"When once this weighty question of the after-life has been opened, 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." Isaac Taylor.
Plain sermons on a topic of present interest
William R. Huntington, D.D.
Rector of All Saints Church, Worcester
New York
E. P. Dutton & Company
1878
PREFACE.
Charles Frederick Hudson's Debt and Grace, and Edward White's Life in Christ, are likely long to remain, what they are at present, the classical authorities on the subject of conditional immortality.
The mere fact that I am disposed to be a little less confident and positive than these writers in stating results, satisfied with likelihood where they seem to find certitude, or a very near approach to certitude, would not of itself justify me in attempting to add a word to what has already been by them admirably said. Agreeing with them, as I do, in their main drift, I ought, if this were all, to be well content to remain silent.
There are, however, those whose attention cannot be secured for elaborate treatises unless some measure of interest in the subject treated has been previously aroused by arguments briefly put and easily understood. I therefore venture to print these unambitious Sermons, originally prepared for parochial use, hoping that, slight and sketchy as they are, they may serve to win a hearing for voices better worth listening to than mine. It may be well to add that Sermons I., II., and IX., although germane to the general subject, are not essential to the integrity of the argument.
W. R. H.
SERMON PAGE
The Eternal Purpose
The Argument For Retribution,
Possible Forms Of Penalty
The Hypothesis Of Everlasting Torment
The Hypothesis Of Final Restoration
The Hypothesis Of Conditional Immortality
The Likeliest Belief
Christ's Law Of Survival
The Heaven For Man
Note
A. The bearing of St. Paul's polemical training as a Pharisee upon his use of the expression and kindred phrases.
B. Atomic and Molecular Analogies in the case of the Soul.
C. The Teaching of the Book of Common Prayer as to Life in Christ.
EPH. 3:2. The eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.
THE greatest men are the men of strongest and clearest purpose. When a thing is to be done, and done well, we instinctively choose for the doing it a man who knows what he is about, who has a clear vision of the end to be attained, and a quick way of determining the means by which to reach it. When we say of a life, that it is an aimless one, we are borrowing our figure of speech from the archer and his mark. How many ways there are in which an arrow or a bullet may miss the target! But the path of a perfectly successful shot is single: the slightest slant up or down, to the right or to the left, would have spoiled the aim.
Now, we know to our cost that in life as it is, this perfection of success is never reached. We may be able to point to this or that one among our acquaintances who, we say, has perfectly succeeded; but we may be sure that, if the power were granted us of entering into that person's consciousness, and knowing him as he knows himself, we should find that we were mistaken. We should discover a wide gap between the thing accomplished as we saw and judged it before we crossed the threshold of that other mind, and the purpose which, now that we have got within, we are able to see in all the grandeur of its true proportions.
Nevertheless, and in spite of this, it remains true that the great lives are, as I have said, the lives that have an evident aim, and the great men the men who are pushing forward with resolute, fixed purpose toward an object. The fact that the bolt always falls short, and that the purpose invariably fails, in no degree lessens the strength of this conviction of ours that aims and purposes are praiseworthy. The very emblems of the broken pillar and the snapped thread draw their dignity from the purpose they suggest, rather than from the failure they confess. The pillar was meant to bear up a roof, the thread was intended to be woven into some fabric of use or beauty; and it is of this purpose which might have been served, this end which might have been accomplished,—it is of this that we think, and are sad.
" The fame is quenched that I foresaw, The head hath missed an earthly wreath:
so sings the mourner; but the remembrance that the fame would have been achieved, had time allowed, and that the purpose would have been crowned at last, is the precious thought, after all. Yes, we do honor always and in every one greatness of purpose, and whether the measure of attainment happen to be less or more, we still reverence the intention; we say of the life, " It was well-planned, nobly conceived: a clear aim was in it, a brave design." Now, is it not a very strange thing that while all people, or almost all, are willing to go as far as this, so many should insist on stopping short just here, and refuse to credit Almighty God with that characteristic, the lack of which in our fellow-men we blame? How little we think and how little we say about the purposes of Him who made us! If anybody in whom we are interested, or for whom we feel responsible, is living a purposeless life, showing plainly, by what he does and leaves undone, that in his mind there lies no plan, not even an outline sketch of what he desires his life to be—why, then, we feel anxious; we wonder if something cannot be done to mend the matter; we say, " The boy is throwing himself away; what a sad waste it is!"
But all the while we are content to look about upon this marvelous world in which we live; to watch the wheels of Nature's processes as they turn round and round; to observe the changes that come over the face of society, the rise of new political powers, the fall of ancient institutions, the ebb and flow in the tide of human affairs, without ever giving ourselves the trouble to think whether a plan underlies the whole thing, whether an intelligent, distinct, slowly-fulfilling purpose runs through it all. How are we to account for this indifference? Why is it that, comparatively, so few take any interest at all in a question which it would seem ought to stimulate curiosity to the last point, and so compel attention?—for whatever makes us curious makes us attentive too.
Several reasons may be given for this sluggishness of the mind. In the first place, there are a great many people who do not like to be reminded of the existence of any other world than that in which they are buying and selling, travelling, building, intriguing, and gossiping.
Well aware that, if there be another plan than that plan upon which they themselves are endeavoring to get the most out of life, it is likely to be one in conflict with their own, they would rather not hear about it. Any purpose, especially that of a stronger being than themselves—any purpose likely to thwart their own purpose is something of which they do not care to be informed. Anything connected with the dark side of life, as it is called—any contact with suffering or death, they shun because it compels them, if they let it come too near, to open their eyes to a class of facts quite out of keeping with their chosen way of looking at things. No, they would much rather not hear anything at all about the purpose or the purposes of God. They may not be themselves the fools who say in their hearts, " There is no God; " but they are always ready to applaud any fool who will say it with his lips.
These are no new-comers on the earth. They have been here many, many years. As long ago as in Job's day they were known and recognized. He speaks of them as the men who say to God, "Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways. What is the Almighty that we should serve him? or what profit should we have if we pray unto him?"
Let us remember these as the people who are indifferent to the purpose of God.
There are others who may be better described as being perplexed about the purpose of God. They do not deny that there may be a God, and that He may have a purpose; but to their eyes the things that happen, here on earth have such a tangled look, that they despair of ever being able to trace any connected meaning in them.
They look at Nature, and it seems to them like a great loom which is forever weaving the same fabric, the pattern changing from moment to moment, but only to reappear again in the same form and the same order after a certain number of revolutions of the shaft.
They study the history of human affairs in the past, and there also they fail to find what is to them satisfactory evidence of the presence of a purposeful mind directing and controlling the general movement of events. They look about them in the present. They watch the currents of contemporary thought; they consider what is done upon the earth; they note the contest going on between the good and the evil, sometimes apparently to the advantage of the one, and sometimes to the advantage of the other: and here also they profess themselves baffled. " If there be a purpose, it eludes us," they say; " we cannot read it distinctly enough to be sure about it; therefore it is a waste of time and of patience to be forever searching after the plan of God. Let us take things as we find them, and, without looking too curiously into the reasons why they are as they are, live along as best we may and with as much contentment as we can command." Let us think of these as the people who are perplexed about the purposes of God. They would not be indifferent to them if they believed them to be discoverable; but they are convinced that there is no such thing as finding them out, and that, for them, is the end of it.
