, may not the fruits of divine grace in the parent so modify the very nature of the child as to render it less fitted to die, and a more proper candidate for eternal life? May we not, indirectly, infer as much from 1 Corinthians 7: 14?
The reaction from the doctrine of eternal suffering appears most plainly in the notion that all punishment is disciplinary and reformatory. Of course it is not properly penal; i.e. suffering incurred or inflicted because deserved. The only desert is a need, if not a right, to be reformed. The name “punishment” does not agree at all with the theory, and is discarded by many who hold it.
The philosophy which is apparent in the work on “The Constitution of Man,” is in fact the Epicurean. The moral state of man is reduced to a question of good or ill health. The whole duty of man is to live according to nature; and by nature is meant a set of contrivances for man’s enjoyment. Penalty is only the natural consequence of violating a natural law. Sin is imprudence — nothing more. Obligation centres in self-love; i.e. it centres nowhere; since a man has a right not to love himself. Guilt is not such because it deserves punishment, but because pain is annexed to it. Without this appendage it would be as innocent as it would be harmless. Hence it is punishment that constitutes criminality; and it follows that the criminality is not in him who suffers, but in him who inflicts punishment. For, with whatever plea of benevolence, by what right can one man disturb the quiet of another, and compel him to be happy in a way he does not choose? This solution of the problem of penalty is worse than a failure. It involves the frightful paradox, the highest right is the highest wrong.
The argument of one of the most able advocates of universal salvation is reducible to this absurdity. “Punishment,” we are told, “is not retrospective, but prospective. You are to be punished, not because you have yielded to an evil volition, but in order that you may yield to an evil volition no more.” Thus one is to be punished at a venture for sins that may never be committed! And if the only demerit in guilt is a desert of reformation, then the greater the guilt, the greater the desert! The only way to avoid this conclusion is to regard punishment, up to the point of reformation, as of grace. “Exemption from further punishment is, without doubt, required by strict justice; and yet, under the divine administration, it is highly improper to speak of that very exemption as a matter of right; for such is the nature of punishment under the government of God, that it is as benevolent a provision as the direct and immediate bestowment of happiness. It is not only the actual communication of good, but the communication of good in the form best calculated to secure happiness. The sinner is therefore as much indebted to God for it, as he is for the gift of life itself, and for that constitution of his nature which renders life a blessing.” This writer, whose doctrine of the will is fatalist, tells us very consistently, “moral evil is evil only because it produces misery; were it without this con- sequence, it would cease to be an object of aversion and avoidance.”
Now this injustice of punishment logically follows, we think, from the notion of an absolute immortality. Such immortality is either the just right of man’s nature, or it is a constant gratuity. If the former, is it not man’s right to experiment upon it as he pleases? and is not every penal interference unjust? If the latter, then it is indeed only consistent that God should seek to render the gratuity a blessing; but since it is to be eternal, sin is no more perilous, and punishment is needless, and unjust.
But if death is the penalty of sin, then suffering may be both benevolent and just. Benevolent, as admonitory of an imminent danger; and just, as related to the conduct of one created in God’s image; who was, therefore, more than a brute mechanism for pleasure, and thus not beneath moral law; yet not divine, and thus not above law.
6. OF PARDON.
In two different ways is the actual pardon of sin denied. 1st, When sin is said to be punished in the person of the transgressor. 2dly, When it is said to be punished in the person of the Redeemer.
1. It is well understood that the common doctrine of universal salvation offers in fact no salvation. For, no one can be said to be saved from that to which he was never liable, nor from that which he actually suffers. Hence we are frankly told that “all who suffer future punishment endure the penalty of the law, and therefore, in a popular sense, cannot be said to be forgiven.” “The advocates for the corrective nature of punishment do not believe that all men will be saved, but that, sinners being reclaimed by the discipline through which they will be made to pass, all men will ultimately be rendered pure and happy.” And such concessions are frequently made by those who regard happiness, in the sense of agreeable sensations, as the highest good.
A higher form of the doctrine is offered by those who admit the freedom of the will, and the reality of moral character, and the true welfare of man as consisting not in what he feels or receives, but in what he does and is. They tell us that justification and sanctification are one and the same thing. This is the highest effort of the Ethical Theology — its special promise to purify the religion of Christ from antinomian abuse and corruption. In this view a man is justified only when, and so far as, he is made actually just. No one is treated as if he were just, by the remission of penalty, until he ceases to deserve the penalty. In the moral constitution of man every sentence remains in force until it is exhausted, in the compliance of the will to the demand of law, and in the healing of the wound which sin had made. The remission of sins signifies the putting away of guilt; and the endurance of full penalty is inseparable from the process. And remission is man’s act, it is self-forgiveness; there is no actual absolution from God. He only pronounces upon the fact of amendment, and receives the sinner, with and on account of his moral improvement, to His favour.
Here the denial of forgiveness in any proper sense of the term is complete, unless it is said that the means of sanctification, divine influences, and all other helps, — are a gratuity, and constitute the divine act of forgiveness. But these helps are needless, if the sinner retains all the faculties proper to immortal existence, and guilt has involved no crisis of condemnation. Divine aid is a lavish waste, and the message of help from on high is not a gospel, if the sinner has an immortal vigour that must outlive the effects of numberless past sins, and enable him to gain heaven in his own right. If he has such power, he ought to use it: and gratuitous aid is neither compliment nor kindness. And one of the ablest rationalists very consistently tells us: “The divine excellence of the Christian religion is especially conspicuous in this, that it directs men to seek their salvation within their own hearts, without any foreign aid whatsoever;” and “the soul oppressed by a sense of its sins, ought to seek rest and peace only from its own powers.” But if man has not such powers then there is a crisis, a sentence, which involves the death of faculties or of being; and the remission of which is, in the fullest sense, an act of pardon.
Justification and sanctification, then, though most closely connected, are essentially distinct. The former is the free gift of forfeited strength and life; the latter is the acceptance and use of it. Pardon is the grant of an undeserved boon; holiness, through faith, is its fruit.
But what’ mean the sufferings that men do endure for their sins? Are they not penal? And are not those who accept pardon partly punished and partly forgiven?
We think this problem of apparently mixed punishment and forgiveness is solved in the doctrine of death as the penalty of sin, and in no other way. Pain is the law both of incipient death and of lingering life. Its domain is that whole shadowy region between full health and extinction. Some have thought it ought to be a condition of incipient life; and the conjecture of Jeremy Taylor that it may be as painful to be born as it is to die, would then be true in another sense than he intended. But not to insist on this, everyone knows that anguish is a law of resuscitated life. Few pangs are more terrible than those of recovery from freezing or from drowning; and convalescence from many forms of disease is full of torture. Now the economy of pain is doubtless benevolent; the nerves give friendly admonition of danger; the conscience, of that which is worse than danger, — sin and the utter death.
Now may it not be a necessity in the nature of things that the recovery of life in every form should be as painful as its loss? That death should cast its shadow both ways; or rather, that a painless rescue from that dark valley should be impossible? The conviction of guilt that follows a sense of pardon is often greater than that which precedes it; could it be otherwise? Can triumphant life struggle with lingering death, without suffering? And the long continuance of pain, either physical or moral, may denote the strength of either remaining life or death. The body may die hard because of its vigour. The bad man often has conscience enough to torment him long. The converted man too often comes slowly into the full light of life, and has just religion enough to make him wretched.
Pain then is the gloomy cloud that envelops death; appointed in mercy, that we may not die unawares; strictly penal to those who choose death, and to those who linger near its borders; and in the escape from death’s pangs, inevitable, — calamitous, yet not penal. To all who will live, the real penalty of sin, — death, is wholly forgiven. And for them, the law of life, that crowns the right use of its powers with blessing, and visits their infraction with pain, is no modification of the pardon, because the annulling of that law would be rather a judgment, turning the world into chaos.
Do we, then, by grace, make void the law? Rather the pardon of sin is the re-enacting of the law, in behalf of those who have forfeited life. They are brought under law, and they share its benefits, by rescue from the outlawry of death.
But what means the bodily death which man is still exposed to, and which we affirm is no debt of nature, but a fruit of sin? “We answer, the Redemption has given it a new character. Men are wont to call it temporal death; its true name is temporary death. It removes a vile and corrupted body, that we may receive a body incorruptible. Without the Resurrection, it would remain our foe. By the Resurrection the enemy is conquered and subdued to our service. Its spirit and power are broken; its form alone remains, the monument of our history, the token of our need.
2. The other denial of pardon, on the ground that sin is punished in Christ, is thus frankly made by Stockell: “In a strict and proper sense the infinite God doth not forgive sin; for it is readily granted by all who are sound in the faith, that Jesus Christ hath given full satisfaction to the divine justice for all sin, and hath fully paid the debt of the Church. And if Christ has satisfied the justice of God for all the sins of His people, how then can it justly, or with propriety of speech, be said that God pardons our sins and trespasses? Sure I am, that debt can never he forgiven, which is paid. And Maccovius, on the proposition that “God remits no sins unpunished,” says: “This is proven from Exodus 34:7; Numbers 14:18; Nahum 1:3;” and that Socinus is mistaken in applying such passages to the impenitent, “for God does not remit the sins of the pious with impunity, but punishes them in Christ.”
In support of this “view, some will say that if penalty is just, the omission of it must be unjust. The transgressor deserves punishment; penalty ought to be inflicted; the demand of justice must be satisfied. If the offender cannot meet the demand, he can be released only by the intervention of a third party. If sin has impaired his power, and disqualified him for future obedience, his future shortcomings are an accumulating debt which can be remitted only on account of satisfaction by a mediator.
We reply that the desert of punishment and its necessity are two very different things; and it is only playing with words when we infer that because the sinner owes something to the law, therefore the law owes something to him. We may also reject the doctrine in the words of another, “first, because in taking. away God’s freedom to any virtue but justice, it takes away also the virtue of that; reducing Him to a Nemesis, against whose fated and repulsive rigors all our*warmest conceptions of divine beauty raise themselves in a mutiny of unbelief; so that if we say we believe, we shall only be found to have let down the precept of the law just enough to accommodate our faith in the forbidding rigors of penalty — just enough to save God’s paternity by the laxity of his principles, after it has been lost by the judicial sternness of his retributions. Secondly, because it wholly displaces the Gospel, as a message of good news from heaven; denying even the possibility of pardon or remission, in any sense that gives it an effective value.”
But we shall not fully refute the fatal theory, unless we exam- me it in its sources and connections. We remark, then, that it seems to be implied, and properly to inhere, in several of the theodities of eternal suffering.
Manifestly, for example, in one form of that of eternal sinfulness; which is worthless without the assumption that God has no right to destroy the rebel, defrauding his justice of the pangs of the next moment for the sins of the past moment. But more plainly and popularly is it involved in the theory of sin, as committed against the universal welfare, against the law of the general well being. This law, which guards an infinite good, is said to be “broken” by sin. And even when it is conceded that the ominous word is only a metaphor, that the sinner is “broken” against an inflexible rule, an eternal rock, it is still thought that the infinite evil which he would do if he could, demands his eternal suffering. And there is much talk about the “infinite affront” to God, and His “injured majesty”; which His dignity cannot pass unnoticed.
And that theory of the Atonement which makes the sufferings of Christ a satisfaction of the divine justice is commonly found in the closest connection with the notion of sin as infinite guilt. Thus Turretin, in reply to the assertion of God’s right to forgive without a consideration, says: “God may be regarded either as a creditor, or as a Lord and an injured party, or as a Ruler and Judge. Here, then, we should take ground against our opponents, whose primal error is this, that sin is to be regarded simply as a debt, and God as a mere creditor, who may at pleasure either exact penalty, or remit without a satisfaction. Whereas, it is certain that God here bears the character of Judge and Ruler of the world, whose right is that of magistracy, and who is the Guardian and Defender of the laws.” From this he presently infers that the Redeemer must be a divine being, “ in order to take away the infinite demerit of sin.”
And Grotius: “Instead of God, the law of God, the moral order of the universe, is considered as violated by sin. Hence it belongs to God, as the Supreme Judge, to form a plan by which satisfaction may be made, and the general harmony may be maintained.” And Anselm, by whom the satisfaction-theory of the Atonement was matured, reasons thus: “The law of God is something so great and holy, elevated above the whole visible creation, that a truly virtuous being would sooner let a thousand worlds, with all their inhabitants, be destroyed and annihilated, than move, were it only the twinkling of an eye, contrary to the will of God. If, then, every sin is an interruption of the divine and holy harmony of the universe; if it is, moreover, an attack on the inviolable majesty of God, it is evident that since man does not give God what is justly His due, God must take from man all of which it is possible to deprive him, provided that the righteousness of God may be in any measure satisfied. God must, therefore, take away every conceivable vestige of happiness, and doom him, according to the language of Scripture, to temporal and eternal death.”
In view of these reasoning, we may safely affirm that, in human theology, infinite guilt is certain to be regarded as unpardonable. It cannot be forgiven gratuitously, without consideration or compensation, as a free act of divine mercy, upon occasion of any repentance, however sincere. Irreparable as all evil is, if guilt were finite, the infinite God might freely remit its penalty. But when His infinity is regarded as occasion of its infinite heinousness, when sin is thought to be infinitely affronting, then His honour is not vindicated by a simple act of forgiving love. If sin threatens a universe with detriment, the tremulous world may crumble, unless quieted by some exhibition of His wrath. If sin is infinitely bold and wicked, repentance and pardon alone cannot annul it; there must be somewhere an exhibition or an equivalent of penalty. Here, if we mistake not, is the origin of that theory of the plan of grace which annuls the very idea of grace, the commercial view of the Atonement, which makes the sufferings of Christ a reparation of damage done, the payment of a debt to God.
But we easily avoid this and all kindred errors, when we regard sin as the forfeiture of being, and the beginning of death. The prolonged life, the lingering delay of death, is itself a gratuity. God’s forbearance is all that gives the dangerous appearance of impunity. The Justice of God has continual display in the deaths of groaning and despairing millions. The death of Christ was not a new exhibition of divine vengeance; it was, rather, a sympathy and consorting with the sons of death, embracing them for their deliverance. So far from being designed to secure an original claim of justice, it was a forgetfulness of every claim, in contemplation of a new interest of mercy. On the side of God there were no necessities whatever but the constraints of love; the necessities were all human. And the only danger attending the long drama of divine grace is told in a word. Men mistake the respite granted, the space given for repentance, and the joys and hopes of a respited life, as though they were a proof of immortality and an earnest of its blessedness. If the common language of prayer, that “of mercy are we now alive and in being,” were transferred to our theology, it would correct many errors. God does freely forgive until grace can do no more.
We have already endeavoured at two points to relieve the doc- trine of the resurrection of the unjust. It may here be relieved of another objection, viz.: that God is not hound to punish the wicked in the precise measure of their misdeeds, and their resurrection would seem designed only for the purpose of such retribution. This objection was felt by some of the Socinians, who early protested against the notion that God must inflict penal suffering; and it led a few then, as now, to deny that the unjust would at all live again.
We reply, that as God is not bound to resent the puny shaking of the sinner’s fist, or the rude swagger of his tongue, but might forget him into eternal silence, so in fact he does not raise him up from death for the sake of punishing him. God never lifts a finger for the recovery of a right of his justice, or to save that attribute from fraud. He is not so poor that he should suffer for the lack of a deserved pang, anywhere in his universe. “If thou sins, what does thou against Him? Or if thy transgression be multiplied, what does thou unto Him?” “Will He reprove thee for fear of thee? Will He enter with thee into judgment?” He condescends to treat with men in the offer of mercy; never in the prosecution of His justice. He does not thus sue a claim or “go to law” with men. All sensible punishment is probably the conscious ebbing away of life — the vanishing from view of infinitely desirable blessings, which seeing, the sinner “shall be grieved; he shall gnash with his teeth, and melt away.” And by a law of his being, the pangs of the second death may be the measure of the sins of life.
The second death, then, we regard as not the object or purpose of the resurrection of the unjust, but its result. The scriptural statements of their resurrection do not represent it as designed for the satisfaction of justice. It is “unto” condemnation, but not in order to condemnation. As life is not for the sake of death, and no man is born into this world in order that he may die, so the brief reviving of the spent life in the dawn of the world to come is not in order to the second death. Every form of man’s death comes from the rejection of life; and every pang marks his progress thither, or his rescue and retreat from thence.
7. THE REDEEMER.
We decline all mercantile theories of the Atonement, not only because they vitiate the whole doctrine of forgiveness, saving it only in appearance, in the notion that what is received by one per- son of the Trinity is freely given by another, — but because no such theory is supported by the language of Scripture. No inspired word do we find of Christ paying a debt to God, or satisfying His justice. Early, indeed, in the history of Christianity, we find a Manichaean notion that Satan had a claim on men as the heirs of death, which could not be released until Christ consented for a while to be prisoner to the Enemy. But even this claim was little respected, in the forceful escape of Him who could not be held of death.
There is, however, a large class of passages which represent Christ as our Passover, our Ransom, made a sacrifice for us, and redeeming us by his blood. And many who discard the commercial view of Atonement, suppose these passages prove a vicarious suffering of Christ, in such sense that his death is a substitute for our punishment; not itself penal, but a substitute for the penalty of God’s law. It is supposed also that without this substitute, there would have been legal or juridical obstacles to the pardon even of the penitent. To us this view appears to involve a necessity on the side of God, either in His nature or in the exigencies of His government, incompatible with the freeness of pardon; and we are ready to ask if there is not some other view, which will satisfy the scriptural terms we have alluded to, and save the full import of the doctrine of grace.
Now one of the most common objections to the doctrine of forgiveness simply on occasion of repentance, which is equally an argument for the need of redemption, is that repentance would then save us; we should need no other Saviour; and why, then all the outlay and expense of Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection? The objection seems weighty and decisive. But it manifestly rests on the assumption of man’s proper immortality. If sin does not bring death, then repentance would do all that can be done. It would be change of character, sanctification and redemption; and to pardon the sinner then, would be simply to let him alone; it would be to do nothing; it would be nothing.
But if sin is the beginning of death, then pardon is more than not to punish; it is the arrest of punishment; the rescue from death. It is no more an idle thing; it involves a great, if not a divine work. The work of redemption is more than a continued preservation of the sinner’s being. It is more than the correction of errors and of evil habits; more than sound instruction. It is the staunching of wounds inflicted by sin; it is the healing of a fatal malady. It is the work of a Physician more skilful than all medical art or moral treatment; of a balm which no search of man can discover. And Christ’s miracles of healing bodily disease seem to have typified this higher power of restoring health to the dying soul.
He also raised the dead. But the gift of life to those who perish may be more difficult than creative power. The one is a work of might, which could have replaced the perishing race as easily as it was created. The other is a work not of power alone, but of persuasion and love. The gift of being to nothingness meets no obstacle. To give new being and life to that which is corrupt, perverse, reluctant, opposed, wayward and wilful, is a work wholly against obstacles. It was needless to God; yet for our sakes he has preferred the methods of love to those of might; a plan of recovery to that of replacement; condescending to restore us from the wreck and ruin which we were, that we might be renewed in the image of God.
And here, it may be, we find a reason, either in the nature of things or in the bounty of God’s love, why our rescue should be effected by an incarnation and the work which followed it. Would God recover any creature of his, through much inevitable pain and suffering, standing aloof and at a distance? Is not His love too tender, are not His sympathies too warm, for that? Do we admire even the human benefactor that founds great institutions for the relief of woes on a grand scale, while he deigns not to reach out his own hand to a poor degraded fellow man in token of love? And what we wish, almost require, that a human benefactor should do that we may love him, might not God freely do, to win our warmest affection? Might not He whose tender mercies are over all His works, and who regards, not without concern, the sparrow’s fall, be resolved that His erring creatures should not suffer more in the pangs of their convalescence than He would suffer with them and for them? But if God would thus meet our case, it must be, perhaps, by assuming our form, by an incarnation in which He may reach the depths of our degradation, feel all our sufferings, come into our very graves with His heart of love and His power of life. And all along this course, in which through the shades of death He shows us the path of life, Christ may suffer as we cannot, because we are so fallen. As the delicate, refined woman, of noblest feelings, fitted to adorn a palace, suffers more for a loved but inebriated husband than he can feel, so may we not conceive the anguish of the Redeemer, approaching the crisis of his humiliation, dying at the hands of those whom he would save?
In this view, Christ was “made perfect through sufferings,” and all his pain and agony was needful that we might be reached and won. He has so identified himself with us that our sufferings and death have become His. He has gone with us through all the forms of sin’s penalty which we must, or which He could endure, that He might stand by and save us from its fatal stroke; himself appearing as one of the guilty, “numbered with the transgressors,” saving us at the expense of his own blood. Yet his death alone was not the procuring cause, the judicial reason, of our salvation. When our theology stops here, it surely misinterprets the exclamation, “It is finished!” And it must linger in perplexity, as did the disciples who under- stood not that Jesus should rise again. The entire Roman system of dead works is derived from this misconception of Christ’s work. “The penalty of our sins was eternal death. But Christ did not suffer eternal death; and woe unto us if he had suffered it!” Rather, in the moment of Christ’s submission to death He gained His advantage over the Adversary, with whom, to use a metaphor of the early Christians, He wrestled. In that moment also he reached the deepest fall of man, and might repose in the tomb secure of the full completion of His work. “He died for our offences, and was raised for our justification.” The Redemption was complete in the Resurrection. And as justification denoted rescue from the sentence of death, it might, in common with the term “salvation,” signify the giving of life.
And here we may add a closing word respecting the divinity of Christ. Believing that Christ was Immanuel, we must say there can be no more unfortunate argument for His divine nature than that so often adduced from the supposed necessity of an infinite sacrifice for an infinite guilt. Of this we have heard spoken, and we need not amplify the criticism of it. We prefer to derive the divine nature of the Redeemer, not from the greatness of the evil He has removed, but of the good He has achieved; not from that which He has undone, but from the nature and vastness of that which He has done. We are happy to know that Calvin himself condemns the reasoning of those who affirmed that none but an infinite Saviour could redeem. “Osiander,” he says, “betrays his folly in objecting that justification exceeds the power of angels and men; since it depends not upon the dignity of any creature, but upon the appointment of God.” God is not bound, so that He may not empower whom he will, by His commission, to bring about His plans. And if man’s salvation were only a judicial procedure, — an official and outward work, then the concessions just named might even cut off the argument for Christ’s divinity. Whereas, if salvation is an inward work, by which men are in any proper sense “born of God” and made “partakers of the divine nature,” it seems to require a divine power. But does not Christ claim such power, when he says “I have power to lay down my life, and I have power to take it again;” and, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly?” And when we are told, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men?” And we are the more willing to ask the attention of Christians to the life-giving power of Christ, of which His resurrection is the pledge for man’s resurrection, because the fact is one of which the early Socinians are so full, and the argument is the favourite one of Athanasius. Divested of its appendages, may not this element of Christ’s work open a way of grateful, practical union among believers, which alone can make an intellectual harmony either possible or desirable?
PARADOXES OF PENALTY.
“Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men.”
1. FEAR AND SHAME.
As the prevalent doctrine of the divine penalty has multiplied future “punishments,” so it has led to a frequent misquotation of Paul’s language, as if he had said, “the terrors of the Lord.” But the context, and the entire argument of Paul, show that his expression had no reference even to the doom of the lost; much less to any manifoldness of their pains. He alludes rather to the MAJESTY of Christ, as a Lord and Judge whose favour he hoped to gain. Making his appeal from the poor judgment of the brethren in Corinth respecting himself and his motives, he declares that the love of Christ constrains him in all his acts, whether he appear to them sober or beside himself. And in this appeal he is confident of the approval of their better judgment, as well as of the approval of God. “We are made manifest unto God, and I trust also are made manifest in your con- sciences.” It was not the terror of condemnation that moved Paul to persuade men; but a feeling of reverence analogous to that which is due to the civil ruler, — “fear to whom fear,” — but incomparably more elevated and ennobling; the fear of a trusting, finite creature, before a loving, infinite Father; and which is best expressed in Hebrews 12:28: “Wherefore we, receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably, with reverence and godly fear.”
This exposition may introduce a discussion of the practical bearings of the doctrine we hold. Has it power to alarm and convict the unconvicted, and lead them to escape the condemning sentence of the final Judge? We think it may be clearly shown that instead of loss of motive power which is feared for the Gospel, if eternal suffering is given up, there will be, in various ways, a real and great gain.
Until the heart is changed and pervaded by a holy love that is almost dishonoured by the name of “motive,” we confess the need of motives derived from human nature, to restrain men and lead them to think of Christ. Among these motives. Fear is one of the strongest; yet it is a most pernicious error to employ it alone, or mainly, or out of its proper connection with other motives; for it then becomes the weakest of all. All the legitimate forces of human nature should be employed, or the Gospel will fail of its proper power.
The author of the “Conflict of Ages” has finely illustrated the place which his theory should hold among the practical forces of our theology. The “principles of honour and right” in the government of God seemed not to accord with the supposed history and destiny of man; as if the wheels of a boat were revolving against each other, turning it round and round, and leaving it to float with the current. The machinery is misadjusted, or part of it is wanting. May not the doctrine of man’s pre-existence harmonize the conflicting forces, and give the Gospel power and progress?
The illustration may be applied to our own theory with a difference. Instead of supplying a missing wheel, we think we dispense with a superfluous wheel. One theory proposes an indefinite extension of man’s guilt; the other, an abatement of an infinite half of his punishment. One theory proposes to balance evil in long ages past, against eternal future evil; the other would restore the balance by cutting off the eternity of evil.
But we will not appropriate the illustration to our own use. We prefer another, which may show how the sentiment of Fear has been misapplied in our theology.
James Watt found the steam engine encumbered with a serious difficulty, the removal of -which has given the age its name. The piston had been raised by the steam admitted to the cylinder, and was waiting to be returned by the pressure of the atmosphere. But how to get rid of the steam that had done its work? The custom had been to reduce it by a jet of cold water; and here the battle of opposing forces had been long fought. If little water was admitted, the steam was imperfectly condensed, and the piston was returned feebly. If water was admitted freely, the piston came down with force, but rose again slowly, because the cylinder itself was cooled. On one side or the other, the loss seemed inevitable; and in reducing the loss to a minimum, the wisdom of a generation had been spent.
But why, asked Watt, admit cold water into the cylinder at all? The idea of “separate condensation” relieved the whole difficulty.
Why retain the notion of eternal evil as an inseparable con- tent of our theology? Is it accepted as the spent force of an immortal nature? An immortality lost, yet not gone, seems a thing incredible, and strongly opposes the fear, which, like a heavy atmosphere, surrounds us. The eternal evil, like a surd quantity, must be reduced to some rational form, before it can yield to fear. Eternal suffering must appear as eternal justice by some theory of human guilt. At the mention of Justice, we are startled, perhaps subdued, if not crushed. And if we are not crushed, the hope of righteousness, trying what it can do with infinite perverseness, may slowly raise us again. God is so good, that the sinner, with a false theodicy, or with none at all, may yet be saved.
But the Christian wants a theodicy for the eternal evil that remains. Temper it as he will, it still challenges many doubts. Christian theology has laboured for generations past to find the maximum of reason, and the minimum of doubt. This has been the Conflict of Ages. And the conflict could not be confined to the schools. Filling the minds of all classes of men, and producing the various forms of false theology we have noted, it has borne most heavily upon the engineer of the doctrines of salvation — the preacher of the gospel. It pursues him in every effort to maintain a theodicy. It pursues him in his resort to mystery, and in his appeal to man’s innate sense of duty. It meets him at the bedside of the dying, and at the funeral of the dead. Whether he feels it or not, it haunts him everywhere, baffling his skill, or marring his labour, in all his efforts to persuade men.
But dispense with the doctrine as unauthorized, and how soon it appears needless. Let the wicked be regarded as of no ac- count, and as having no part in the world to come, and the powers of that world find their natural adjustment. The necessity of all laboured theodicy, unhelped by a single word from God, is gone. Men can not now bear up against immortal fears, confiding in immortal strength. They may be moved by a “deep, convulsive dread.” And the new fear, — the fear of infinite loss, — is of a healthy quality. It implants no superstitious or fanatical feeling; it breeds no morbid melancholy. It clearly recognizes, and thus may most deeply feel, the infinite goodness of God. Freed from every chilling gloom, and paralysing doubt and deceitful hope, it may impel to the truest faith and the most earnest effort to lay hold upon eternal life.
A second improvement of the engine by Watt was hardly less important than the first. He found atmospheric pressure too feeble, and requiring too nice a fitting of the machinery. He dispensed with it altogether, and moved the piston either way by steam.
Human nature has two sides — the sentiment of Fear, and of Shame; — the blanched, and the blushing face. Each, in con- cert with the other, is powerful; sundered from each other, they are weak. If fear has no place, the character becomes mirthful and frivolous, and shame itself is lost. And without the sense of shame, fear passes into dismay and reckless doubt. And each sentiment is, in its place, and in different minds, stronger than the other. There are appalling fears that move the soul as no reproach could move it; and there are moments of shame that would gladly be exchanged for months of pain.
Now we think we have shown, in our discussion of human dignity, that the notion of an absolute immortality leaves little work for shame. Men may indulge vice freely, if it cannot touch the being of the soul. And they may glory in the power of an eternal wickedness. When, on the other hand, the appeal is made to the dread of eternal suffering, that is not shameful in itself. And if it is believed and feared, the sense of fear engrosses all the other sensibilities; one can hardly think then of blushing for sin. Then follows paralysis; and we are sometimes astounded to hear of crimes committed, apparently under the full influence of a doctrine of infinite terror, that shock the common decency of men.
But reduce the terror to the proper dimensions of human fear, and the sense of shame may do its proper and effective work. The abounding goodness of God, the freeness of his priceless gifts, the proper infamy of man’s ingratitude, and of all our foolish sins that dwarf us into nothingness when we might be the “sons of God,” — these things may produce an overwhelming shame; and they have done so when rightly plied and relied on to move the soul. Too often, the appeal is followed by allusion to an infinite but doubtful terror, and the charm is broken.
We need not repeat examples heretofore adduced from the Scriptures, and which might be multiplied, to show that he who knows what is in man has abundantly appealed to his sense of shame. The frequent instances of scriptural irony and sarcasm belong to the same argument. E.g. Genesis 3:22; 1 Kings 18:27; Zechariah 11:13; and perhaps Luke 16: 9.
2. SEVERITY AND CERTAINTY.
There is in the very nature of rational and moral being a limit to the sanction power of law, and to the terror which may be brought to bear as a motive to reflection and duty. And when this limit is passed, a reaction, either of incredulity or of fatuity, is inevitable. Hence, of two proposed penalties, the more severe may be the less terrible, because less apprehended that which seems too fearful is likely to be unfeared. A threatened or asserted penalty may be too dreadful to be much dreaded. The principle holds good not only in human nature but in all organic life, that when we reach a certain acme of motive power, all superadded force is an increment of weakness. Hence, when we have found the ultimatum of just and revealed penalty for human guilt, God, in the constitution of His works, as well as by the guarantee of His word, forbids us from persuading men by a single lisp of added terror, lest we peril the welfare which we seek to secure.
It follows, that when there is reason to suspect the received doctrine of the divine penalty as an untenable and unwarranted extreme, he who proposes a milder doctrine, if it be only truer, instead of weakening the sanction of God’s law, is really adding to its power. He is substituting a basis of salutary fear, for a covert of false security. He is promoting faith instead of disbelief. And the light which he offers, though it seem at first not so terrifying as the old error, will only dispel mischievous darkness, and scatter refuges of lies.