There is still another class, entirely distinct from either of the two I have described, who would rather not hear much said about the purpose of God, because the very phrase itself is associated in their minds with a doctrine which they consider equivalent to fatalism.
Fatalism is an opinion which few in Christian lands openly profess, but which very many secretly hold. Fatalism is the belief that things are as they are and happen as they do, because they could not be or happen otherwise. The fatalist says of his life that, from first to last, it is the result of causes which lay far back of itself, and for which he personally can in no wise be held responsible. For whatever he does that is right, he is entitled to no credit, and for whatever he does that is wrong, he is deserving of no blame, for the reason that these things were, all of them, settled ages before he was born, so that the good and the evil have alike been done under restraint, and from necessity.
Various fine names have been invented of late years for this way of looking at things; but the old - fashioned word " fatalism " cannot be improved. Many a life among us is sunless and full of gloom because shadowed by this dark belief. Many a man has been made desperately wicked by coming under the power of it. You remember the strong way in which one of the old Hebrew prophets upbraids some of his countrymen who were trying to palliate their iniquities by this plea of destiny—" Behold," he says, " ye trust in lying words that cannot profit. Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not, and come and stand before me in this house which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations?' " Those were the fatalists of that time. " We are delivered," they argued—" handed over by a power greater than our own to do these things, and help ourselves we cannot."
Now, there is no doubt that there have been periods when Christian teachers have come dangerously near to fatalism in their efforts to emphasize and enforce the truth that a divine purpose guides and governs the order of human affairs. There have been times in the history of New England when the truth about the purpose of God was set forth in such a distorted form, and the line between the elect and the' non-elect drawn with such particularity and arbitrariness, that men were not to blame for thinking and saying that fatalism had usurped the place of the Gospel, and that their preachers were giving them stones for bread; for stony, hard, and heavy it is—this doctrine of a compelling destiny, and the soul can draw no more nourishment from it than the body can from flint or granite. And so it has come to pass, that besides those who do not care to hear about the purposes of God, because they are indifferent to things spiritual altogether, and besides those who refuse to listen because they are perplexed, there are also those who are conscious of a certain timidity about the subject, because they know how easy it is to drop into fatalism and recklessness in their ways of thinking about God and duty, and they are apprehensive that for them to dwell much upon the purpose of God might result in their coming to believe that His purpose in their own case was not a purpose of love and salvation, but a purpose of rejection and doom.
To judge from the tone of current literature, this state of mind is very prevalent at the present time. Belief in the eternal purpose of God in Christ Jesus has been put into the background. Hatred for the stern dogma of the divine decrees as taught by the Puritans has thrown many minds into an attitude of antagonism toward the truth, of which that dogma was a distortion and a caricature. In loosing our grasp of a worthless husk we have let fall a precious fruit.
For among all the truths of religion there really is not one more uplifting and inspiriting than that which our text enshrines, " the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord."
For what does it mean? Why, it means briefly that this world and all things in it are being governed in accordance with the principles set forth by Jesus Christ. It means that we are moving, perhaps slowly, perhaps more quickly than we think, but, at any rate, surely, to a great and glorious triumph of the good and the right over the bad and the wrong. It means that God is not in-different, as sometimes it seems to us that He must be, to the guilt and suffering which make the burden of the world's life, but in due time will recompense and adjust. Is it no comfort, think you, to be assured of this at times when the heart is sick and the head faint at the thought of there being no God, no Heavenly Father, no one to care whether the righteous or the wicked prevail, no Arbiter, no Lawgiver, no Judge? It is a mistake to imagine that any taint of fatalism necessarily attaches to this belief in a purpose on God's part which events are certain to fulfil. A man of strong will says to himself, " I desire to compass a certain end; I mean to occupy a definite position already selected in my own mind, and, if I live, I shall do so, for I am determined to make everything bend to the carrying out of that one purpose." A resolve of this sort, it is true, not seldom fails of accomplishment; but sometimes, as we know, it does not fail—it succeeds. For the sake of illustration, take the case when such a resolve does succeed,—will anyone pretend that the will of the successful man has acted like a spell of destiny upon the chain of intervening events between the moment when the purpose was formed and the moment when it was crowned with success? Does anyone suppose that, had these intervening events been other than they were, the purpose could not have been accomplished? Certainly not. Everyone would acknowledge that just as the man's powerful will had compelled one set of circumstances to serve his purpose, so might it have compelled another, or another, or another set to have helped him on to the same end. Call to mind any famous historical character who has risen from obscurity to eminence by dint of resolute purpose,—is it not manifestly absurd to say of him that he never would have attained the height he did, had a single one of the circumstances that surrounded him been other than it was?
* At Mrs. Norton's house Lord Melbourne met Mr. Disraeli, now Lord Beaconsfield, then only a young and nameless adventurer, who had just been defeated as a candidate for the House of Commons. " The minister was attracted more and more, as he listened to the uncommonplace language and spirit of the young politician, and thought to himself that he would be well worth securing. Abruptly, but with a certain tone of kindness which took away any air of assumption, he said, Well, now, tell me what you want to be?' The quiet gravity of the reply fairly took him aback, ' I want to be prime minister.' "—Memoirs of the Right Hon. William, second Viscount Melbourne, by W. M. Torrens, M.P.
And yet this is the way in which many people allow themselves to think about the only perfect will there is, namely, the will of God. They say that the purposes of that will cannot be carried out unless all that comes between the forming of the purpose and the attainment of it is absolutely controlled by destiny. Why not? One may fairly ask, Why not? Are we to think of the Supreme Will as less able to compass its end in the face of all sorts of difficulties than a human will is? A man carries his point, and he carries it because he has set his heart on carrying it, no matter what happens; and it occurs to no one to suspect that he has succeeded because he possessed a power to decree that things should happen in just the way best suited to his purpose. Why, then, should we say of ourselves that if God has a purpose about the world, and knows what is to happen to it in the end, it must necessarily be that all we accomplish in the way of choice is done under the compulsion of a stronger will than our own, a will that cannot be resisted, a stern destiny, an iron doom?
No, we may believe in the existence of the purpose and in the certainty of its accomplishment, and at the same time honestly believe, too, that it is open to us to choose whether or not we personally shall have a share in the carrying out of the plan; whether we personally shall be among those who help forward or among those who try to push back the great work of God. If we are not under compulsion when we serve to further one of our neighbor's cherished plans—and we well know that we are not,—why need we suppose ourselves to be under compulsion when what we do is turned to account in the accomplishment of the eternal purpose of the Lord our Maker?