“Knowing the terror of the Lord,” says Paul, “we persuade men.” And though Paul does not here allude to the punishment of the lost, yet we may assume that he who “shunned not to declare the whole counsel of God,” and who ceased not to warn men, day and night, with tears, but who never named eternal woe, — did know the actual penalty of God’s law; and that this penalty should be heralded and believed as a thing known, if it should be heralded and believed at all. And assuming, at this stage of our discussion, that this penalty may be known to be eternal death and not eternal pain, we will apply the principle now generally admitted in human governments, — that the certainty, rather than the severity of punishment, is the surest preventive of transgression.
The principle is admitted in human governments. And the divine government cannot be an exception; for the same human beings are the subjects of both; and though the revealed penalty of God’s law is of course most certain, yet the misinterpretation of that penalty furnishes a case precisely analogous to a wrong enactment of penalty by man. Interpretation that makes future punishment more severe or more lax than God has declared it, is quite as mischievous as severe or lax legislation among men. Error in the one may illustrate error in the other.
If an erring statute may exasperate the feelings, or raise doubts of its execution, or otherwise prevent the ends of justice, the same evils may be wrought by a false view of the statute that cannot err. If the one may become a dead letter, the other may become a dead and delusive reading of the letter. And all the reasons that may be urged for the repeal of the bad law may also be urged for doing away the bad interpretation.
An illustration of these principles and facts occurs in the re- form of the criminal code of Great Britain in the beginning of the present century. Such was then the character of this code that the complaint of Blackstone was still just: “It is a melancholy truth, that, among the variety of actions which men are daily liable to commit, no less than a hundred and sixty have been declared by act of Parliament to be felonies without benefit of clergy; or, in other words, to be worthy of instant death.” Yet, like the supposed severities of divine law, these penalties were all designed for the protection of society and the welfare of men. With the slightest abatement for the human passions and special interests of legislators, they all sprung from humane motives; their very severity often growing out of the hope that it might prevent crime, and with it, the need of executing the penalty. This argument, which had been once artfully employed to elicit the views of a persecuting hierarchy, was as plausible to kindness as it was to cruelty; and is well known to have been the reason why our own forefathers threatened Quakers returning from banishment, with death.
The death of four persons repealed that particular law; but what was the practical working of the principle? “So dreadful a list,” Blackstone adds, “instead of diminishing, increases the number of offenders. The injured, through compassion, will often forbear to prosecute; juries, through compassion, will sometimes forget their oaths, and either acquit the guilty or mitigate the nature of the offence; and judges, through compassion, will respite one half of the convicts, and recommend them to the royal mercy. Among so many chances of escaping, the needy and hardened offender overlooks the multitudes that suffer; he boldly engages in some desperate attempt, to relieve his wants, or supply his vices; and, if unexpectedly the hand of justice over- takes him, he deems himself peculiarly unfortunate, in falling at last a sacrifice to those laws which long impunity had taught him to contemn.”
And, assigning the reasons of this paradox, he says: “It is the sentiment of an ingenious writer, who seems to have studied well the springs of human action,” that crimes are more effectually prevented by the certainty, than by the severity, of punishment. For the excessive severity of laws, says Montesquieu hinders their execution; when the punishment surpasses all measure, the public will frequently out of humanity prefer impunity to it. Thus also the Statute [of Queen Mary] recites in its preamble, ‘that the state of every king consists more assuredly in the love of the subjects toward their prince, than in the dread of laws made with rigorous pains; and that laws made for the preservation of the commonwealth without great penal- ties are more often obeyed and kept, than laws made with extreme punishments.’ Happy had it been for the nation, if the subsequent practice of that deluded princess in matters of religion had been correspondent to these sentiments of herself and parliament in matters of state and government! We may farther observe that sanguinary laws are a bad symptom of the distemper of any state, or at least of its weak constitution. The laws of the Roman kings,- and the twelve tables of the decemviri, were full of cruel punishments; the Porcian law, which exempted all citizens from sentence of death, silently abrogated them all. In this period the republic flourished; under the emperors severe punishments were revived, and then the empire fell.”
The same doctrine had been maintained with great power by Lord Bacon, by Stiernhook, — the Swedish Blackstone, — by Bentham, and others. Paley had confessed it. It was now urged in Parliament by Samuel Romilly, with a view to the thorough reform of the penal code; and its advocacy was the great labour of his life.
The startling frequency of crimes, notwithstanding the severity of the laws, was generally acknowledged when he began his work. But this fact was ascribed to other causes than defects of the penal code, and his doctrine was scouted as that of visionary enthusiasts, by nearly the whole of the bench, the bar, and the leading influences in Church and State. It was admitted that the unvarying execution of the law would be barbarous; but it was urged that its frightful penalties ought to be suspended over the heads of offenders, to deter from crime. It was also objected that nothing could be more acceptable to the contempt of law and the enemies of society, than the removal of these restraints. Those who were, or who should be, on their way to Tyburn, might hold jubilee, if the penalties of the law were to be reduced to comparative insignificance. Bad men might now talk boldly, crime might lift up her brazen front and stalk fear- less through the land, and the peaceful citizen might tremble for his house and life, if such a reform should be effected. “The excitement caused by this attempt to narrow the scaffold,” we are told, “is at this day incredible. All entered the lists to crush the disciple of Jeremy Bentham, and demolish his dangerous heresies. Jack Ketch was no longer to hang men for stealing a cast off” coat worth five shillings and six pence, and what would become of England!”
We need not follow the history of the reform in its details.
Suffice it to say, that after several years labour, and success which began with the raising of the death-limit for theft from twelve pence to fifteen pounds, and the repeal of capital punishment in the case of soldiers and sailors found begging without testimonials of discharge from the service, Romilly bequeathed his work to be completed by other men — foremost among them Mackintosh. His designs of humanity and justice were at length accomplished, and the panic that had been created was followed by peaceful congratulations.
The slightest shade of rational doubt that eternal suffering is either a revealed or just penalty of sin, produces evils similar to those which resulted from this sanguinary code. Fear gives way to hope, when the “terror of the Lord” is made to signify infinite sorrows. Such a God is either unjust, and exists only as an object of hatred, or He is as infinitely merciful as He is supposed to be infinitely just, and the terror goes for nothing. And the alarm which is felt by multitudes of professed believers for a dying race, or for ungodly friends and neighbours, subsides into a faint hope when it touches an individual case. When a bad acquaintance is dead and buried, the condemning doctrine hardly follows him. And it has been very truly said, “We are all Universalists when we lose our friends.” The doctrine of the creeds is freely argued, and asserted to be proved. It is often professed, but ever faintly. The expression, “I must believe the doctrine if the Bible is true,” indicates an argumentative and inferential style of belief, not a hearty conviction; and we may safely say that multitudes, perhaps the great majority, do not know what they do believe, and do not know what to believe. The doctrine is sometimes tremblingly preached — and never applied. The worst man, dying, is “left in the hands of a just and merciful God.” We may abhor the memory of wicked men, but with reference to a future state we observe for them the old maxim, and say of them only good. What wonder, if men cast off fear, and restrain prayer; or if destructive vices, and high crimes, and public sins, and threatening dangers abound.
The outcry that was raised when the reform of the penal code was proposed, has its parallel, also, in the fears of multitudes lest sinners shall forget to repent, and earth become more intolerably wicked, and heaven be made poorer, if men are told that they may altogether die. This panic sometimes hastens to explore a supposed world of woe, and tells us that devils and lost spirits would exult for joy, if their anguish might come to an end. Be it so. To say nothing of the joy in heaven, also, if wickedness and woe may cease, we shall only reply that the messengers of heaven took no alarm on this score, when they first preached the Gospel of life and peace. The world was wicked enough then, if there was ever occasion for such alarm. Here is the picture given of it by a heathen writer. “All is full of criminality and vice; indeed much more of these is committed than could be remedied by force. A monstrous contest of abandoned wickedness is carried on. The lust of sin increases daily, and shame is daily more and more extinguished. Discarding respect for all that is good and sacred, lust rushes on wherever it will. Vice no longer hides itself. It stalks forth before all eyes.
So public has abandoned wickedness become and so openly does it flame up in the minds of all, that innocence is no longer a rare thing, but has wholly ceased to exist.”
For this state of things — due to the persuasion of the soul’s divine immortality, and to the reaction of despair — the Gospel of Life was the proper and most effective remedy. There was no preaching of eternal anguish; that could have only aggravated the evil. And human nature is the same now that it was then. The Gospel has indeed hardened, when it has not softened, the minds of men. But the present Christendom is not gospel-hardened alone; it has been hardened far more by that which is not the Gospel. Let the “words of eternal life“ be told again in the ears of dying men, and let the proper inference respecting the divine penalty be understood, and though they may seem a new and strange sound, they will be scarcely an experiment as a cure for the evils of this day.
Our argument thus far has proceeded on the supposition that very few persons practically believe in such a penalty as eternal suffering. We should add a word respecting the few who do thus believe. They may be divided into three classes: 1st those already named, who regard eternal wickedness as nobler than extinction; 2d, those who regard an eternal future with mean and trifling feelings; 3d, those of more serious temper; some of whom are alarmed heavenward, not by the eternal itself, but by the very slight apprehension which they do have of eternity; while others settle into a morbid state of mind, a religious melancholy. Some regard themselves as reprobate; but so little does eternity move them, that we have known such an one who habitually composed himself to rest at night, whenever he was wakeful, by turning his thoughts to the eternal woe which he expected.
3. MYSTERY AND CONVICTION.
The ideas of mystery and justice are not indeed strictly opposite; men may believe that the penalty of sin is just, with- out being able to see how or why it is just. But the fact that the Bible never treats the justice of the sinner’s doom as a mystery, and that the common resort to mystery is burdensome, shows that it is unfriendly to conviction. The awakened sinner, inquiring about eternal misery, is often told: “Well; that matter need not concern you. One thing is certain, — Christ has died for you, and there is a way of escape. Your duty is simply to believe, and be saved.” As a last resort, such advice is pardonable; it may be commendable. But it is ever hazardous; for, — aside from the danger that a sincere inquirer respecting God’s justice may be thus driven to scepticism, or to open infidelity, — the most essential element of conviction is fore- gone and lost by such a reply. He is now invited to yield to God, not because His law is manifestly just, but because He is at once able to execute it, and willing not to execute it.
He is a God of power, and He has offered a reprieve from the doom He has threatened. This reprieve is called a grace, and He is called merciful; but this is to assume the very point in question, — Is the penalty just? And it avails little to postpone the question, by saying the inquirer may be convinced of its justice when it is too late. For, when he is said to be liable to eternal suffering, he is charged with deserving it; and, thus accused, he must be fairly convicted if possible. Otherwise he may deem himself wrongly accused; or his plea of guilty may be ambiguous, or meaningless. Ambiguous, when he only means to say he has forfeited eternal life, or he has deserved some divine displeasure. Meaningless, when it is extorted by fear. For, to force conviction by a sense of overwhelming danger, is simply preposterous. To say that God is terrible, throws no light on His justice. That is the fatal resort of alarmists, which can produce only spurious conviction, and spurious conversion, and spurious hope — each a great and crying evil.
The sense of justice is the same with conscience. It is the echo of the feelings to the voice of reason. More than anything else it distinguishes man from the brute, and the laws of its action should be most sacredly observed. The thunders of Sinai may hush the clamours of passion for a season; but when there is no rational conviction, the heart soon goes back to idolatry. The hope of God’s favour may elicit many fair promises; as the Israelites pledged themselves to Jehovah, taking him for a powerful and friendly deity: “Therefore will we serve the Lord; for He is our God.” But this was only the other side of the illusion. “Ye cannot serve the Lord,” says Joshua, “for He is a holy God.” He can never be served aright, — He can never be worshiped with godly fear, until the conscience, apprehending His justice, avails far more than the dread of His power.
The sense of justice, as distinct from the dread of undefined evils, is among the most effective of all restraints. The slave, emancipated from the brute terror of the lash, shows it in a manly and respectful fear of law. When crime has been committed, it appears in a new form, as a sense of guilt, driving the criminal to confession. Such an evil conscience is the foreshadowing of punishment, — the wounded spirit, which no man can bear. But when conscience is neither convicted nor convinced, one can endure all things. Whence the story of Prometheus, doomed to ages of cruel torture, yet bearing up nobly, and defiantly:
“My miseries, be assured,
I would not change
For thy gay servitude; but rather choose
To live a vassal to this dreary rock,
Than lackey the proud heels of Jove.”
With the same feeling, hundreds, not of the worst of men, have said that if eternal suffering were the penalty of God’s law, they would scorn salvation from it, and endure it by way of protest.
Conscience has been called the worm that never dies. Those who believe thus ought to understand its laws exceedingly well, and direct its immortal energies with exemplary skill, ere it should torture forever in vain. But it will be better for us all to leave fire and worms to their work of death, while we seek to rouse the stupefied consciences of mortal men into the life of repentance and love.
4. ETERNAL DEATH IS ETERNAL PUNISHMENT.
We have already shown that death, as the literal loss of life, is punishment. If this be true, then by parity of reasoning the loss of life forever is eternal punishment; and if logic could carry conviction of truth, we might add nothing more. But we ought here to point out an illusion, and a delusion, that makes the assent to this proposition too often reluctant; and also to add the suffrages of two or three who have been guides of Christian thought.
The illusion is this: Eternal death has been understood to mean undying pain; and compared with that a death that knows no life would he an infinite deliverance and an eternal salvation. But, by parity of reasoning, eternal suffering itself in a certain degree would be eternal salvation compared with a greater endless pain. If we regard things simply as they may be conceived or imagined, we have at once a sliding scale on which a most terrible woe may be a little thing compared with a more tremendous evil. We dispel the illusion when we inquire what is the just penalty of sin that actually awaits the impenitent. If that is indeed death, then life is indeed pardon and salvation.
But there are suffrages. We offer three names, each one as good authority as man can be for man. The younger Edwards says: “Endless annihilation is an endless or infinite punishment. It is an endless loss not only of all the good which the man at present enjoys, but of all that good which he would have enjoyed throughout eternity, in the state of bliss to which he would have been admitted, if he had never sinned.” And he goes on to show that the loss is not only calamitous, but strictly penal.
Isaac Watts, speaking of eternal death as the third and worst form of the threatened penalty of sin, says: “ But who can say whether the word ‘death’ might not be fairly construed to extend to the utter destruction of the life of the soul as well as the body, if God the righteous Governor should please to seize the forfeiture? And why might not the threatening declare the right that even a God of goodness had to resume all back again, and utterly destroy and annihilate his creatures forever? “Such punishment, he had already said,“ is in some sort commensurate to the infinite evil contained in sin, as it is a loss of all blessings for an infinite duration, that is, forever and ever.”
His was a just remark: “Nor do I think we ought usually, when we speak concerning creatures, to affirm positively that their existence shall be equal to that of the blessed God, especially with regard to the duration of their punishment.” Hermann Witsius, whose “ Economy of the Covenants” will not be suspected of new fangled notions, says: “I know not if it can be determined whether this eternity ought necessarily to consist in the punishment of sense, or whether the justice of God may be satisfied by the eternal punishment of loss, in the annihilation of the sinful creature.” Again: “Whether it be necessary that God should continue forever the sinful creature in a state of existence, I own I am ignorant. May it not, in its measure, be reckoned an infinite punishment, should God please to doom man, who was by nature a candidate for eternity, to total annihilation, from whence he shall never be suffered to return to life?
I know God has now determined otherwise, and that with the highest justice. But it is queried, whether agreeably to His justice he might not have settled it in this manner: If thou, O man, sins, I will frustrate thy desire of eternal happiness, and of a blessed eternity; and on the contrary give thee up to eternal annihilation. Here at least let us hesitate, and suspend our judgment.”