But what is this eternal purpose purposed in Christ Jesus? That is the question of deepest import the text suggests. What is the eternal purpose? The New Testament gives the answer in various forms, but everywhere it is in substance the same. The eternal purpose is the final establishment—whether here on this earth or elsewhere is not distinctly told us—the final establishment of a great commonwealth of souls, of which holiness shall be the law and perfect charity the atmosphere. This final result is called, sometimes the Kingdom of Heaven, sometimes the City of God, sometimes the New Jerusalem, sometimes the Church, sometimes the Bride — the Lamb's Wife; and the process by which the end is to be reached is also variously named: now it is " the perfecting of the saints; " again it is the " edifying or building-up of the body of Christ;" again it is the " bringing of many sons unto glory: " but, whatever the phraseology, whether as regards the end or the means, the Kingdom itself or the process of building up the Kingdom, one thing is always fixed, always the same, always distinctly and clearly put, so that there can be no mistaking it; and that is the absolute dependence of the whole upon the person of the Son of God. The divine purpose is not only declared to be and to have been an eternal one, but it is an eternal purpose purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord. A Christianity cut loose from Christ, made independent of his person, freed from his supremacy, may have much to say for itself; but this it must not, cannot say—that it is the religion which apostles preached and for which martyrs died. The teaching of the Gospel is that in Jesus Christ we have the key to human history. Leave him, and presently we find ourselves " in wandering mazes lost." The Christian solution of the problem leaves many things unexplained; but cast away the Christian solution, and we have, not many things, but all things, folded deep in doubt.
ISA. 3:10, 11.
Say ye to the righteous that it shall be well with him; for they shall eat the fruit of their doings.
Woe unto the wicked! It shall be ill with him; for the reward of his hands shall be given him.
THUS much with respect to the problem of human destiny all the prophets of God, ancient and modern, have felt themselves empowered to utter. Some of them have been moved to say very much more; none of them have been disposed to say very much less. Common to them all has been this broad basis of agreement—that with the righteous it shall be well, with the wicked it shall be ill. No doubt, the moment we set foot upon this common ground in a spirit of inquiry difficulties spring up to meet us like armed men. What, for instance, is the future into which the prophet is looking? Is it a limited or a limitless one? is it bounded by the horizon of this life? or does it stretch out far beyond the threescore years and ten? Who are the righteous? and by what tests may we distinguish them from the wicked, so as to know certainly upon whom the blessing is to fall, and upon whom the woe? And, further still, of what sort is the blessing and of what sort the woe? Is it, on the one hand, a blessing wholly unalloyed with grief? Is it, on the other, a woe not mitigated by any ray of pity from without?
These are not captious or unreasonable questions; they are natural, fair, and to the point. But does the fact that it is possible to ask them destroy the value of what I have called the common basis of agreement furnished by the text? Certainly not. From a clearing in a forest, the woodsmen who have lost their way strike out in all directions, each choosing his own path, and blazing it as he advances; but it is a great thing for all of the party that there is the clearing to turn back to, for only so can those who were mistaken meet and rejoin the one who happened to be right. In religious discussions, especially in such of them as cover regions of profound mystery, we ought to remember more constantly than we do that the interest of each is the interest of all, and the interest of all the interest of each; and instead of starting from our differences to see if we-cannot bring about a forced agreement, we ought to start from our agreements to see if we cannot harmonize our differences. The agreement in this case, the open spot from which Christian thinkers may best start in search of the truth about man's future, is the general declaration of the text, that with the righteous it shall be well in time to come, and with the unrighteous ill.
But before setting out upon any such investigation ourselves—and presently I shall propose that we do this very thing—let us look for a little while at the reasons why it has proved easy to secure so large a measure of agreement as has been, in point of fact, secured among men as to this single point of belief, that retribution is to come. In a word, why are so many ready to assent without dispute to the statement that in some way, and at some time, the way and time not being too accurately defined, all men will receive their just deserts, whether of good or evil? I do not believe that any single reason will suffice to explain this very general unanimity. It is a result that comes from various cause's working together, rather than from any isolated one. People have concluded that, on the whole, it is most likely so to be. But the foundation of the likelihood is complex. In part, no doubt, the persuasion has its source in what our senses tell us of the world without us and around us. Fire burns, water drowns, and cold freezes without the slightest partiality. Loosen the rock that holds it in its place, and down the avalanche comes upon the passing traveler, be he Cesar or peasant. And not only is Nature no respecter of persons, as concerns rank and dignity, but she appears to make no allowance for ignorance, to have no compassion for innocence, and to pay no regard to penitence. The unwitting offence of the inexperienced child is visited as relentlessly as the conscious transgression of the man who might have known better; and the same flame that shrivels pitilessly the outstretched hand of Cranmer at the stake carries genial warmth to the bad-hearted persecutor standing a little way removed. Such is "natural law," as we name it, an awful reality, which we blink out of sight at our peril. Such is the method that force uses in the realm of which our eyes and ears and finger-tips take cognizance.
When, now, we turn our thoughts away from these sequences of cause and effect in the outer world of earth and air and sea, and bend them inward, upon that world invisible which is the dwelling-place of the soul, when we do this, we find a state of things partly resembling and partly differing from what we discerned in external Nature. We find a law asserting itself through a voice which says, " Thou shalt," and " Thou shalt not; " but we by no means find penalty following upon transgression with the same promptitude and certainty. In Nature the headsman's axe falls with the precision of mechanism, but in this inner world of spirit it hangs trembling, and often seems never to drop at all. No doubt there is always a protest on the part of the law-giving voice every time its word "Thou shalt" is disobeyed. We call it the rebuke of conscience. But, strangely enough, the protest grows more and more inaudible, the more frequently it is disregarded, until, finally, in many instances, it dies away into silence, and the sin which has become a habit is followed by no perceptible pain. Now, is it to be wondered at that men, observing this marked contrast between the inevitableness of penalty in the world of Nature, and the seeming uncertainty of it in the world of spirit, should argue that since the same God reigns in both worlds, and is likely to be working on the same principles in both, the probability must be that, for reasons known to Himself, He is reserving at least a portion of the retribution due the law-breaker till a future day? This is one argument in favor of a judgment to come, a very simple and easy one. I do not say it proves the point; I only say it makes in favor of it. Take another argument, also drawn from what we observe of the workings of the Creative Mind in Nature. Everywhere in the universe, so far as we are able to study it, there seems to prevail a tendency or disposition to keep things evenly adjusted. The thought I have in mind finds expression in the common saying, that in the long run Nature may be depended upon to balance her books. The sun draws no more water from the sea than the lakes are able to receive and the rivers to carry back. Immense as is the pressure of the atmosphere upon every hair's-breadth of surface, we move about in it unconscious of discomfort be-cause our own powers of resistance have been exactly proportioned to the need. In hundreds and thousands of ways, many of which the curious mind of man is only just beginning to understand, this principle of equilibrium or balance asserts itself. Can it be that the principle has no application to the ordering of human life? its mysterious inequalities, its seemingly so ill-proportioned justice? This is the burden that has weighed on sensitive consciences and aching hearts since the world began, or, at least, since men began to think. " The tabernacles of robbers prosper," cries Job, dismayed at his own reversal of fortune, " and they that provoke God are secure; . . . their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them." He tries, as well as he can, to meet the difficulty by reminding himself of the many instances in which we do actually see wickedness repaid with penalty in this world, but he cannot help feeling, even after he has spoken of these temporal judgments, how little force there really is in an argument built upon exceptions, and he falls back upon the hard fact, that " one dies in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet, and another dies in the bitterness of his soul, and never eats with pleasure." And he adds, "They shall lie down alike in the dust."