5. THE SECOND DEATH.
God’s right to forgive the penitent without a satisfaction of justice, includes the right to forego the infliction of pains upon the unrepentant; provided only that they do not receive the reward of righteousness, in eternal life. Hence we may regard the pains of the second death as endured, not simply for the satisfaction of justice, (though they are such,) but rather as a result of unbelief. As life is not given to the sinner for the sake of his death, so neither is his resurrection for the sake of his dying again. The sufferings of every death are the agonies of departing life. We will therefore attempt a portraiture of the horrors of the second death, not to cater to a feeling which is foreign to the spirit of the Gospel, but to meet a frequent objection. We are told “There is a death whose pang Outlasts the fleeting breath; Oh what eternal horrors hang Around the second death!“
And it is alleged that those horrors would vanish, if the second death should actually kill. Perhaps so, to those who are already brutish, mindless, half-dead. But the Gospel is never a Gospel, until men are persuaded to think what they lose by rejecting it. The message of life is that which makes death most fearful. And to lose an infinite blessing, even by a pain- less death, — a gentle and easy exit from the universe, — might be only so much the more horrible. The noble mind scorns the mockery of repose at such a moment. It would not be in keeping with the scene. The agony of a wakeful death is preferred to the fatal slumber of the opiate. To know and feel that one is bidding an eternal farewell to God and His creation, is better than not to know it.
But this, though more honourable than a brutish insensibility, cannot be enviable. The pain of death may be measured by the vital power and capacity that is extinguished. And as the soul far out-measures and outnumbers the poor faculties of the body, with its high intellectual, aesthetic, and moral susceptibilities, its death may be a manifold anguish, a thousand deaths in one.
This anguish is not relieved, if we take the scriptural expressions as metaphors denoting a literal agony of the dying soul. To affright the careless, we need no gloomier pictures than of God’s fierce anger as burning, devouring, consuming, tearing in pieces, grinding to powder, and the like. And if we take into account the accompaniments of the second death, in the judgment scene, the alarmist shall not lack matter for eloquence, though he paint that scene as the prelude of the soul’s execution and funeral. That terrible dramatic poem of the day of judgment, the “Dies Ira,” the chanting of which in full orchestra has produced madness, contains hardly an expression that implies the eternity of the final anguish.
To the argument that sin against God is infinite guilt, we have already replied that by parity of reasoning all punishment proceeding from God is infinite. For if sin can be committed against the whole of God, (and how else can it be infinite?) it may be punished by the whole of God. Here offers an exhaustless magazine of terrors, — an argument of the dreadfulness of death under the frown of God, that may ever accumulate, and never culminate. The smile of a child, nay, even the innocence of the lamb, is a torment to the guilty soul. Much more the look of an injured friend — the sorrow of a dishonoured parent — the displeasure of a sovereign, which would give a sharper pang, if he could also be all that a parent is. Yet these reproachful glances of human eyes — more terrible than all bodily pain — would be so many nothings, compared with the displeased look of Him who is all love, and all else that can make His smile worth more than worlds, or His frown more intolerable than the pangs of expiring nations. Why do they who hear that the Prince of Peace is coming to reckon with the nations, cry out to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us! And hide us from the face of Him that sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of His wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand”! Need they be immortal, to be so fearful?
But it is said, if the soul dies, this agony, terrible as it may be, will end in a most welcome relief. It may all be braved, if it shall land the sufferer for ever beyond the reach of pain. It is the eternity, and not the intensity, of future misery, that makes it most fearful.
The objection sometimes takes a bolder form, — “the greater the suffering, the greater the relief.” And we have waited to hear the proper conclusion — “the greater reason it should never end.” So, to avoid the remotest appearance of clemency, the terribleness of punishment, either in sharpness or in long duration, would be made
the plea for its perpetuity! A fallen creature’s natural and divinely implanted dislike of pain is made a law of contraries, to compel a God of Lore to unceasing inflictions!
But aside from this reduction to a horrible absurdity, one point intended by the objection is to be fairly considered. Time must enter as an element into all finite views of a dreadful penalty, unless out-ruled by the reflection that the judgments of an infinite God may not be impeded by our tardy conceptions of time. When the arm of Omnipotence shall smite the soul, or the eye of Omniscience shall wither and consume it with the fever of death, it is a puny objection, that His Justice may defraud itself by its lightning speed. God’s power is infinitely greater than all our conceptions of Time and Pain.
But we admit the element, as a law of human thought. And here we are confronted with instances that have frequently occurred, of a life-long experience crowded into a moment of time. In a fleeting instant of expected death the events of many years have recurred, — as a grand cavalcade, or a funeral procession, — for a spectacle of the soul. Who has not, in a short troubled dream, passed days of sorrow? Who can not understand the wish of Clarence? —
“I would not spend another such a night,
Though it were to buy a world of happy days,
So full of dismal terror was the time.”
And who knows that the lost soul may not, by some law of its nature, so transcend the laws of time and space as to apprehend a certain boundlessness of its woe? “The wicked shall see” the happy lot of the righteous, “and shall be grieved; he shall gnash with his teeth, and melt away.” Who knows that in the hour of dissolution the thought may not wander through the eternity that eludes his grasp, and reckon, against the burden of his guilt, the eternal weight of glory that was offered in his ransom? Do we not find the indications of a psychological eternity, as the natural and dreary pilgrimage of the expiring soul? We have been told of the sinner’s “own eternity,” in the guilt of his life; is it not more real, in the visions of his death?
“But the sense of relief, when death comes at last.” We hardly need to reply: there can be no sense of relief. The light of life gone out, the expired soul can never know that it has escaped from pain. The bold transgressor may fix his thoughts upon it now, heedless of all that intervenes; but he will forget to think of it then. To waken from a troubled dream, and to know that it was only a dream, is an exceeding joy; and with transport do the friends of one dying in delirium note a gleam of returning reason ere he breathes his last. But the soul’s death knows no waking; its maddening fever ends in no sweet moment of rest. It can never feel that its woe is ended. The agony ends, not in a happy consciousness that all is past, but in eternal night, — in the blackness of darkness forever!
We may conclude this argument in the eloquent words of an opponent. Says Dr. Hamilton, of those who hold this view: “They have erased eternal from that scroll of lamentation, mourning, and woe. But let them not be too elate! They may not have adjudged the whole question. What have they disproved? What alternative has relieved them? Their cheerless resource is annihilation! Have they pondered it well? A creature strictly immortal, strictly perishes. He is cut off. He is blotted out. An interminable capacity for greatness and felicity is destroyed. A flame, which might have burnt with all the ardours of piety and love, is extinguished. The portion of an infinite good is snatched away. Do they not think, in common with many who generally agree with them, that the perished soul was convertible to this? Why is it not spared? Is it mercy which shortens its misery, or justice which shivers its being? With them most assuredly rests the charge, commonly, and not invidiously or unjustly, raised against us, of following sin with eternal ban and loss. What do we more than they? They, in the destruction of immortal susceptibilities, write the eternal doom of sin! They, in the deprivation of eternal happiness, show how the sinner is eternally treated and condemned! They mark, in the sudden wreck of immortal hopes and powers, that only an eternal sentence can satisfy! They go further than others: they do not wait: they “precipitate the endless award.“
6. FAR AND NEAR.
To the doctrine of the intermediate state as one of detention it is often objected that it postpones unduly the future retribution. If, on the other hand, it is a state of retribution, after which the wicked perish in the second death, it is supposed to make an unjust, if not remediless, difference between the punishments of the lost. Each objection only illustrates the vast importance which men attach to the first and nearest portions of a future state. The same feeling appears in the great desire of Romanists to shorten the pains of Purgatory for themselves and their friends, while they think almost nothing of the eternal woes to which men are so often anathematized.
There is a reason for this. Evils are dreadful according as they seem near to us. They are frightful when they are at hand, confronting us, towering up before us, imminent, threatening. Far away, they appear small. But the eternal cannot be near to us. The central period of eternity — if we could conceive such a moment — must ever be infinitely distant. Of eternity, we can grasp only the feeblest beginnings, to make them appear real. All beyond must ever be a vast negation. When the eternal shall be far advanced, — and yet ever remote, — we can only have begun to dream of its import. Hence eternal suffering must and does now appear to men, faint, shadowy, un-substantial. This is one reason why the doctrine is so easily believed.
Hence it is better, after the style of the Scriptures, to represent the penalty of sin as a near, pressing, overwhelming danger. Whether the intermediate state is one of unconsciousness or of all-consciousness, the second death joins hand upon the first; this is the prelude; that, the tragedy. It hastens apace; it comes as a catastrophe, and hope is gone forever. The Scriptures do “precipitate the endless award.” The wicked “shall be suddenly destroyed, and that without remedy.”
Of the vain attempts to convey some suitable impression of what Eternity signifies, which would fill many volumes, the following is perhaps the best example. Sir J. Bowring tells us: “The Buddhists, whose contemplations lead their thoughts into calculations of infinite ages, as connected with the incarnations of the Divinity, have sought to convey notions of eternity by images in which the fancy is made the handmaid to speculations the most adventurous. For example, they teach that, in order to estimate the ages needful for all the transmigrations which are preliminary to the creation of a Buddha, you are to fancy a granite rock of enormous extent, which is to be visited once in a hundred thousand years by a celestial spirit clad in light muslin robes, which should just touch the rock in flitting by; and that until by the touch of the garment, which must remove an infinitesimal and invisible fragment of the stone, the whole stone should be reduced in successive visitations to the size of a grain of sand, the period of the transmigrations of a Buddha would not be completed. Again, so many must have been those transmigrations, that there is no spot on earth or ocean which you can touch with the point of a needle where Buddha has not been buried in some form or other during the incalculable period of his transitions from one to another mode of his existence.” — Kingdom and People of Siam, I. 292, 293.
7. WRATH AND LOVE.
But the terrors of the second death, though multiplied a thou- sand-fold and brought ever so near, are not the Gospel, and have no converting power. It is, rather, a serious problem, — which the prevalent doctrine cannot solve, — how He who delights not in the death of the sinner still loves those who perish and is in no sense their enemy. Those who hold the prevalent view, we say, cannot answer this question; for if the lost suffer forever, it cannot be said that God’s “tender mercies are over all His works.” It may be said that He pities them, or that He employs them for some greatest good; but not that He is good to them, or that He loves them. But if they die, though the problem still has its difficulties, we think there is a view of their death which is truly evangelical, yet even more terrible than the one just presented. The anguish of that death may be sharpened by the sense of God’s unchanged goodness; the “wrath of God,” which cannot be a distinct attribute, may be felt as a last despairing sense of His love. Not “love in disguise,” but love freed from all the encumbrances of doubt which the sinner has interposed between himself and it.
The “wrath,” “jealousy,” “repentance,” and other like emotions ascribed to God in the Scriptures, are, in the heart of man, mixed passions; imperfect, if not sinful. Man’s anger is indignation, coupled with fear; without fear, it may pass into con- tempt. In God’s “anger“ there is no fear; therefore He may“ laugh “ and “mock “ at the puny rebellion of men; yet He never despises them. Man repents, with sorrow and change. God “repents,” grieved at heart for the sins of men, because He loves them; but He changes no plan. Man’s jealousy is his love, in doubt of the fidelity of its object. In God’s “jealousy“ there is no disquieting doubt or suspicion — only love, reproaching His people as unfaithful to Him, while lie is as a husband to them.
In all these metaphors there is a method of compensation, — each correcting some error that might be deduced from another. Thus their apparent conflict evolves their harmony, and clears God of imperfection. And they are explained by being referred to His love, as their common source and centre. Hence we may say it is love that makes the various moral attributes of God to he emotions. This is specially apparent in the instance of His anger. That is His justice, commiserating the guilty. If now He were simply just, He might — with the firmness that fits a human judge for an unwelcome duty — pass sentence and exe- cute judgment, and the stroke should be scarcely felt. It is as when a man weary of life throws himself upon the track of a railway. Justice might destroy him, and the train receive scarcely a jar. But mercy sounds the alarm, stays with mighty struggling the speed of the moaning train, and sends anxious fear through a hundred hearts. And the groaning delay shows the almost resistless power to be overcome, that a forfeited life may be saved.
If the engine could feel, its feeling would be indignation restrained by love. Such is divine wrath — Omnipotence, held back by compassion; the power of justice, displayed in the restraint of love. “ What if God, willing to show His wrath, and to make His power known, endured with much long- suffering the vessels of wrath, fitted to destruction?“
Now, such is human nature, that the notion of simple justice is often agreeable, though it may bring pain and death. Men may endure and even cherish a sense of God’s condemning justice, if He is simply just. This is the principle of the Stoic fortitude — proud to pay one’s heaviest dues, to gods and men. With the persuasion that they were reprobate, men have soothed and quieted themselves to sleep, by meditation upon their expected doom; but the thought that God loves them they cannot endure. So an undutiful child — whose parents’ anger is a type of God’s — can often bear their displeasure simply as just, but not as an emanation of love. By mistake or wrong friends are alienated. With doubts and misgivings and many half-resolves the alienation continues, and mars the happiness of a life. What more terrible discovery than to learn at last that a mistrusted or injured love has never languished! The assurance that love had changed to hatred would be an inexpressible relief.
Such examples may illustrate the final disappointment of sinful man, regarding God as his enemy, or careless of the continual tokens of His love. Life is his constant gift; and the possibility of a second death grows out of a redemption from the power of death, by which the life of human kind is respited and repaired. Suffering itself is the lingering of reluctant death. The groaning and travailing in pain of the whole creation grows out of the long delay of justice; God seeking to recover and restore a lost world whose life was forfeit from its early youth. With all the suffering man cherishes the life, yet distrusts the Giver offering eternal life.
The day of crisis arrives; and then all the sinner’s doubts, misgivings, cherished excuses and delusions, give way before the conviction that from first to last God has only loved him. The strength of his life has been wasted on follies; his faculties are all perverted; he has no capacity for eternal joy. It only remains for him, under the full assurance of God’s unchanging goodness, to perish. It would be a relief to believe that God had been ever cold and indifferent; it would be a comfort and a joy to know that God had hated him, and that all his own ingratitude and hatred were just and right; it would ease his agony even now, if God could seem to resent his ingratitude, or to be stirred with any weakness of man’s indignation. But that cannot be.
To suspect that God assumed a frown, kindly to disguise His tormenting benignity, would not quiet the sinner’s distress. Conscience, echoing the accusation that God is love, would dispel all such illusions. By a law of his being, impelling him to know the worst, though ignorance were bliss, — a law, perhaps, intensified, when man desperately resolved to “ know good and evil,” — the dying sinner will not believe that God ever has been or ever can be less than infinitely good toward all His creatures. The Redeemer’s tears over lost souls are the burnings of their anguish, the bitterness of their cup. The lost sinner has rejected infinite loveliness; he has departed from the Source of all life and blessing; he has sundered the cord that united him to God. The sense of its parting is the pang of his death.
THE MISSIONARY SPIRIT.
“A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children, refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not.”
1. VICARIOUS IMMORTALITY.
The tribe of Benjamin, refusing to surrender the men of Gibeah to the demands of justice, was in danger t)f becoming extinct. The other tribes, repenting of their solemn refusal of their daughters in marriage to the Benjamites, came together, and “lifted up their voices and wept sore; and said, O Lord, God of Israel, why is this come to pass in Israel, that there should be to-day one tribe lacking in Israel?“
But the mother, whose life had been yielded in the birth of Benjamin, must grieve far more than the brethren whose indignation had so nearly destroyed the tribe. And though dead, she is represented in prophetic vision as the chief mourner on this occasion. Her sorrow is inconsolable; and her wailing is heard, in fancy, above the waiting of all the people. From Ramah comes the most piercing cry of anguish; — Rachel, weeping for her children, refuses to be comforted, because they are not.