Now, the only way out of this difficulty for anyone who believes that God is not only a strong Maker, but also a King of men holy and just, is to let the eye take in a larger sweep of time than the days of our age on earth can bound, and to conclude that, in the eternal years, compensations may be brought about, adding and subtraction made, which in the end will secure a balance as absolutely perfect as that which holds the stars to their courses. It was in this temper of reliance that the baffled but still trustful mind of Abraham cried out to God, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Perhaps, to him listening, there came down, in answer, the distant music of the song, " Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou king of saints." Here, then, we have a second argument from Nature in favor of some destined readjustment of man's lot in the age or the ages to come. The working of the principle of balance in the world we see suggests the working of the same principle in the world we cannot see. I do not say of the argument that it is conclusive; I only say that it helps toward a conclusion.
Again, men find as a matter of fact, and as a result of experience, that it is impossible for them to live together in society without some code of law, and that it is equally impossible to carry out the law without attaching to it some scheme of rewards and punishments. In the civil state, quite as really as in the kingdom of God, there is need of a voice to say to the righteous it shall be well with him, and to the wicked it shall be ill with him. No doubt, we can imagine a condition of things in which the simple publication of the law as the will of the rightful ruler would of itself suffice to secure absolute obedience and complete order. But we know perfectly well that, as a matter of historical fact, no such community, keeping law for law's own sake, ever existed. Commonwealths there have been and are in which law does its work and maintains its sanctity with less aid from the motives of hope and fear in the hearts of the citizens than is elsewhere found necessary; but, nowhere, it is safe to assert—nowhere does the nation, the province, the city, the town, the village or the family exist where the principle of retribution (and retribution, be it remembered, is a word that applies equally to reward and punishment) can be wholly dropped out of the scheme of government without damage to the interests of law.
Well, then, is it strange that the great bulk of men, seeing how potent a part of the enginery of control is furnished by the appeal to hope and fear, should hold it likely that the Maker of the human race means to employ these motives in ruling the race that He has made? And, further, is it strange that, seeing how partial and imperfect the distribution upon earth of these divine rewards and punishments appears to be, they should fall back on the belief that, to a great extent, the final distribution of them is reserved for scenes other than those in which we are moving now? Thus we arrive at a third reason for believing in the retributions of a life to come. Man's own poor attempts at governing himself and his fellow-creatures show him the necessity of enlisting hope and fear as aids to the efficient administration of the law. I do not call the argument demonstrative; I call it highly suggestive.
But we must not leave the question here. There is more to be said. Thus far we have been dealing only with considerations of the kind technically called analogical. We have been comparing one thing with another, natural law with spiritual, human governance with divine, and reasoning from like to like. Listen, now, for a few moments to an argument of a wholly different sort.
From time to time, in the history of the past, there have appeared on earth, and notably within a definite region and among the people of a particular race, certain men of marked spiritual stature who have claimed for themselves the title of prophet or messenger of God. First and last, there have been many of these preachers of righteousness, these spokesmen of Jehovah, but some of them so conspicuously overtopped the rest, gained such mastery over the thought of their times, that their names have come down to us as the names of "the prophets,", and they stand before us the representatives of the great fellowship of which they formed a part. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, who walked with God, was one of these; Noah was another; Moses, lawgiver indeed, but prophet also, another; Samuel and David, Elijah and Elisha, Isaiah and Ezekiel,—I need not recount them: their names and their words have been familiar to us from childhood. What I would have you remember about them, is the fact that as a company of preachers they bore consistent testimony to a purpose on God's part to bring the world to judgment. Through the dimness of the time in which they moved, with the smoke of idolatrous altars clouding their sky, and the noise of tumult roughly breaking in upon the stillness of the soul, they patiently, believingly, serenely looked forward, and pointed their fellows forward, to a day when He who had made the world would judge the world. Not as a matter of conjecture, not by arguments from analogy, such as I have thus far been using, but (so they alleged), with authority and by commission from the Most High, they stoutly taught these two companion truths: the Lord is righteous, and He shall come to be our Judge.
At last we find ourselves in the presence of Him to whom all the prophets lead up, Him who is King and Priest and Prophet all in one; and what has He to tell us? simply this—that to Him all judgment has been committed, that in Him we see the Judge. He scruples not to picture Himself to us as seated on the clouds of heaven; armies of angels make the background of the scene, and before Him is assembled the whole vast family of man. Take out of this majestic vision as much as you choose under the name of figure and imagery and similitude, hush the sound of the archangel's trump, and lengthen, if you will, the day of judgment till it cover a thousand years or twenty thousand, there yet remains to be explained away, if explain it away you can, the momentous prediction from the lips of that preacher who has secured more listeners than any who ever spoke before or since; there yet remains, I say, the momentous prediction of a time when God shall judge the world in righteousness by that man whom He hath ordained.
I have been laboring to build up, as you see, a cumulative argument in defense of the doctrine of retribution. Observe the successive stages by which we have advanced: first, we noted the presence of suffering in Nature as the penalty of broken law; next, we studied the principle of balance as it manifests itself in the same sphere; then, turning from Nature to human society, we marked the absolute necessity of some system of rewards and punishment in connection with the administration of law; from society we passed to history, and listened to the voices of the prophets; thus, starting from Nature's symbols, we have worked our way on and up to the spoken word of Him whom Christians recognize as Nature's Lord and only true interpreter.
No doubt, at every step of the process there has been room for cavil and plausible objection; but the question is whether, taking all these considerations that I have urged together and in the mass, they do not carry great weight of persuasion, a momentum of probability quite sufficient to justify the strong language of the text: " Say ye to the righteous it shall be well with him; woe to the wicked, it shall be ill with him." And yet all that has been thus far said only brings us to the threshold of the subject in hand. We have been looking into foundations, or, to speak more accurately, we have been surveying the ground upon which it is proposed to lay a foundation.
The question of the nature and the extent of the retributions which we have seen it to be a not irrational thing to anticipate yet remains untouched. With this question, in its various phases, I purpose, God willing, to attempt to deal in my Sunday-morning sermons during Lent.
How weighty the responsibility incurred in making the effort I think I fully understand and keenly appreciate. In the presence of a problem so awful one might well covet the privilege of silence. But, as even the cynic among the prophets admits, there is a time to speak as well as a time to keep silence. And it does seem that when the mind of the community is very generally agitated upon a question of deep spiritual import, the duty of the honest minister of Christ is to do the best he can, poor as that best may be, to lead those who care to trust his guidance to right and just conclusions. To no one can it be matter of small concern what his belief shall be with reference to the destiny of those who sleep. If Nature has anything to tell, if reason has anything to tell, if Scripture has anything to tell, we want to know what it is. It is little to the credit of any man's intelligence, let alone his conscience and his heart, to boast that he does not care.
I do not forget, indeed I have already reminded you, that retribution has its bright as well as its dark side. There is a retribution of good as well as a retribution of evil, though it must be confessed that it is highly characteristic of our disposition to think the worst things of God rather than the best, of our tendency to dread instead of trusting Him, that we have let the gloomy aspect of the word so cloud and cover the cheerful phase of it, that the very mention of " retribution" carries terror with it. The Son of Man came not to destroy men's lives, but to save them, and the retribution to those on His right hand is at least as worthy of our thankful recognition as the retribution to those on His left hand is worthy of our fear.
It is not at all out of forgetfulness of this larger way of looking at the whole subject that I ask you to approach the problem from the side of loss and punishment, rather than from the side of blessedness and reward; but partly because the present awakening of inquiry has more to do with the character of the penalty than with the character of the reward; partly because, in the movement of the Christian year, Easter may, more properly than Lent, bring in thoughts about Heaven and the things of Heaven; and partly because in Nature's order it is usual for the darkness to come before the light, even as " the evening and the morning were the first day."