And so sad was the sorrow, that it is deemed the most suitable type of the agony of many mothers, bereaved, hundreds of years after, by the murderous hand of Herod, seeking the life of the infant Jesus. But why such lamentation? The slain Benjamites had ended their earthly toils; the babes of Bethlehem were saved from a thousand ills of life. And in neither case do the mourners say aught that betrays “The dread of something after death, That undiscovered country, from whose borne No traveller returns.”
They are grieved only because brethren or children have ceased to be. They have, then, ceased to suffer. What cause for their sorrow?
Such reasoning would indeed be insulting to a mother’s love, and to the common love of man for his kind. But it is proper to state them; since they are identical with objections sometimes urged against the notion that the lost may cease to be. It is actually feared that Christians will not sorrow much, or be very anxious to save the perishing, if they may altogether perish. Hence we must inquire whether the mitigated doctrine of the divine penalty leaves a valid motive for evangelical and missionary labour.
At the outset we may reply that the Christian, though he expected himself to perish utterly, would show no greater love for man than Rachel did, if he should weep and pray that his fellow men might share with him a temporary spiritual life. For all who truly live, desire that their life may continue; in the being of others, if not in their own. And in the patriarchal age, when a personal future life was scarcely revealed, parents did look upon their children as the most natural continuation of their own existence. In the multiplying offshoots of their own lives they found their best assurance that they should not altogether die. In their posterity they found what may be called a vicarious immortality. Hence the Jewish proverb:
“The childless are but as the lifeless.” Hence also the peculiar love of offspring, which appears in the Mosaic law respecting the raising up of seed to one who had died childless; upon which one ancient writer remarks: “For since a dim hope only of the resurrection was yet given, they represented the promise of that which was to come by a kind of mortal resurrection, that the name of the departed might ever remain.” In the same view Athenagoras says that man “begets children, not for the benefit of himself or kindred, but that, in the existence and longest possible continuance of his posterity, he may in their successive lives relieve the evil of his own death, and thus, as it were, immortalize that which is mortal.”
The Hebrew love of offspring was in the case of Rachel enhanced by adventitious provocations; but her ambitious rivalries may have been far from selfish. Her bosom companion inherited a promise that in his seed should all the nations of the earth be blessed; and every noble sentiment — every feeling that impels us to honour the mother of Jesus as blessed among women — must also impel Rachel to desire a part in that life-travail, that immortal honour. She might, then, as a pious hand- maid of the Lord, utter the prayer, Leave me not childless, lest Idle.
2. THE MATERNAL CHARACTER OF THE CHURCH.
The author of the “Conflict of Ages,” assuming that the Redemption of man is a crisis in the history of the Universe, has extended the notion of the Church as the heavenly bride to include her relation to God as the instructress of new-created minds in all ages and in all worlds. In this eternal union and cooperation of the Church with God, in which the Church appears as the fostering mother of an ever extending family of the children of God, — it is thought we may find the key of the entire moral system (p. 508).
This view, we think, gives the earthly Church too vast an honour. But it may truly represent the feeling by which she is impelled in her efforts to extend the range of God’s kingdom. As both human parents have one and the same affection towards their children, — so the Church, as the spiritual mother of the regenerate, is impelled by the same love that sways the divine bosom. And when Zion is represented as travailing “in birth and bringing forth children, we must regard her as desiring them for the same reason that God does, — sympathizing with the feelings that moved Plim to the creation and redemption of man. The members of the true Church are co-workers with God. His emotions impel their hearts. His plans are their plans. Their labours are the complement of His work. Their sufferings fill up that which is lacking of the sufferings of Christ. Their joys are the same with his, in his mission of grace to mankind. In their proclamation of his love they show their own love also, which he has kindled in their hearts. In short, creative goodness, redeeming love, and the missionary spirit, are essentially the same feeling. They are the beginning, the continuing, and the completing, of the same divine work. They are diversities of operation by the same loving Holy Spirit that works all and in all.
It follows that if from first to last God has encountered no emergency, — if the Redemption was designed no more than the Creation to forestall an infinite evil, — if there has been no exigency of infinite justice, — no cry of anguish that might move the stones to pity, — if rather, God, when able to raise up from the stones children to Abraham, has preferred the methods of grace to the methods of power, and His love is constrained by no necessity but that of love, — then we should expect the Church to be moved only by the same love; and we greatly err when we seek to move her by any of those terrors. If in Christ “were hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” if His glory was seen as that of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, in order that the lavishing of divine attractions might win the regards of men, then the Church, with her bridal array, should win mankind by the methods of love, not of terror. But in fact the entire display of God’s goodness and grace may be regarded as a divine suitor ship; in which the wooing party is above all need of the return of love, — where the love is rather an overflowing fullness, asking the love of men for their own sakes. Thus in the quaint verse of Herbert:
“Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,
The Trinity and Incarnation;
Thou hast unlocked them both,
And made them jewels to betroth
The work of thy creation
Unto thyself in everlasting pleasure.”
God has created intelligent beings that He might not be alone in His blessedness. And because His love is free, yet sincere, we may suppose He would rather not be, than be alone blessed. But to suppose that the refusal of His love leads Him to make the sinner ever wretched, is to suppose that He is needy. Rejecting this view, let us not again imply it, by any false view of the love of His Church for His creatures.
But the love of one who would rather not be, than be alone happy, is a parent’s love, one which the true Church shares with God. This was the love which Moses expressed in his prayer for Israel: “Yet now, if thou wilt, forgive their sin; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.” This was the love of Jeremiah, who would that his head were waters, and his eyes a fountain of tears, that he might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of his people. And the love of the Church is often represented as a maternal passion. Unfaithful to God, and forsaken of Him, she becomes a widow, mourning her barrenness. Returning to Him, she is no more called a forsaken one, but Hephzibah, and Beulah. “For as a young man marries a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee; and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.”
But the same instinct which desires a spiritual seed and travails in birth for souls, makes the Church jealous for their salvation, as the mother is anxiously careful for the safety of her children. A mother’s fear is the alarmed form of love. So that of the Church. As the mother is frantic, when her child is in imminent danger, so the
Church is moved with terror, when the Adversary would destroy the objects of her love. But, like the mother’s love, the just and salutary fear of the Church is never a panic terror for v/hat the soul may suffer, but for what a redeemed creature may lose.
3. THE MISSIONARY MOTIVE.
No human motive can endure, or can suffice for the various exigencies of duty, which is not truly healthful. The painful emotions can act only temporarily. They are made painful, because, like the sentiment of anger, they were designed for extraordinary occasions. If they continue to be cherished, they become diseases; their action is irregular and capricious; they exhaust the energies of the mind; they fail of their purpose in the hour of need.
They will be specially inefficient when they are indulged for the morbid pleasure they give. Those who delight most in tales of romance or in the tragic scene, and they who feed their thoughts with the forebodings of melancholy, or, — as some have done, — with the anticipation of endless sorrow, do least of the work of life.
If alarm for the heathen as exposed to eternal woe were needed to move Christians, we should expect frequent notes of such alarm in the Scriptures. We find nothing of the kind, but the very opposite. “I put thee in remembrance,” says Paul to Timothy, “that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands. For God hath not given us the spirit of fear but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” And though Paul, the model missionary, in one field of his labour, ceased not by the space of three years “ to warn every man day and night with tears,” yet this grief was felt not for any woe of the lost, but for the evils that threatened the Ephesian Church itself, by grievous wolves entering in, not sparing the flock. And he never uses the term “salvation“ in the negative sense it so often assumes when men are warned to escape an infinitely fearful doom.
The “great salvation“ found its entire value in the inestimable wealth that was offered to men. Christ had bequeathed untold riches to all who would accept them. The expunged ordinance of man’s condemnation was converted into the title deed of an eternal inheritance. Each man may now be regarded as a minor heir, for whom a heavenly citizenship and estate are waiting. We regard with a peculiar feeling any child that inherits a large estate. We take a livelier interest, if the inheritance was unexpected; or if the heir was a child of poverty; or if he is not yet prized of his good fortune; or if, through heedlessness, or doubt, or waywardness, the estate may be forfeited; or if it is a kingly fortune and rank, for which he should be fitted with the education of a prince. But all these occasions of interest are combined in the case of man as a subject of the Redemption; with an infinite difference in favour of those T/hose possession is eternity, and whose rank, that of kings and priests unto God.
Now, who shall tell the good news of such an heir ship, and inform the subjects of it in the faith and feelings that behove them? So far is a panic terror from being an allowable motive to this duty, that our human nature, and our liveliest common interest in man, cannot furnish the exalted feeling that becomes so high an office. The true herald of this gospel will he diffident, and will ask “who is sufficient for these things?“ not because man has an immortality that may be a living death, but because he may receive, or may fail of, an infinite good. He who would herald this Gospel aright, must feel the same divine love that has bestowed the gift. He must share the divine magnanimity that devised the bequest, and the long-suffering that still grieves for those who will not receive it. He must feel the sense of superhuman wealth. He must be himself one of the princes of the kingdom, if he would not be a beggarly, inept, chattering messenger, telling that which dishonours the King, or making the good news seem false by his ignorance of its high import. He who is truly furnished for this work will not need to reckon the value of the Redemption by the immense number of the saved, just because each human being, as an object of Christ’s love, has worth enough to engage his undivided interest. And this may explain a paradox of Christian benevolence. We find in the life of Christ and in the apostolic letters a marked attention even to the temporal wants and interests of individual men; while the wants of men counted by masses are little noticed, though they are a common theme of modern missionary appeal. The reason is, human nature itself has received a new value in the Redemption; and the divine estimates of it are those of magnitude rather than of multitude.
To the question, What is the true missionary motive? We may then give a concise answer in the words of another:
“The elementary expansive principle of Christianity is not natural benevolence, enhanced and spiritualized by religious considerations; — it is a sense, bestowed in an absolute manner from on high upon whoever receives it, of that which is ineffable, and for the conveyance of which language has no terms or powers adequate, but which et it indicates and affirms, as when we hear of the ‘ unsearchable riches of Christ,’ — a wealth available beyond the utmost reach of the all-grasping desires of the human mind, and available, as for the individual soul, so for all human spirits. Whoever thus feels, first exults for himself, as rich indeed; yet the consequent feeling
follows so closely upon the first, that the two seem one; and it is this second impulse which we assume as the true missionary rudiment, — the earnest, the burning desire to make known to all men ‘that which passes knowledge.’“
4. THE CAMPAIGNING SPIRIT.
Peter the Hermit could easily raise an army to rescue the holy sepulchre from the power of the infidel, because many human passions answered to his appeal. Hatred to the Saracen, the love of adventure and of exploit, and, when numbers began to be rallied, proneness to go with the multitude, — enlisted thousands who cared little whether the Nazarene were the Christ, or an impostor. All these passions could work under the banner of the cross, and for the alleged interests of the Church. A monstrous perversion, indeed; yet how few suspected the delusion! In the Roman societies for the Propagation of the Faith the perversion is more easy, because the weapons of that warfare are not so carnal; corrupt motives might here work more fatally, because more subtly.
The danger of this corruption does not lie in such an age, or in such a form of the Church, but in human nature itself. A Protestant name, therefore, gives no security against it. Where the missionary feeling is gone, it may still be easy to create mission funds, and send forth missionaries, and the Church may easily persuade herself that she is doing a glorious work, when the glory of that work is departed. Those who go to heathen lands and come personally in contact with degraded yet redeemed men, will, if they have felt the unutterable love of Christ, rely upon that alone to sustain them, and will rejoice in their proper work. But if other motives are relied on Ify the Church to support them, they will find a strange incongruity between the missionary spirit abroad, and the missionary effort at home. Serious differences will arise between them and their supporters, not only respecting their own work, but respecting various interests and rights of humanity. It will be found that those abroad and those at home are labouring for different ends, and can, per- haps, no longer work together.
All the dangers we have intimated will be the more serious if the Church rests her hopes on the conversion of the whole world to Christ. “The conversion of the world“ — is a rallying cry that appeals too strongly to man’s fondness for great enterprises. The ambition to do great things, though it be only as humble instruments, and the love of success in some great undertaking, which is one of the most seductive forms of idolatry, — these feelings may enlist thousands in the work who have no genuine love for Christ. Sectarian rivalry and all the passions connected with it will swell the numbers of those who give from sinister motives. “When the day of trial comes, and some cherished hopes of success are disappointed, these numbers will fall away, like the hosts of Gideon’s army; and the great victory that is to be achieved, must be won by a few faithful followers of Christ, “ faint, yet pursuing,” sustained by the spirit of Christ, whereby they are His.
Now Ave venture to say that the prevalent doctrine of the destiny of the lost aggravates the dangers we have named. For, as soon as the terror it inspires for the individual has spent its force, it may be reproduced in behalf of the great numbers, the millions of benighted heathen, supposed to await that doom. Then comes in the notion of an eternal kingdom of the Adversary, rivalling, in the number of its recruits drawn from this earth, the kingdom of God. The tragic interest of the “immortal conflict“ of which Plato speaks, is enlisted. Will that be a drawn battle? Will God’s victory be only in the majority on His side? Then we have left us only the boast of numbers, which is the great power of the Enemy. For to make a show of numbers, is his forte. This is the illusion of the vox populi, vox Dei. This explains the power of the Roman Church, calling herself universal, and the attraction of all great and ancient sects. And just so soon as God’s kingdom and the worth of the Gospel are estimated, no longer by the measures of magnitude, but by the comparative multitude of the saved, — then the hoped for victory is a real defeat. The hosts whom Satan can muster, though they be so many nothings, acquire respectability, and the warfare against him becomes a campaign that may be too like the political and military campaigns that make up so much of human history.
Before Christ came as the great Missionary, to supersede all lower motives by the example of his simple love for man, the chosen people were often addressed as a nation, with special national interests. Thus the Psalms of David, and many of the prophetic utterances, are redolent of the campaign. But the Banner is never displayed in the Gospels or the apostolic epistles. Never until the “thundering legion“ gave Constantine an excuse for converting the emblem of Christ’s ignominious death into a military ensign, did Christians think of the “ banner of the cross.” And never until then did they regard numerical success in their heralding of the gospel. But the times have changed. “Those incalculable revolutions,” says the writer just cited, “which have carried the human mind so far away from the ground of antiquity, have given rise to modes of thinking for which we shall in vain search the inspired writings, as furnishing either the w arrant or the example. It is a fact noticeable indeed that the modern mind — the world-wide philanthropy of these latter days — finds its like of sentiment and expression, and of animation, much rather in the prophetic poetry of the ancient dispensation, than in the writings of evangelists and prophets. The books of Isaiah, David, Daniel, are the modern missionary treasury of texts, fraught with hope.” And, speaking of an eminently successful preacher of the last century, he adds: “The averment is boldly hazarded, that unless he had, by mere sympathy, caught the feeling and fallen into the style of those around him, Whit- field, as a platform orator, at a modern missionary meeting, would have felt himself out of his place, and quite non provided with materials that might mingle homogeneously with the speeches going before, and coming after, his own. Might it be imagined that Whitfield and St. Paul would together stand apart, on such an occasion — rejoicing indeed as listeners to the Report; but both inclined rather to hear than to speak, and both of them perplexed as much as delighted?“
5. A TEST OF CHRISTIAN CHARACTER.
The Christian, burdened with the gloomy thought of an eternity of evil, may and ought to feel an inexpressible relief, a hallowed joy, when he shall believe that God can utterly destroy Satan’s kingdom without detriment to his own. But if one’s feelings go beyond this, and, freed from a most appalling fear in behalf of one’s fellow men, the love of Christ does not con- strain to devoted effort for their salvation, the evidence of Christian character is gone. The former hopes of such an one were a bondage of fear, and a delusion. He was a stranger to the spirit of adoption, that delights in doing the will of a Heavenly Father for a redeemed human family.