1 PETER 4: 17.
What shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?
ALTHOUGH his question admits of no fewer than six different answers, the apostle is content with asking it. He puts on record no reply—certainly no prompt and plain reply. He leaves us to infer from his tone that the doom of the ungodly and the sinner is a fearful one, but precisely wherein the fearfulness consists he fails to state; just what the end shall be of them that obey not the gospel of God he does not say.
It is on account of this very circumstance that I have taken the words as a text for this morning's sermon. Verses of Holy Scripture abound, any one of which, looked at by itself, might be understood as settling forever and beyond controversy the question which this verse raises, but does not settle. Why should we pass by these apparently decisive sayings of the Bible, and take up with such an evidently indecisive one instead? Why preach from a text that opens the whole question, when a text might have been found that would have sufficed, not only to open the question, but to close it?
The answer is obvious. We must do one thing at a time. Opening the question is quite enough for the present; it will be well to think about closing it after we have carefully considered the subject in its length and breadth, or, at any rate, so far considered it as the limitations of pulpit-teaching will allow. If those other and apparently decisive verses to which I have referred were all of them decisive in the same direction, then, indeed, it would have been well to have chosen a text from among them; but it so happens that while some of them seem to decide the matter in one way, others of them seem, with equal positiveness, to decide it in a wholly different way. A hasty inference from this fact is that any attempt to find the truth must necessarily be hopeless, but the wise, and prudent, and right inference is simply this, that we are bound to settle our belief upon the point at issue, not by any one isolated verse, or by any two or three such verses, but by a careful and impartial survey of the whole field. To such a survey the text invites us to address ourselves; we could not have a better one.
"What shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?"
When I said that this question admitted of no fewer than six different answers, I did not mean that all the possible answers were such as Christian believers might give, and remain Christian believers after giving them, for such a statement would not be true; but I meant that looking at the matter in a purely speculative way, as one might look at a problem in philosophy, six answers were conceivable. These answers group themselves under three heads corresponding to three forms of belief about the nature of the soul, which are, first,
(1.) that the soul is mortal and perishes with the body, never to be revived again; secondly,
(2.) that the soul is necessarily immortal, and cannot die, but must under any circumstances continue to exist forever; and, thirdly,
(3.) that the soul, though subject to death in consequence of sin, may by the grace and gift of God become immortal and live forever.
More briefly, we may characterize these forms of belief as pointing respectively to the mortality, the necessary immortality, and the conditional immortality of the soul. Now, it is evident that every one of the possible answers to the question of our text, " What shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?" must come under one or other of these beliefs about the nature of the soul. To the man who holds that the soul is mortal and perishes when the body does, of course only a single answer is possible. One event, he replies, happened to all, and the end of those who obey not the Gospel is the same as the end of those who do obey it. Good and bad, they lie down in the grave and perish with the same destruction. In the spirit of this belief; or perhaps pretended belief, the French wrote over the gateways of their graveyards during the first Revolution, " Death is an eternal sleep."
Under the second of the forms of belief mentioned, namely, that of the necessary immortality of all souls, whatever their attitude toward God, there is room for four answers to the question of the text. It may be said of the souls of the wicked, that when liberated from the bondage of the body and its lusts they are lifted at once into purity and blessedness. A belief of this sort has sometimes been built upon a misconception of St. Paul's words, " He that is dead is freed from sin."
Or, secondly, it may be believed that the souls of the wicked at death enter upon a period of discipline and purgation more or less prolonged, at the end of which time they are restored to God's favor, and enjoy, for ever after, a life of blessedness and peace. This is the opinion popularly known as Restorationism.
Or, thirdly, it may be believed that in the future life, and throughout eternity, there will be the same mingled experience for souls which we witness and share here and now—spiritual growth and spiritual decline, moral advance and moral retreat, blessedness and misery, victory and failure, running on to all eternity in an order of succession such as none but God can foresee.
Or, fourthly, it may be believed that the souls of the lost are tormented with a punishment which never ceases, that they live on for ever and ever, the victims of an anguish to which nothing puts or can put an end. Belief in the necessary immortality of the soul makes supposable, then, any one of these four different destinies for the wicked: immediate and entire release, temporary punishment to be followed by final restoration to favor, a continual alternation of happiness and wretchedness, according to the life that is lived, and a never-ending suffering.
To those, again, who hold the last of the three opinions with regard the nature of the soul, name-ly, that the soul is not necessarily, but only conditionally immortal, two forms of belief are open, first: that only such as are " accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection of the dead," will survive the grave at all, all other souls perishing with the bodies that have clothed them here (a view which, so far as the destiny of the wicked is concerned, is identical with that which denies any future life at all, and therefore need not be counted as a separate answer to the question of our text), or, secondly, that although all will survive the grave, and be judged for the deeds done in the body, only a portion of those so surviving will inherit an endless life, the rest, through failure to obtain that life, lapsing finally into literal, complete, and lasting death—non-existence.
We see, then, that there are thus six possible answers to the question, What shall the end be of them that obey not the Gospel of God? Be patient, for a moment, while I recapitulate them: first,
(1.) Extinction of being at the moment of death;
(2.) Immediate admission to a state of pardon and blessedness at the moment of death;
(3.) Restoration after a season of punishment;
(4.) Alternation of happiness and unhappiness, according to conduct, as we have it here in this present world;
(5.) Never-ceasing torment;
(6.) Final extinction after a period of punishment that shall have been accurately apportioned to the sinner's deserts.
Of these six possible answers, two may be ruled out at once, as never having received enough re-cognition from serious-minded Christian thinkers to make it worth while to consider them. No reputable following has ever been secured among Christian believers, either for the opinion that the souls of the wicked perish with their bodies, or for the opinion that all souls are admitted to immediate blessedness at the moment of death.
There remain the four, two of which have so much in common that we may class them together under the descriptive phrase, " a fresh chance for the soul in the future life," while the other two, though agreeing in the point that human probation, or a man's opportunity, ends with this life, are yet wide apart as to the character of the penalty; the one making it a never-ending death in life, while the other sees it to be the final loss of all life whatsoever.
Practically, then, we have reduced our possible conclusions from six to three, and the doctrines we shall have to consider in the course of our inquiry will be these: The doctrine of never-ending torment; the doctrine of restoration; and the doctrine of conditional immortality.
The method of treatment which I have to suggest differs somewhat from that usually followed in such cases. What I would propose is, that instead of choosing out one of the three positions, and trying to see how much can be done to dis-credit the other two, we make it our endeavor to ascertain what are the strongest arguments in favor of each, before pronouncing for any. No doctrine of religion that has at any time commanded the allegiance of large numbers of devout and studious minds can possibly be unworthy of our thoughtful attention. There must be some grain of truth, even though it be but a grain, in any form of belief which has made out to secure a foothold in the Church of Christ. It is simply matter of record that illustrious names of men, accounted defenders of the faith, stand associated with each of these three opinions as to the destiny of "them that obey not the Gospel of God." I do not say that these names are equally distributed into three portions. I do not assert that as many authorities can be cited as witnesses in favor of one opinion as can be marshalled in support of another. I merely affirm that each has had its defenders, its learned defenders, its devout defenders, and that for this reason, if for no other, each would be de-serving of our patient, fair, and attentive study.