For, the unconverted man, and even the grossly wicked man, might be impelled by frantic terror to labour and even to pray that his fellow man should not suffer eternally. Such a fear addresses every man’s emotional nature. And though it should move one to spend his life and to suffer death to rescue a fellow creature from eternal suffering — however just, that would be no proof of love to God or love to man. It might be only the instinctive sympathy with which the brutes bemoan the sufferings of their kind. It is essentially without moral quality; it is sim- ply a part of man’s constitutional nature; drawn out to its utmost tension, and employed in the severest labours, it can never make one a Christian, or prove one to be such.
“Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, I am nothing.”
And it is a serious question whether multitudes, alarmed first for themselves and then for others, have not received the Christian name merely in consequence of this alarm. When the terror has spent its force, it has given way to some worldly and secular, but respectable mode of feeling toward the race of man- kind; or it has passed into dead indifference, and the subjects of it show no signs either of Christian or philanthropic vitality. They have a place among the children of life; but they are the offspring of fear and the children of death.
Here is another paradox: As it is easier to convict a sinner of finite than of infinite guilt, so it is easier to convict a Christian of neglect in destroying his fellow man, than in leaving him to eternal misery. Why is it so hard to convince the Church that millions of souls are every year ruined and lost by her remissness? The reason is, she doubts instinctively whether God has staked the salvation of millions from endless woe, upon her fidelity. She will not deny a vast responsibility; but that responsibility must have limits, both in the numbers that she can reach, and in its relation to the pains of the lost. If these pains are eternal. Christians w ill unconsciously evade responsibility for them, by a resort to the theodicy now most prevalent.
They may plead guilty to the beginnings of eternal woe; but its eternity will be regarded as the result of an eternal sinfulness, for which the lost alone are responsible. The Christian’s accountability for sins to be committed a thousand ages hereafter, is too indirect and remote to be at all felt. Or if, according to another theodicy, he regards the sinner as deserving eternal woe by the sins of this life, then the infinite heinousness of sin appals and perplexes him. How can he be responsible for so stupendous a guilt? What can he do or say to dissuade a man from infinite sin? Must it not defy his utmost skill and power? What wonder if many theologians have said that human preaching can have no more adaptation to convert the sinner, than the blowing of ram’s horns had to throw down the walls of Jericho? In this view the Christian may wait for a special miracle to produce an infinite change, and think himself guiltless if it is not wrought.
But let it be understood that the sinner is simply a candidate for endless existence, and the charge of guilt is easily made out and brought home to the consciences of those who neglect his welfare. Many indeed, perish under the blaze of the clearest light, and with heaviest condemnation. But it is not so with all. The masses are ignorant of Christ. “The people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” And on the part of most, — of those who “perish without law,” — there may be barely guilt enough to justify their perishing. Our guilt may be greater than theirs, if they are not saved. In a Christian land, men may be sorely tempted by adversity to distrust God’s goodness; they may scarcely know the name of Christ, or the work he has done for man. Acts of kindness done to them in His blessed name might lead them to faith and love. And for the heathen, Christians are, to the extent of their light-diffusing power, wholly responsible. To them, deluded and corrupted by many false hopes and gloomy fears, the Gospel will be indeed tidings, — news of glad things. Without Christ’s words of life they despair and die.
“Shall we whose souls are lighted with wisdom from on high, — Shall we to men benighted The lamp of life deny?”
We have read of a Caspar Hauser, shut out from the light of day and from all knowledge, until at the age of a young man he was still in pitiable infancy. His sufferings during that night of years were a trifle not to be thought of. But the crime of his exclusion from a proper human existence was called by a new name, the “crime against the life of the soul.” At the bar of conscience, there may be a conviction of like guilt, for the care- less or wilful failure to save those who are liable to perish. Redeemed already by Him who came to seek and to save that which was lost, they wait for the after-work which He has committed to His people; and the neglect of this work is blood- guiltiness.
We need not dwell here, to say how the Gospel should be brought home to the minds and consciences and hearty acceptance of men. We will only remark, that when a simpler theology shall have done away the necessity of argumentative preaching, to smooth over the Gordian knots of the present sys- tem, preaching itself may become a different thing. It will not only be more practical, but it will consist more in Christian practice. The Christian life, — the living epistle, — the kind word and deed wrought into gospel by the love of Christ, will assume its due importance. The sermon will still have its place, as an instruction of those who believe. The Gospel will become a common ministration of all who believe; a service of love rendered by Christians wherever scattered, “preaching the word.” Such, if we mistake not, was the Church in its infancy; and such it will be in its maturity.
6. GOSPEL FOR THE HEATHEN.
“You talk of hell;“ said a heathen in reply to the discourse of a missionary; “hell — it is just the place we wish to go to!” What could now be said, to a Hindu whose own doctrine of metempsychosis had made him too familiar with the thoughts of future suffering? Which was more like a gospel to him — the news of salvation, or the threat of damnation? The case was indeed unusual; but it illustrates what we have said of human nature as often preferring justice to mercy, — wrath to love. The goodness of God — most awful when least disguised — is that which strikes the deepest dread. “They shall fear the Lord and His goodness in the latter days.”
But the heathen more frequently takes exception to the doc- trine of eternal misery, as an encumbrance to the Gospel, making it inferior to his own religion. A priest of Siam once asked a missionary “how long his God tormented bad men in a future state?” and when answered, “forever” — replied: “Our God torments the worst of men only a thousand years; so we will not have your American God in Siam! “ And how poorly prepared is the missionary, with all the extra-scriptural theodicies of the schools, to meet one such blunt objection to the religion he offers. The story is told of a smart Japanese, convinced of the folly of his old worship, and hesitating what Christian communion he should join. He could accept neither the Roman, nor the Lutheran, nor the Calvinist faith. With the latter he found fault for its doctrine of predestination, which he found so absurd that he was tempted to hold fast his idolatry more firmly than ever; for he protested that those terrible decrees of absolute predestination and reprobation made God appear as a cruel and inexorable tyrant, who had no greater pleasure than to see His creatures suffer eternally.
This idea seemed to him so frightful, and so contrary to the general law of all the religions of the world, — that vice should be presently punished and virtue re- warded, — that he was astonished that men endowed with reason could adopt a principle so irrational, and so little conformed to the idea they would have cherished of God as a being infinitely good and merciful. Such is the heathen’s objection to the Calvinistic side of the difficulty. But how poor a relief does the missionary afford, when he tells him that eternal suffering is beyond God’s power to prevent. And though he should be convinced that Christ can save him, still how heavy and gloomy a cloud of mystery is left if the Gospel reveals no end of evil! The heathen will have a right to echo what the Christian theologian has said, — it is “dark, dark, dark, and he cannot disguise it.”
But the heathen is concerned with the doctrine of eternal suffering, not for his own sake alone. If he is saved from that, what company shall he find in heaven? and whom shall he not find there? The author of “Hypatia” gives the following narrative as warranted by fact. “Wulf died, as he had lived, a heathen. Placidia, who loved him well, as she loved all righteous and noble souls, had succeeded once in persuading him to accept baptism. Adolf acted as one of the sponsors; and the old warrior was in the act of stepping into the font, when he turned suddenly to the bishop, and asked him where were the souls of his heathen ancestors? ‘In hell,’ replied the worthy prelate. Wulf drew back from the font, and threw his bear skin cloak around him. ‘He would prefer, if Adolf had no objection, to go to his own people.’ And so he died un-baptized, and went to his own place.” And even now, the missionary cannot tell him that he will not find some sad consolation of society, even there.
The Church has yet to learn, in behalf of a dying world, what the Gospel is. Men need not be told that they are sinners, already condemned by the law of God. That they may know well enough; they feel it daily; they doubt it only when condemnation is made to mean what they cannot believe. Let the message of pardon and life be once more understood as a plain word, and it may again be said: “ How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that brings good tidings, that publishes peace; that brings good tidings of good, that publishes salvation; that said unto Zion, thy God reigns!“ And the Church, whose exotic theology has brought gloom and strife within and scorn from without, may forget her anguish, her reproach, and her desolations. “For thou shalt break forth on the right hand and on the left; and thy seed shall inherit the Gentiles, and make the desolate cities to be inhabited. Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed; neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame; for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood anymore.”
THE HIGHEST GOOD.
“ I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life.”
We have already remarked that the Christian must not only believe that God is just, but must also seek to know how and why He is just in doing thus or thus; otherwise one cannot perceive wherein justice consists, or, in many cases, decide what things are just to be done.
For the same reason the Christian must not only believe that the actual system of the world is the best system, (the evil that is in it being no scheme of God’s,) but he must desire to understand why it is the best system. He must wish to know wherein the highest good consists, or what is the best gift that God can and does bestow upon his intelligent creatures. Such an answer to the old inquiry respecting the Summum Bonum is implied in the duty which Paul enjoins: to “approve the things that are excellent.” As faith ever leads on to reason, and as we admire the holiness, justice, and goodness of God, then, whatsoever things are true — honourable — just — pure — lovely — of good report, if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, we must think on these things. As the Book of Job is a continuous theodicy, so that of Ecclesiastes is a continuous inquiry respecting the highest good; of which the ancients, we are told, had two hundred and eighty-eight different theories; and so prone is the mind of man to have some opinion here, that theories are unconsciously offered even by those who pronounce the whole question a vain speculation.
The question is not only the natural sequel of a theodicy, but it is specially pertinent for us. We have undertaken to oppose not only a prevalent theology which makes eternal evil a part of, or incidental to, the best system, but also a counter theology which asserts the highest good of the world to consist in the final salvation of all men. Believing that such will not be the promised “restitution of all things,” we may inquire why in the divine economy it should not be so. And on the human side of the question we shall encounter the prevalent opinion of a remnant of virtue, a “good in all,” into the genuineness of which we do well to inquire.
1. LIFE THE TRUE GOOD.
Besides the general tenor of scriptural language in which “life,” “eternal life,” is made to be Heaven’s best gift to man, and the burden of a glorious Gospel, we have remarked various expressions that denote life to be the greatest good, and death the greatest evil. The Jewish proverb, “All that a man hath will he give for his life,” speaks the natural sentiment of man- kind; for life is the primary condition of all happiness, the casket that contains every good, and which is freely emptied if itself may be saved.
But the casket cannot be literally emptied. Life cannot exist without the continued action of its powers. They are only suspended, in sleep, trance, and death; these are kindred, as shadow and substance. And vital action must be either pleasurable or painful; pleasurable, if normal, healthy, or in accordance with the laws of life; painful, if irregular, disturbed, or diseased; and then it looks toward death. When the casket is emptied quite, it is destroyed.
We venture the proposition, then, that the scriptural equivalence of “life“ and blessing“ is philosophically true. Life is the primary quality of all joy. It is more than a metaphor, when we speak of the cheerful and gladsome as “lively.” And when we compare the active and passive forms of happiness, — those in which action is given out or taken in, — we not only find that the former are higher, but the latter give happiness only by means of reciprocal action, and in the measure of that action.
The passive joys are grateful only as forms of reaction, such as riding and resting; or as preparations for action, such as refreshment and repose. When these are sought as an end, for pleasure’s sake, their life and their joy is gone. Here also is explained the paradox, — that vigorous action, though it costs effort, is happier than indulgent ease.
And in this view it is truly said: “Plato has profoundly defined man, the hunter of truth: for in this chase, as in others, the pursuit is all in all, the success comparatively nothing. ‘ Did the Almighty,’ says Lessing holding in his right hand Truth, and in his left Search after Truth, deign to proffer me the one I might prefer, — in all humility, but without hesitation, I should request. Search after Truth.’ We exist only as we energize; pleasure is the reflex of unimpeded energy; energy is the mean by which our faculties are developed; and a higher energy the end which their development proposes. In action is thus contained the existence, happiness, improvement, and perfection of our being; and knowledge is only precious, as it may afford a stimulus to the exercise of our powers, and the condition of their more complete activity.... ‘ Where there is most life, there is the victory.’“
Without going into a severe analysis of a question which to many will seem to possess the importance only of a definition, we may then say, the inquiry, “What is the highest good?“ resolves itself into another, — What is the highest form of life? May we not classify the various forms of life, — sensation, motion, thought, free will, virtue, faith, love, — as lower and higher, (though they be interlinked, and are found in varied relations to meaner and loftier things,) and may we not show the last to be largest and highest, and thus man’s truest good, as it is God’s first demand and His own best gift?
2. SENSATION AND MOTION.
The flowers and the trees often seem happy; they would be so, we think, if they were only conscious. But we leave them in happy ignorance of their want, to find the simplest forms of actual happiness in sensation and spontaneous motion. Every leaf and every drop of water teems with animalcular life and joy. The fossil remains of the earth’s strata, thousands of feet in thickness, — remains whose fossil character is largely discovered by the microscope, — have been truly styled “monuments of the felicity of ages.” And that felicity is continued in multi- plied and more exquisite forms of animal life, in the mature age of the earth; a world-wide life in which God takes delight, and in which man may rejoice. But man’s joy in the well-being of the brutes is only his sympathy with the benevolence of God. Created to be lord over them, with a rational dominion that should liken him to God, he must seek for himself a higher good.
We can hardly say of the brutes that they think; for, in the strict sense of the term, “he only thinks who reflects,” and reflection implies purpose and free will. Yet the mind of the brute is, in its acts of intelligence, carried, as it were, through the forms of thought; and it thus passively enjoys some of the pleasures of intellection, though it cannot control and augment them by the powers of freedom.
So noble is the life of thought in man that it may be his greatest danger. It saves him from brutish sensuality — when it is not perverted and squandered to adorn his lusts. It invites him to the realm of truth; it compels him more or less into the possession of knowledge; it offers him, as an object of science, the mastery of the whole world. With one of its created aids of vision it discovers kingdoms in leaflets; with another it gives him conquest of the stars. It determines the unseen laws of all things, and the methods of God’s own work. It tempts and seduces him away from God when it is made an idol, an end in itself, and not ancillary to a higher life. Thus did man fall. And for this sin was the wisest of men reduced to utter the complaint: “In much wisdom is much grief; and he that increases knowledge, increases sorrow.“
2. FREE WILL.
Self-consciousness and freedom denote a higher life than mere intelligence, which they transmute into thought; higher than thought, because they carry it on to personality, responsibility, and the capacity of virtue; and far higher than sensation, for it is only in abjuring mere pleasure that true freedom is possible. Consciousness would be little worth, if it only enabled us to pleasure ourselves more knowingly than the brute; and free will would be as worthless, if it could only prefer one form of gratification to another. That would not be freedom, but capricious spontaneity. The brute acts spontaneously in yielding to its impulses of desire; but it cannot change or rise above them; it is therefore unfree. The human will is free just because it can rise above the desire of gratification, can oppose the moral to the sensational, the spirit to the flesh. The love of pleasure is not active, but passive; whence it is so subject to passion. Its law is that of inertia; its power, nothing but momentum, and it must obey the “greater motive.” In this lower sphere the necessarian may truly say that the lover of gain cannot prefer a shilling to a pound, and that the epicure cannot prefer a crust to a feast. And as sin greatly consists in the love of pleasure more than of God, it is a state of bondage. “Whosoever commits sin is the servant of sin.” Human freedom is only a delusive bondage, if it cannot hold the love of pleasure in abeyance, to seek a nobler end.
But that end cannot be any mere happiness, however refined; for then the refining of our enjoyment would only be the refining of our bondage. The law of the “stronger motive“ would still hold good; the pursuit of the best pleasure would be a necessity; it could not be a virtue. Happiness, then, cannot be man’s highest good. To say that the truest welfare is the highest good, is almost a truism; but the enjoyment of that welfare is an instinctive desire, not a, matter of duty. That the highest well being should be happy being is God’s concern, not ours.
Waiving for a moment the question wherein true virtue consists, we remark, man’s noblest aim must be a virtue. But virtue is the free energy of a higher life-power. The exercise of virtue brings happiness of course; for happiness is “the reflex of unimpeded energy.” But to make this happiness the end, is to ignore the proper aim of virtue, and to derange the whole scheme of action.