Even supposing that our minds are made up in advance, and are not likely to be changed, it can at least do us no harm to consider what there may be to be said in favor of conclusions different from our own. It only strengthens our confidence in the rightness of our own judgments, if, after listening with open mind to all that can be urged on the other side, we find ourselves still rooted and grounded in the conviction with which we set out.
Moreover, it very often happens that in examining with fairness an opinion which we are predisposed to reject, we find that although we must continue to reject it as a whole, there are yet features of it which we can with advantage engraft upon our old belief. A visit to your neighbor's house, and careful observation of its plan and furnishing, may not lead you to wish to exchange your home for his; but it is very likely that after your return, the recollection of what you have seen will bring about some slight modification of things as they were; there will be a little alteration here, or a trifling adjustment there, even though there be no general overturning or rebuilding. Domestic and doctrinal architecture have much in common, and in building a house of beliefs for the soul to dwell in, we shall do well to study the good features of more than one plan. So that our foundation be that other than which no man can lay, even Jesus Christ, we may safely trust Him who built all things to correct, sooner or later, in His own way, our errors of construction.
But before entering upon this impartial, or, as nearly as possible impartial, setting forth of what-ever most makes in favor of each of the three leading doctrines of retribution, there would seem to be no reason why I should not outline in advance the conclusion to which it will be my endeavor to lead you. I have no desire, under cover of stating all views fairly, to conceal my own belief, or to gain a cheap reputation for impartiality by waiving the main point. St. Paul lays down the right way for ministers of the Gospel of Christ when he says, " by manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. " The conclusion, then, to which I anticipate that our inquiry will lead us is this, namely, that the precise character of the penalty in another life of unforgiven sin committed here it has not pleased God to reveal, although enough is told us to make it clear that retribution for guilt, whether in point of duration it be limited or unlimited, is a thing terribly real, and a thing more to be dreaded than anything that happens to us in the earthly life. If this conclusion be sound, why then it must follow further that individual Christians should be left at liberty to form judgments, each for himself and according to the best light he can command, as to the comparative likelihood of one opinion being the true one rather than another.
But here, also, that is to say, in this matter of comparative likelihood, Christian people have, as it seems to me, a right to know their minister's mind, -have a right to such guidance as he may have it in his power to give, be it better or worse.
I shall, therefore, not hesitate, in setting forth the three prominent doctrines that have been named, to arrange them in the order of what appears to me their comparative probability, treating first that which we will call the least likely; then the less likely, and, last, the likely one of the three. I do not think that this method need at all interfere with an honest endeavor to state the argument in behalf of each as strongly as it can be stated, both on grounds of reason and of Scripture. That all this must be done under what have already been referred to as the necessary limitations of pulpit-teaching, is not really so great a misfortune as might be imagined. We shall be keeping strictly within these limitations so long as we cling to plain English speech such as all men use, and hold the discussion anchored to that one book which all Christians know, or ought to know. I say we have no need to chafe under these limitations, for it can scarcely be that God permits peace of mind in connection with such questions to be attainable only through a knowledge of the niceties of theological discussion, and an acquaintance with the unfrequented by-paths of historical research. If there be any point upon which a man feels that he cannot settle his mind until he knows all that the most advanced students in the various departments of critical inquiry have to tell, let him be sure that that particular point is one about which he can continue in doubt with entire safety to his soul. This is a matter in which the ministry might advantageously learn something from the bar. No lawyer dreams of arguing a case before a jury in the same way in which he expects to argue it, if it shall happen to be carried up by appeal to the supreme bench. The style of the language, and the character of the reasoning, will, both of them, be different. And yet, the arguments used before the jury may be, in their way, as good and as conclusive as those used before the bench. At least, if the case be one which the advocate would not dare to defend in the face of the judges, he ought not be willing to undertake the defense of it before the jurymen.
And just so is it in questions of religion upon which an almost infinite amount of scholarship has spent itself. The refinements of the divinity school are out of place in the parish church; and the attempts so often made to naturalize them there would be ludicrous, but for their harmfulness. The preacher, like the advocate, ought to be ashamed to argue plausibly for a point which he would not venture to maintain before the tribunal of scholarship; but to make his case with the congregation hinge upon points which only the tribunal of scholarship can possibly decide is a thing manifestly absurd. The parallel involves no disrespect either to congregations, on the one hand, or to scholars on the other. It is simply a calling of things by their right names. A pulpit is one thing, a professor's chair is another, and the essayist's desk is still a third.
What is the message of God to man, and how may man be persuaded to attend to it, and obey it? That is what concerns the Christian pulpit, and the only excuse which I, standing in a pulpit, can plead for treating such a subject as this even in such a simple way as that in which I have undertaken to treat it, is the fact that mental distress and perplexity with reference to the doctrine of future punishment are to-day keeping many souls from listening to the message brought by the Son from the Father to the children.
Not merely to indulge a taste for speculative discussion, not to amuse or to divert minds that are well content to hear about religion, so long as the claims of religion are not driven home upon the conscience—not for any such purpose at all, but in order to lift the cloud, if possible, from before eyes that ache with long searching for the truth, and through tangled thickets of prejudice to clear the way of the Lord to the door of the heart, I have invited you to enter with me upon this enquiry.
Accordingly, you will not be appealed to to decide between the rival claims of the School of Alexandria and the School of Antioch, nor shall we find it necessary to determine how far the eschatology of the Hebrew Church exhibited the results of Zoroastrian influence after the return from the Captivity. All topics of this sort will quietly be left untouched.
Nature, that every-day Nature from which Jesus of Nazareth was content to draw his parables; Scripture, that only Scripture in which we find assurance of eternal life; and reason, that kingly gift, with which God endowed us that we might the better interpret both Nature and Scripture—these shall furnish us with the materials of thought.
May the spirit of truth so guide us in our use of each one of the three that we may be led into all the truth God thinks it best that we should know!
1 PETER 1:17.
What shall the end be of them that obey not the Gospel of God?
MATT. 25:46.
These shall go away into everlasting punishment.
WE found, last Sunday, that while the question started by the former of these two texts might admit of at least six different answers, there were really only three with which as Christian believers we had need seriously to concern ourselves, namely, these: the answer which says of the wicked, They shall be everlastingly tormented; the answer which says They shall finally, after due discipline, be brought back to God; and the answer which says, Because of their choosing death and rejecting life, they shall perish—cease to be.
Without assuming, with regard to the merits of these various answers, an impartiality and indifference to which it would have been an hypocrisy to lay claim, I yet did not hesitate to promise that I would endeavor to state the argument for each of the three opinions at its best before subjecting it to criticism, either friendly or unfriendly, premising this much, however, that since some order of treatment must of necessity be observed, I should follow what seemed to me to be the order of comparative likelihood, beginning with the least likely, passing on to the less likely, and ending with the likely one of the three. This morning, therefore, I invite you, first of all, to consider what may be said in behalf of the belief that those who obey not the Gospel of God are to suffer pain everlastingly. Afterward, we will look at the reasons for accounting this to be, on the whole, the least likely of the several doctrines we have undertaken to weigh.
The belief that any portion of the human race is destined to live on forever in ceaseless suffering rests upon the antecedent belief that man is immortal; that we have within us a certain conscious something called the soul, or, more accurately, the spirit, which cannot, or, at any rate, will not perish. This body that we wear may decay and cease to be, but the vital spark which animates it, " the soul that rises with us, our life-star," is quenchless. In some state of conscious being, blessed or unblessed, happy or miserable, we are to continue to exist, all of us, " while endless ages run." Such is the only supposition upon the basis of which any strong argument in behalf of everlasting torment can possibly be built up.
That it is a supposition, and not a self-evident truth, all must admit; and, therefore, it follows that in any complete discussion of the question before us, this point that the soul is destined, in some condition or other, to endure forever, would have to be established before any further progress could be made. For our present purpose, however, it will suffice if we concede the point, seeing that only so will it be possible to do what we have undertaken to do, namely, to set forth the argument for the ceaseless suffering of the wicked at its best and strongest.
The proper time to argue upon its merits the question of the perishable or imperishable nature of the soul will be when we take up the doctrine of conditional immortality, later on.
Taking for granted, then, for the present, the alleged fact that the soul is certainly to exist for all eternity, let us draw the first reason for believing the doom of the wicked to be irreversible from the field of Nature. We find at work in Nature a principle of persistency. In plainer words, things have a disposition to move on in the groove to which they have become fitted. In mechanical philosophy, the first law of motion declares that anybody moving in a straight line will continue to move in the same direction unless turned from its track by some other and stronger force than that which started it. The cannon-ball, to be sure, no matter how heavy the charge that first propelled it from the gun, falls to the ground at last; but why? Only because two opposing powers—the resistance of the air, and the attraction of the earth—have overmastered the original impulse. But for this interference on the part of other forces, the ball, so this law of motion requires us to believe, would have gone on indefinitely in the same direction in which it issued from the cannon's mouth.
Transfer this principle from the material to the spiritual sphere, and what have we?—souls moving on, after all interference from without has ceased, moving on in the same course to which they find themselves thoroughly committed.
There is much in what we see in every-day life to justify a parable of this sort. Take the workings of that mysterious influence we call habit. If you fold a piece of paper in the same way for a great many times in succession, and then throw it carelessly down, it will not take some new shape, but will easily and naturally curl itself up according to the creases you have been making in it. It is apparently thus with the soul. Thoroughly wonted to any path or use, it will not quit that path or use unless it yield to some attraction, or obey some sudden wrench from a power acting upon it from the outside.
Now, all that is necessary is to imagine an immortal soul, which has, by its own choice, become completely habituated to evil, launched upon a state of existence where no counter-attraction exists, and you have, as a necessary consequence, everlasting torment; for evil carries torment in its own bosom, and the bad soul that can neither turn nor perish must be endlessly unhappy. It has been said that if man carries his free-will with him into another state of existence, it must be that he can at any time, if he chooses to do so, turn, and be reconciled to God. But what if it should prove that there is such a thing as a perpetually enslaved will--a will which under the dominion of sin has lost its character of freedom and spontaneity, and become like a machine, which goes on repeating the same motions, and can originate no others? A man's organs of speech are flexible and can utter words as they may happen to suggest themselves at the moment, but the bit of indented foil in a phonograph gives out the very same vibrations upon the one-thousandth turn of the cylinder that came from it at the first. Does the will of the habitual drunkard stand in the same attitude toward the appetite of thirst as that in which the will of the temperate man stands? Is it, in any just sense of the words, a " free will "? No; and those are words of fearful import in which Paul asks the Romans, " Know ye not that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey? " echoing as they do the plain declaration of our Lord, " Whosoever committed sin is the slave of sin."
Now, we know that in this life that we are living here, the case of the man who has been overcome by the power of evil and brought into bondage to it is never wholly hopeless. But why? Because there is here continually going on, under the banner of God's good tidings, under the leadership of one named the Savior, a war of emancipation. Efforts are making to rescue slaves, to strike off their fetters, to set them on their feet as free men. But suppose all this healing, and helping, and restoring power withdrawn, and withdrawn forever, what is to hinder the coming into play of that law of persistency which will keep the lost soul moving perpetually upon that line which in the day of its freedom it deliberately chose; and which now, in the day of its thralldom, it is powerless to forsake? To the conditions of our life present the sanguine words of Job apply: "There is hope of a tree if it be cut down that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease; " but what if it should turn out that, in the world to come, the sad presage of Ecclesiastes is the one that rules, " if the tree fall toward the south or toward the north, in the place where the tree falls there it shall be? " This is one argument in support of the belief that a lost soul will suffer everlastingly. It is an argument drawn from the nature of things, and some may say that being this, and only this, it can carry no great weight. That depends, of course, upon the degree of esteem in which one holds Nature as an interpreter of spiritual truth and a prophet of destiny.
For myself I confess that if we are to concede an endless existence to all souls, this argument from persistency seems to me a cogent one. But let us turn from the book of hieroglyphics to the book of words, from the dumb symbol to the articulated message, from Nature to Scripture. What says the Lord Jesus Christ? and what say prophets before him and apostles after him? To quote all the testimony of these witnesses is manifestly beyond our power. Happily, there is no need of attempting to do so. The answer which our second text gives to the question of our first is confessedly the strongest that the Bible, as interpreted by the maintainers of this doctrine, affords. " What shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?" asks the disciple. " These," replies the Master (and we have a perfect right to link the two utterances together, far apart as they actually stand in the New Testament), " these shall go away into everlasting punishment." The argument hinges, of course, upon the meaning of the Greek word here render-ed in our English Version " everlasting," and in the very next clause " eternal ": " These shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal." Mindful of the promise made last Sunday to avoid anything that might entangle us in the meshes of scholastic controversy, I shall not invite you either to trace the history of the adjective (aionios), or to sit in judgment upon its precise position in the family of words. The statement of two or three unquestioned facts in connection with the word will suffice for our purpose. One of these facts is that in turning the New Testament into English, the translators rendered this word in some twenty-five instances " everlasting," and in some forty-two instances " eternal."
Another fact is, that some scholars deny that either of these English words rightly gives us the meaning of the original, a portion of those who so deny alleging that the Greek ought to be rendered by some such expression as " age-long," as when we speak of the age-long periods of geology and astronomy; and others of them preferring the interpretation followed by the translators of the Nicene Creed, where this word, as a reference to the Prayer Book will show, stands English thus, " of the world to come." You recall the sentence, " I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." Thus, if the word " aonian," for which some modern writers have sought to secure a foothold in our language, were to become naturalized among us, we should receive the words of Christ sitting in judgment as follows: " These shall go away into Ionian punishment, but the righteous into aonian life "—which might mean, according as we followed the one or the other of the interpretations I have mentioned, "These shall go away into an age-long punishment," or, " These shall go away into the punishment of the world to come," be that what it may be, many stripes or few.
But to all reasoning of this sort, my friends, the believer in the everlasting wretchedness of the wicked has it in his power to reply, and to reply forcibly, as I think, Our finite minds at best can-not take in or appreciate the idea of endless duration. Our only conception of eternity is that of a very, very long time, whether in connection with reward or punishment. Be, then, the right translation of (aionios) this or that, the fact remains that the sacred writers thought fit to apply this epithet to the Almighty Himself: they speak of the Aeonian God. Endless it doubtless must mean when spoken of His being, and endless, therefore, it may mean as applied to the doom of the wicked and the life of the good.