It is the highest blessedness to see the divine glory. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” But they who seek after God just to find happiness, will see only themselves. They will never discover His glory; that can only, as a mirror, reflect their own poor image. Happiness is not an essence, subsisting by itself. It is like the rainbow, which the child may run after, hoping to grasp it; but its finished image is in the eye of the beholder. It is most enjoyed when least thought of; as when Archimedes, transported with joy at a great discovery, cried “Eureka,” not dreaming that he had found happiness.
Here it is apparent in what sense virtue is its own reward. Virtue is action; withstanding, by a peculiar vitality, the seductions to which vice yields. The reward of vice is the decay of life; that of virtue, its vigour and growth. And here we see why virtue may be encouraged, and yet remain unbought and disinterested. It is the active vigour of life; the right use of our being, that makes it worth preserving. Immortality is not its reward, but its proper sphere. God asks men to be virtuous, not simply that they may live forever; but that, living for ever, they may be ever virtuous. And here the censure of Pomponatius on the ancient argument for a future life seems ill-judged. “If virtue is her own reward,” lie would say, “she is paid already, and may have her discharge.” We answer, “She has her reward, indeed; but there is none other so fit to dwell among men. Let her be retained; and those also who retain her, for her sake.”
These views of life as the highest good, of its happiness as found in virtue, and of its continuance as being not the reward but the proper sphere of holiness, are contained, we think, in the last words of Moses to the Israelites:
“I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live; that thou mayest love the Lord thy God, and that thou mayest obey His voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto Him (for He is thy life and the* length of thy days); that thou mayest dwell in the land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.”
5. THE ELECTION.
Is man indeed made a party to the question of his own im- mortality? We have given various reasons for saying that those who live forever, do so of their own choice; to which others may here be added.
41. In this way alone can life become strictly and truly, man’s own. Without such free acceptance, the inheritance would be an entail. With it, the life, freely received as God’s free gift, becomes as really man’s own as if he had created it. The disabilities of dependent existence are overcome, when the candidate for life is empowered to appropriate the offered boon to himself. Thus it becomes in a special sense his property, such as it could not be made by any compulsion; it pertains to him by his own act; and that act the highest act of his life, because it is the choice of life. He who says “I will live“ — does then begin to live as never before.
42. In this view eternal existence is not man’s necessity; it is not imposed upon him, willing or unwilling. He is invited, not compelled, to be immortal. Here, then, is found an answer to the ancient cavil, that our being is obtruded upon us; that God, or fate, has brought us into being without consulting our wishes, and keeps us in being with the same inexorable rigor. The cavil may be prompted, indeed, by wrong feelings, — sinful impatience and want of faith under the ills of life; and it might be silenced if with immortality eternal freedom were secured to each one. But it is wholly justified, if in the infancy of man’s being he must choose between eternal weal or woe. Hence we need not wonder that Justin Martyr treats it with respect, and answers it truly, if we interpret his words strictly. Man is brought into being, unasked, indeed, but just in order that he may be consulted, and may choose for himself “For as God created us at first, when we were not, so by the same power will he restore us to being again, and crown with the immortal enjoyment of himself such as have made it their choice to please their Maker. For though we had no choice in our creation, yet in our regeneration we have; for God persuades only, and draws us gently in our regeneration, by cooperating freely with those rational powers he has bestowed upon us.”
Here we meet a very common argument that an offer so great as that of eternal life should not depend on the capricious choice of man, — a wayward child of earth, an infant of days before the unending years. That is the same as to say that the greatness of the grace makes it a debt; or that the folly of those to whom it is offered demands that they should be made wise — as if this were their right. If the offered gift were a little thing, no such claim would be set up. When it swells to infinite value, men claim it as their due, lest in their madness they should spurn it away.
107. The view we have taken enhances the dignity of man An inherent immortality, created into man’s very being, might ennoble him as making him truly divine. Self-existence would then be his dignity. Man approaches as nearly to this as he could wish, and yet retains all his blessed dependence, when of himself he accepts existence. But how, it is asked, can man’s free election of life consist with God’s election from among men? We answer, if God’s foreknowledge were limited by the connection of events as causes and effects, then either man’s freedom or God’s omniscience must be given up. But if God’s knowledge is not under the conditions of Now and Then, as He is not omnipresent by the law of Here and There, — if He indeed dwells in eternity, — then may He know, and choose, and love His own, and no finite reason can say whether they are first known, or chosen, or loved. They are elect, indeed; but their election was no bar to the salvation of those who refused life. They are elect also, perhaps more prominently than is commonly supposed, in a moral sense; they are the chosen ones — choice, in the sight of God.
And they may be thus choice, because they freely choose God, in the infancy of their being; choice, as those could not be, who should accept life in a second or third probation, after repeated rejections of it, and when the youthful vigour of their being was gone. Is not this intimated in the peculiar regard which God shows for the young? “I love them that love me, and they that seek me early shall find me.” “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” May not the divine wisdom find a limit, beyond which it is better to make anew than to repair the old?
But while we assert man’s entire freedom in respect to God’s election, — the Arminian side of the organic truth, — we by no means deny God’s sovereignty or his foreordination. We have already spoken of his appointing some to be vessels of honour and others of dishonour, as a mystery. But the mystery may reach back into the counsels of eternity in the same way that the question whether the solar system should be located here or there was to be determined by an original and eternal arbitrament of God. In the place which God appoints to various creatures there may be ample range for his foreordinations, while their freedom is unharmed.
108. The view we offer furnishes occasion of happiness for the saved. Those who insist upon God’s election as precluding man’s, have asserted the contrary. To be saved by God’s special goodness, without any act of one’s own, it is said, will give the highest feeling of happiness. “Not unto us, O Lord, but unto thy name, give glory for thy mercy.” This argument against free will has been most fully- developed by Bayle. “To be firmly persuaded,” he says, “that we move only in obedience to impulses and divine directions in the practice of virtue, so far from diminishing the satisfaction of conscience, makes it the more delightful. A Pharisee [unhappy illustration, since the Pharisees were fatalists] who is persuaded that he obeys the law of God by the powers of his own free will, feels great pleasure; but for less than the true devotees of the Reformed Communion, who deem themselves incapable of any good thing, except as they are impelled by an irresistible grace of the Holy Spirit He who in giving alms is persuaded that it is God who has inspired the thought and given him power to execute it, is happier than he who attributes to himself all the glory of an act of charity. Indeed, the persuasion of a man who does not believe that he can even cooperate with grace, is well fitted to strengthen his union and intercourse with God, and consequently the joy of his soul.” After a few other illustrations the argument proceeds: “To believe firmly and on good grounds that one has received of God a special privilege, that one is His chosen vessel. His favourite, may extinguish pride, but cannot diminish one’s pleasure. It may prevent flattery and self-conceit, but not that one should feel himself very happy.”
We willingly concede the happiness of a good fortune, a high destiny, a brilliant success. But — not to say that examples of a splendid career are foreign to the question at issue — there have been unsuccessful great men, who will be admired through all time. And there is a proverb which says that fortune favours fools. The truth in Bayle’s argument becomes a one-sided half- truth, and a falsehood, when the divine favour is supposed to preclude all action of the human soul, and thus to nullify the very idea of virtue and of character. We congratulate the brave man, if he is successful; but success never made a hero. To deserve success is better than to enjoy it. The heirs of eternal life may give God the glory of their salvation; but their humility should give place to shame, if they have not themselves proved worthy to be the “sons of God,” — if they have not given diligence to make their calling and election sure. They are most to be congratulated, who are “strong in the Lord,” and who “quit them like men.”
6. VIRTUE.
An examination of the popular theory of the “good in all“ brings us at once to the question: What is true virtue? And here, freely conceding, for argument’s sake, that there is in most men, even the most abandoned, a remaining susceptibility of good, we doubt whether that is a moral good, or a virtue; and, taking the terms “justice” and “goodness” in a sense to be defined presently, we propose to show that real virtue is found only in their union; though each without the other may furnish various forms of apparent virtue.
Plato has remarked that “God is not only good, but also just; and he has an esteem for justice beyond anything that is felt among men.” The distinction must be at once admitted, unless we say that virtue or morality has nothing to do with conscience, and that the distinctions of right and wrong are a delusion.
We may define “justice” as conformity to the rule of right. It may be mere innocence, or absence of guilt. It may be more than this, as enforcing a rule of right in respect to others. Innocence is justice in repose; justice is innocence in energy.
The term “goodness“ we shall use in the utilitarian sense. He is a good man who confers benefits, or who meets the wants or wishes of another.
With this distinction seems to accord the language of Paul: “Scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die.” The reason is, we naturally love the good man, while we simply admire the just man. The one is our friend, whose good nature and agreeable qualities or kind acts have bound us to him; the other is the man of unbending integrity, whom we must respect. The one wins our affection; the other compels our admiration. The one gives us pleasure and delight; the other inspires awe and reverence. The one engages us by the ties of gratitude; the other binds us to a sense of duty. The one is nearer to us, and be- comes a part of our being, so that we can hardly live without him; the other is strong and robust, and can endure much; the principle of his integrity will sustain him; no essential evil can befall him. If his justness take the form of godliness, he has “dwelt in the secret place of the Most High, and he shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” Hence we are ready to die, if need be, for the good man, while the just man may be per- mitted, as he can endure, to die for himself.
Now it is true that there can be no sincere love of the good man without a hearty admiration of the just man, and a desire to copy his virtues. Yet fallen human nature may seek to sunder the qualities of goodness and justice and to regard one without the other; hence two forms of spurious devotion.
1. The Idolatry of Goodness. —
This is easily explained, and the examples of it are numerous. Self-love delights in those who befriend or Hatter us, and may even hate those who seek to do better for us. Thus a certain citizen of Athens ostracised Aristides, though he was doubtless as good a man as any other, because he could not bear to hear him perpetually called “Aristides the Just.” Thus Alcibiades could dread the presence of Socrates, who sought to direct his mind to a nobler ambition than the poor adulation of sycophants. “I stop my ears,” says he, “and flee away as fast as possible, that I may not sit down beside him and grow old in listening to his talk.
And often have I wished that he were no longer to be seen among men.” The Israelites under Joshua appear to have regarded Jehovah as a patron deity, a powerful and friendly God, and to have preferred his service to that of Baal mainly for this reason. He was beneficent and good. “Therefore,” say they, “will we serve the Lord, for he is our God.” And Joshua might well be concerned for the genuineness of their devotion, “Ye cannot serve the Lord,” he tells them, “for he is a holy God; he is a jealous God; he will not forgive your trespasses nor your sins;“ intimating that God required integrity in their allegiance to him; without which, he might “turn and do them hurt and consume them,” i.e. his holiness would appear against them, as they had not received it. Their subsequent history showed that the admonition was not uncalled for.
And in the character of Christ and the reception he met on earth, we have a still more marked illustration of the idolatry we have named. The Jews were wedded to the idea of a temporal deliverer, a good king, who should rescue them from the tyranny of the Romans, re-establish the throne of David, and bring the peoples of the earth as proselytes to their customs and religion. The Messiah appeared among them; was born their king, and by his miracles of beneficence proved himself a prince of such goodness that none other could for a moment compare with him, and Heaven itself could offer them no more. But he was not only good; he was also just; and the beatitudes uttered in his Sermon on the Mount, — the inaugural in which he set forth the principles by which he should reign, — ran wholly counter to the expectations of the chosen people, because he told them the kingdom of heaven is “not meat and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.” Such was his goodness that the earthly benefits he conferred were but mere types of far richer gifts — the healing of worse than physical maladies, and the grant of eternal life; but these gifts were to be enjoyed only by the poor in spirit; the kingdom of heaven belonged to the meek; the pure in heart alone should see God.
The evangelical prophet had described his goodness and his justice in a single picture: “He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench. He shall bring forth judgment unto truth; he shall not fail, nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth.” And he was rejected not through misapprehension of his real character, for he could say to those who knew him well: “Ye have both seen and hated both me and my Father.” The people preferred Caesar for a king, and Barabbas for a prisoner to be released, for reasons boldly charged upon them by Peter: “Him ye delivered up, and denied Him in the presence of Pilate, when he was determined to let Him go. But ye denied the Holy One, and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you;” and by Stephen: “This was that Just One, of whom the people were the betrayers and murderers.”
2. The Idolatry of Justice. —
We have already seen how a morbid conscience or a lofty and defiant temper may delight in the notion of justice, even though one is condemned by it. But the worship of justice without goodness commonly appears in other forms, either as selfishness or as fanaticism. How often do men rejoice in the law, though it make their neighbour’s case a hard one. The prosecutor insists that a principle must be maintained, he wants nothing but justice. Thus men wax righteous overmuch, and are glad in their hearts that the law knows no mercy. “What the prosecutor does in the name of the state, the persecutor does in the name of religion. Thus Saul, in his zeal for a law given from Sinai, could breathe out threatening and slaughter, and flatter himself that he was doing God service. The inquisitor is made the incarnation of cruelty which he is, by his fond notion that men can be saved only in some churchly or doctrinal way; knowing that God is just, lie has too willingly forgotten that he is also good, and has himself ceased to be good. By a similar process the ascetic arrives at the conclusion that he has no right to be useful to his fellow men or to receive good from them. In the same v ay he who had made a religious vow, so that he could call his future plans a Corban, — a consecrated thing, — used to think himself released even from filial duty. And the taboo, the fetish, and all the impure consecrations of idolatrous worship, are the ripe fruit of the same perversion. It is the essence of superstition to conceive of man’s relations to God as purely those of justice, and thus to regard the divine favour as a thing to be propitiated only by some just claim upon it. Hence all empty ceremonies, penances, austerities, in which it is forgotten that God will have mercy and not sacrifice. But the falsified justice ever appears as a frightful caricature. The Scribes and Pharisees who had so much of it, even to the tithing of mint, were those who hated most the truly Just One, and who imposed intolerable burdens upon the people.
The Jews have a tradition that when the tables of the Law were broken by Moses, in his displeasure with the sinning Israelites, they pressed eagerly to snatch for the fragments; and he deemed himself quite happy who secured a piece of the Law, to keep. The story is a lively, picture of human nature, so prone to sunder the elements of true virtue from each other, and to be a part only of what God requires. It is as if man were shattered in the Fall, and he had not yet recovered the integrity of his moral sense.
If now the qualities of goodness and justice tended each to produce the other, then might the doctrine of the “good in all“ as a saving germ of virtue, be maintained. But the fact is just the reverse. When goodness and justice are sundered, so far from each producing the other, each tends to corrupt and destroy itself. The partial and one-sided character naturally degenerates. Instead of the complementary virtue, it produces the opposite vice. And the methods and progress of this corruption may be easily traced.
Thus, he who tries to be good without being just, will become, first, simply good-natured; then kind and clever; then complaisant and yielding; he then falls an easy prey to temptation, and becomes at last weak, worthless, bad.
On the other hand, he who would be just without being good, will naturally grow strict; then exact and rigid; then harsh and severe; then heartless; and soon haughty, overbearing, cruel, unjust.
The practical illustrations of this perverse tendency are numerous. We will add but a single example to show how the principles of justice and goodness may struggle together in the same mind, and each come to naught. The slaveholder at one time would fain renounce his claim of property in those whom he has inherited, making them to be indeed men, but leaving them to fortune; as if he could be just to them without goodness. More commonly he resolves to treat his slaves kindly, without securing for them the rights of manhood and freedom; as if he could be good to them without doing them justice. And most of the wrongs under which humanity groans are prolonged or aggravated by the effort to be virtuous at halves, — to be either just or good, but not both.
7. THE ATONEMENT.
In the Sermon on the Mount, having censured the Pharisaic righteousness on the one hand, and the publican goodness on the other hand, Christ requires his followers to be “perfect, as the Father in heaven is perfect.” That is, they must be complete. Those who would be the children of the Heavenly Father, are not to be half-virtuous. They must possess all the essential elements of true virtue, if they would be “partakers of the divine nature.” And if justice and goodness are such elements, they must be had in living union, by all who would enter the heavenly kingdom. The failure of either is the forfeiture of eternal life.
The inner relation of these each to the other may be a mystery, while their mutual necessity is an obvious fact. They may be the polar forces of the same vital principle. They may be compared as centrifugal and centripetal forces; or as power, and law regulating the power and making it efficient; or as the oak and the ivy, giving mutual support and adornment — strength and beauty. We may consider the one as more manly, the other as more womanly. Each, for a special life-work, may have an apparent prominence; the other being more hidden yet no less effective. Will not their equipoise be discovered in the perfected man, when marriage and all the kindred relations of life are done away in a divine espousal?
But how can the fallen man, the integrity of whose virtue is lost, and who is so prone to sunder the elements of it, recover them in their harmony? As the recovery of a natural life, so likewise that of the moral life might have been impossible with- out a redemption, — a spiritual, vital power, more potent than instruction or example, and to be found only in Christ. It is the great work of our salvation that He who was at once so just and so good, who was “ full of grace and truth,” in whom mercy and truth met together, righteousness and peace kissed each other, — should be formed in us, the hope of glory. And while we discard the notion that Christ’s righteousness in our behalf consisted in the payment of a penal debt, may not the doctrine of Atonement find some illustration in the want of man’s nature which we speak of? The nature of the redemptive work must be judged by its effects; and these are remarkable, in that the child of God acquires not only a new love of goodness, but a more lively moral sense. The law which before was a sentence of death becomes a living, active principle. “What the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh; that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit.” Here is a “law-work” different indeed from that commonly intended by the phrase, — a work not of death, but of life; but does not this efficacy of Christ’s work grow out of His companionship with man in suffering and death, whereby He might reach and rescue us? And whatever be the theology of the Atonement, are there not here two phases of truth the denial of which betrays itself in a defective practical view? When men insist on the efficacy of repentance alone for salvation, as if Christ were not indeed our Righteousness, do they not think of God too exclusively as good, and does not their faith become sentimental and powerless?
When, on the other hand, men insist on the efficacy of Christ’s sufferings, as if salvation were by the imputation of their merit, do they not think of God too exclusively as just, and does not their faith become rigid and formal? The two extremes are likely to meet in a lukewarm piety and a degenerate morality, because the whole of Christ is not received, “who is of God made unto us wisdom, and justification, and sanctification, and redemption.”
8. FAITH.
Coleridge has made a just distinction between prudence, morality, and religion; which he illustrates with reference to the faculties of the soul. “The prudential,” he says, “corresponds to the sense and the understanding; the moral to the heart and conscience; the spiritual to the will and reason; that is, to the finite will reduced to harmony with, and in subordination to the reason, as a ray from that true light which is both reason and will — universal reason, and will absolute.”
“We have already observed that free will, as the power of preferring the moral to the pleasurable, or duty to mere self-interest, is essentially a higher life. Yet this free will cannot be in itself the highest life. For on the one hand, it contains the power of wrong action, — lust conceiving sin, and sin producing death. And though the sceptical argument against free will, — that it contains a power which ought not to be used, and which therefore ought not to exist, — is fallacious, still we must regard the contingency of wrong action as a thing to be superseded, by the alliance of the will with some higher law of life.
But, on the other hand, this higher life is not found in the conscience. For though it be supreme as Law, yet it is not Life. The subjection of the will to the conscience alone may be even a bondage — infinitely preferable, indeed, to the bondage of sin, unless it arise from the tormenting conflict of conscience and lust, yet a bondage far removed from the peace and joy which is man’s true life.
Faith, if we mistake not, is the means of deliverance from this bondage. Conscience is imperative: “Do what is right, be the consequence what it may.” Faith encourages: “The consequence cannot be evil. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall — says the one. The heavens cannot fall — says the other. Thus faith assures the heart, by laying hold upon the infinite, and climbing towards heaven. It is the tendril power of the soul. By it the soul turns away from creeping upon the earth, and, grasping the support that is offered in Christ, rises toward God. Conscience points upward, directing the will to a law above. Faith looks thither, and sees farther; it mounts above the law to “dwell in the secret place of the Most High, and abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” The law is still “a lamp to the feet, and a light to the path; but no longer a yoke or a burden. Faith embraces the Christ to whom the conscience was a schoolmaster; and in this “act of the moral reason” (as Baxter defines faith), the will accepts the law, and makes it a perfect law of liberty. By placing itself on the divine side of law, the will at once secures its steadfastness and its freedom.
Faith is, of course, so far from being opposed to reason that it is its main support. Reason demonstrates that certain things must he, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Con- science tells us of what ought to he. Faith confirms the voice of each, by affirming that there can be no disruption of the world’s harmony, — no conflict of truth with truth, or of duty with welfare. It is only opposed to the senses that deceive, and to the passions that seduce. It may be defined as the synthesis of thought, feeling, and act; the will embracing the rational and moral convictions, and resolving them into a life of harmony with the will of Him who is Lord of the conscience, and the Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.
But this far-reaching and all-embracing power of faith indicates its nature as a higher life. We may affirm that it alone unites justice and goodness in true virtue, and that it transmutes moral law into religious principle. Is not this faith the true beginning of a divine life, and the “partaking of the divine nature?“ If we look to the scriptural account of its fruits (2 Peter 1:5-8; James 3:17, 18) it would seem also the productive power of the soul. Is it not a power received and accepted from on high, that makes the man a new creature? “In the redeemed, there is,” says Coleridge, “a regeneration, a birth, a spiritual seed impregnated and evolved, the germinal principle of a higher and enduring life, of a spiritual life; that is, a life the actuality of which is not dependent on the material body, or limited by the circumstances and processes indispensable to its organization and subsistence. Briefly, it is the differential of immortality, of which the assimilative power of faith and love is the integrant, and the life in Christ the integration.”
Respecting saving faith two questions here arise.
1st, Is it possible to those who have not heard the name of Christ? i.e. Are the heathen salvable?
2d, May those be saved, who, having heard the name of Christ, deny his special character as a Saviour?
To either of these questions we may reply, faith is more moral than intellectual. “With the heart man believeth unto righteousness.” Faith is trust, or confidence in God. Over against the conviction of sin and need, it is the hope that by some goodness and grace of God one may be pardoned. Hence it may be the less one knows of God’s methods of grace, the more implicit may be his faith, and the wider its range. As they who believe without having seen are more blessed than the doubting Thomas, so, among those who lived before Christ’s day, or whose lot has fallen without the bounds of Christendom, the’ e may be a faith, that “does justly, and loves mercy, and walks humbly before God,” that is more blessed because less instructed in the details of the divine plan. Its nature is illustrated by the case of the young man of whom account is given in the ninth chapter of John’s Gospel. In the fervour of his gratitude to the unknown benefactor who had opened his eyes, he suffers himself to be cast out of the synagogue for his confidence in him. The Christ whose name he knew not then meets him with the question: “Dost thou believe on the Son of God?“ he asks: “Who is he Lord, that I might believe on him?“ and when told that he stands before him, confesses and worships. Now here was no change of heart, produced by this conversation. It gave him nothing but information; his feelings were the same when it ended as when it began. It only gave a new direction and a freer course to a faith already existing. In the strict sense of the word, it informed a faith which it did not create.
So the heathen may have an unformed faith, which saves the soul, because it is in substance what God requires, and which will joyfully accept Christ when revealed, as the object after which it has yearned. It still remains true that the heathen stand in deplorable need of the Gospel, to encourage the heart with its glad tidings and to interpret for them the common goodness of God, which in their twilight, they now misconstrue and abuse.
In principle, the case of those who have heard the name of Christ, but who reject him in ignorance of his character, does not differ from that of the heathen. Under the names of “Gospel,” and “Saviour,” they may have heard such representations of the divine government and of the redemptive work that their apparent unbelief is the most generous and noble faith. Their rejection of Christ may be but nominal. They may be wailing for the true Christ because the Nazarene has been known to them only as a false Christ. It still remains true that the perversion of the Gospel is as dangerous for those who reject it, as it is criminal in those who heedlessly pervert it. Fancying that we are “evangelical,” we may so take away the Lord from the minds of men that they shall utterly fail to find him, and shall despair and perish. When we profess to hold the true Gospel, we should be not high-minded, .but fear; for we then in fact signally claim to be — what we ever must be — our brothers’ keepers; and we have no right to judge or condemn those who reject our gospel, until it has been preached not as a formal doc- trine, but as a true and beneficent Christian life.
9. LOVE.
Faith can not subsist without Love, which is the “fulfilling of the law,” and the “bond of perfectness.” Their inner relation to each other may be obscure. Perhaps they may be compared as the act, and the habit, of the redeemed soul; or as volition and emotion. Act is ever passing into habit, — as the musician learns to play without conscious attention or effort, with delightful facility, and as a second nature. This gives new consciousness of power; new courage and effort; new victory and joy. That which began with self-denial, ends in a higher life of self- indulgence. The bondage of sin has yielded to the power of self-command, and this to a higher subjection, — the self-will vanishing in its free allegiance to the divine will. The individual redemption is then complete; that which began with the want of power to do right, has ended in the lack of power to do wrong, and the contingency of sin, which pertains to our probation, is passed. This is the perfect law of liberty, in which we may continue, and be blessed in our doing. Inward delight in the law of God pervades all the powers of the soul. The fear and torment that pertained to a lingering power of sin, have been cast out by perfect love.
Virtue, we have granted, brings a reward of its own. And so does faith; but this is especially true of love. Love, for what- ever object, imparts happiness though it be a mere fondness or pity for an unworthy thing. The poet has truly said — “Love is the life of living things.”
For it is their joy. But it is the highest joy when it is elevated and conformed to the supreme law of the world, as “holy, just, and good;“ when it begins to embrace the world itself as redeemed for subjection to this law; when it apprehends the universe and eternity as the sphere of its infinitely varied application; and when it learns to rejoice in Him who is infinitely greater than the universe, to receive His smile, and to share His love and joy. As divine Love created the world, and rejoices in it all, even in a divine sorrow for that which turns away from God and dies, — so Christian love, in sympathy with the divine, encircles and appropriates all things. It transmutes all things, even those which seem adverse, into spiritual wealth; like the philosopher’s stone changing all it touches into gold. Love not only quickens the intellect, but sanctifies it as a spiritual sense, that “discerns all things.” The stores of learning, or the intellectual mastery of things, thus become an emblem of the Christian’s wealth, in a nearer and dearer possession. He is heir of all things, because he has the mind of Christ. Because he loves, the entire world, life and death, things present and things to come — all are his; as he is Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.
This, which is the divine blessedness, must be indeed the Highest Good of man. Whence Paul, alluding, perhaps, to inquiries with which the Ephesian Christians had been familiar, prays for them, “ that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in- Love, may be able to comprehend with all saints, what is Breadth, and Length, and Depth, and Height; even to know the Love of Christ, — which passes knowledge, — that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.”
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Hinton J. H.
Hippolytus
Hobart, J. H. (Bishop.)
Hobbes, Thos.
Hooker, R.
Hopkins, S.
Howe, John
Huet, P. Daniel
Huidekoper,
Huntington, J.
I
Ignatius
Ireneaus
Isidore of Pelusium
J
Jacobi, F. H.
Jacquelot, I.
Jambliclius,
Jarchi, S.
Jenyns, Soame
Jerome
Jews, opinions of
Jochanan ben Zaccai
Josephus, F.
Jurieu, P.
Justin Martyr
K
Kant, E.
Kenrick, J.
Kimchi, D.
King, Edward,
King, W. (Arch bishop.)
Kingsley, C.
Knapp, G. C.
L
Lacoudre, A. N.
Lactantins
Lapide, Cornelius a
Latiph, Ebn
Law, Edmund
Law, William.
Le Roux, P.
Leibnitz, G. W.
Less, Godfrey,
Lessinor, J, G. E.
Lewis, T.
Lightfoot
Livy
Locke, J.
Lombard, P.
Lord, D. N.
Lowman, M.
Lucas Brugensis
Luther, Martin
M
Maccovius, J.
Macknight, J.
Magee, William. (Arch bishop.)
Maimonides
Malebranche, Nicolas
Manes,
Marsh, J.
Matthai, C. F.
Maud, J.
Maurice, F. D.
Maximus, St.
McCosh, J.
Menasseh Ben Israel,
Miiblcr, A. J.
Milman, H
Milner, J.
Milton, J.
Minucius Felix
Mitford, W.
Montesquieu, C. de S.
More, Henry
Morrison, K.
Mosheim, J. L.
Moyle, W.
Muller, Julius
Munscher
Murdock, J.
N
Nachmanides
Neander, J. Augustus
Nemesius
Nevin, J. W.
Newton, T.
Nicholas of Methone
Nitzsch, C. L
Norton, A.
Novatian
O
Olshausen, H.
Origen
Owen, J.
P
Paley, W.
Pamphilus,
Pareus, D.
Park, E. A.
Parker, T.
Patrick, S.
Payne, George.
Pearson, J.
Pelagius,
Pellicanus,
Pherecydes
Philo
Plato
Pliny, the Elder
Plotinus
Plutarch
Pocock, E.
Polvcarp
Pomponatius
Poole, M.
Porphyry,
Post, T. M.
Proclus,
Prudentius
Pythagoras
Q
Quenstedt
R
Ramsay, A. M. (Chcy.)
Ridgely, T.
Ritter, H
Robinson, J.
Rogers, H
Romilly, S.
Rosenmuller, J. G.
Ross, F. A.
Ruperti, G. A.
Ruskin, J.
Rutherford, S.
S
Saadiah Gaon,
Saisset, E.
Sallust
Saurin, J.
Schaff, P.
Schlegel, F. von,
Schleicrmacher, F.
Schleusner, J. F.
Schoettgen, C.
Schubert, G. H.
Scott, J.
Scott, J. N.
Scotus, Duns
Secretan, C.
Selden, J.
Semisch, C.
Seneca
Sfondrate, (Card.)
Shaftesbury,
Simon ben Lakish,
Smith, J. Pye
Smith, T. S.
Socinus, F.
Socrates,
Sparks, J.
Spinoza, B.
Squier, M. P.
Standlin, K. F.
Starr, W.
Stephen, Sir J.
Stilling, H. Jung
Stobaius,
Stoics, the
Storrs, George.
Storrs, R. S.
Strabo
Strauss, D. F.
Strong, N.
Stuart, M.
Swedenborg, E.
Symmachus
Synesius
T
Tacitus
Tatian
Taylor, D. T.
Taylor, Isaac
Taylor, Jeremy
Taylor, John,
Tennemann
Tertullian
Thcognostus,
Theodore of Mopsuestia,
Theodoret, I
Theoiogia Germanica
Theophilus of Antioch
Theophylact,
Theory of the Moral System
Tholuck, A.
Thompson, R. A.
Tillotson, J.
Titus of Bostra,
Toulmin, J.
Trench, R. T.
Tulloch, J.
Turnbull, R.
Turretin, A.
Twisse, W.
Tyndale, W.
U
Ullmann, C.
V
Valla, Laurentius
Varro,
Vatablus, F.
Vestiges of the Creation
Villaume
Vinet, A.
W
Wake, W. (Arch bishop.)
Walker, J. B.
Walsh, J. T.
Walterus,
Warburton, W.
Watson, R.
Watts, I.
Weisse, C. H.
Werdermann, J. C. G.
Wetstein, J. J.
Whately, R.
Whitby, D.
White, E.
Wiggers, G. F.
Wilkinson, J. G.
Willard, S.
Williams, Rowland
Williams, S. W.
Witsius, H.
Wolf, J. C.
Woods, L.
Wright, W
X
Xenophon
Y
Young, J.
Z
Zend Avesta
Zoroaster