Another argument worth taking into account is that which rests itself upon the tremendous imagery employed by Jesus Christ in picturing the destiny of the disobedient--the fire that never can be quenched, the worm that dies not.
How, it may be fairly asked, could He to whom the consenting voice of all the centuries has accorded the title of the Merciful Savior, how could He have used such symbolism, knowing as He must have known, the interpretation that might be put upon it; how could He have employed such figures of speech, had He not intended that they should be understood, as for the most part they have been understood, namely, as predictive of an everlasting sorrow? Again, how does it happen, not only that the public opinion of the Church has in the main inclined this way, but that so many individual Christians, eminent for piety and learning, men of the tenderest sensibilities and the keenest perceptions of right and wrong, have been, all these years, able to see this doctrine in the Bible, and yet able also to retain their confidence in that book as the Word of a just and compassionate God? Why, even the sensitive and gentle Keble could write about a text which does not one half so readily as do many others lend itself to the sterner view:
"Salted with fire, they seem to show How spirits lost in endless woe May un-decaying live."
These, then, I would submit as the strongest arguments known to me in favor of the opinion that the suffering to be visited upon men in punishment for their sins will be perpetual. We may call them, respectively, the argument from Nature, the argument from Scripture, and the argument from History. That other arguments than these are sometimes brought forward, I am, of course, well aware. I have not developed them, simply because I thought that they would weaken rather than strengthen the case. There is, for instance, the argument that in many instances critics of high scholarship, who do not accept the Bible as the revealed Word of God, and who because they read it as they would read any other book, may be supposed to be the most impartial judges of what its words really do convey, affirm that everlasting torment is as a matter of fact the doctrine of Scripture.
But this reasoning loses much more than half its force when it is remembered that of these critics a portion consists of unbelievers, who became such because they thought the Gospel hopelessly committed to the obnoxious doctrine, while another portion is made up of men so bitterly hostile to Christ and his Church that an impartial judgment with respect to anything Christian is the very last thing to be expected from them.
Another feeble argument is that which with a parade of metaphysical acuteness asserts that sin, being an offence against an Infinite Being, merits of necessity an infinite punishment, as plain a begging of the question as possibly could be, and easily met by the counter-assertion that because the powers of endurance of a finite being are finite, he cannot conceivably support an infinite punishment. When torture reaches a certain point humanity succumbs; the limit of tension is past. No; this playing with the word " infinite " is easy, but it is dangerous sport for reasoners who care anything for the stability of their reasoning.
But dropping out of mind these feeble and inconclusive reasons, and remembering only the forceful ones, we have now to face the plain question, Are these things so? Do these arguments really prove what they seem to prove? To some the case may now appear so plain that they can scarcely believe me to have been in earnest when I named this doctrine of the endlessness of the sufferings of the lost the least likely of the three possible beliefs. And yet in that opinion I remain, and that opinion I am prepared to defend.
It is easier to pull down houses than to build them, and therefore fewer words will be needed to show the unsoundness of the arguments that have been exhibited than were essential to the fair statement of them. Besides, some of the reasons for not accepting these arguments as conclusive will naturally find a place in our study of the other possible beliefs. For the present, let a rapid criticism suffice.
The first argument brought forward—that from persistency of habit—collapses the moment you withdraw from under it the supposition that the soul of man is necessarily immortal, incapable of extinction. There is, indeed, no reason to believe that an enslaved soul could to all eternity throw off unaided a habit that had once gained control.
But suppose the enslaved soul finally perishes; what then? The arrow of Acestes fired into the air was burned up in the very rapidity of its flight. So long as it was an arrow, so long as it continued to exist, it was subject to and obeyed the first law of motion, but after it had been consumed there was nothing left that could move. So much for the argument from Nature.
Equally short-lived is the argument from Scripture after this foundation error of supposing that the Bible teaches the inevitable immortality of all souls has been once exploded.
"These shall go away into everlasting punishment." Understand that to be, as it is, an ever-lasting punishment which forever cuts the soul off from happiness by cutting it off from life, and you will have no need to pare down the meaning of (aionios). Take the epithet in its strongest sense, and it is not at all too strong to express the truth. The full consideration of these points will, as I just said, more properly come in at a later stage of our enquiry. I simply indicate them now as a suggestion of the sort of ground upon which one who holds everlasting torment to be the least likely of the three possible conjectures may securely stand.
The argument drawn from the improbability of Christ's having used language so liable to be misunderstood, in case He really had not intended to teach an endless woe, is entitled to more serious attention. Taken along with the Church's general acceptance of the doctrine, and the acquiescence of holy and devout and tender-hearted men in the same belief, it is indeed a powerful plea.
And yet, unless we are prepared to accept as true the dogma of transubstantiation, to which, it must be admitted, the recorded words of Christ do give some color, as well as the doctrine of the Papal primacy, of which the same thing may be said—unless, I say, we are ready to receive these doctrines as true because the Church at large did for centuries hold them with all but universal assent, we must allow that our Lord, knowing all things which should happen, may have purposely used language upon this point which He foresaw might very possibly, for a season, be misunderstood, with a view to the far-off day when a clearer light would dawn, and the true meaning of His word shine forth. May it not be that the very ambiguity of the words, their capability of various interpretations, was intended to serve a beneficent purpose? There was a long reach of time in the history of the Church, during which the belief generally held with reference to eternal fire was that it would literally scorch and torture the actual flesh. We need not to be too hasty in concluding that even this gross misinterpretation of Christ's words was a calamity. Who shall say that the rough peoples, the savage races to which the Gospel was then being carried, could in any other way have been made to feel the terrible reality of retribution in the world to come; could any otherwise have been persuaded to look forward to that retribution as a thing to fear?
That these counter-arguments which have now been rapidly passed in review are absolutely conclusive I do not claim; but this much I may perhaps with safety say—that they are cogent to such a degree as to warrant any one whose moral sense revolts against the doctrine of endless suffering as the penalty for sins committed in this handbreadth of time we call our life in classing this opinion, if he chooses so to do, as the " least likely " of the three constructions of which the language of the Bible has been thought capable.
I do not believe that anybody who has listened carefully this morning will go away with the impression that my aim has been to prophesy smooth things. On the contrary, dear friends, the solemn conclusion to which meditations such as these ought to bring us all is this—the certainty and the awfulness of judgment. If we have seen reason to question the endlessness of suffering in the future world, it has not been for the purpose of veiling the threatening of the Most High, or of explaining away the doom pronounced on un-forsaken sin, but rather with a view to clearing the ground for a statement of the truth, which, by its reasonableness, as well as by its scriptural-ness, shall compel men to listen, as now for a long time they have stoutly refused to listen, to the warning words of Christ.
1 PETER 4:17.
What shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?
PSALM 136:1.
His mercy endures forever.
THIS coupling together of two seemingly disconnected sayings, of which the one does not even profess to be a direct answer to the other, really puts the case precisely as a thoughtful advocate of the doctrine of restoration would wish to have it put. Such an advocate usually prefaces what he has to say, with a protest against the practice of trying to settle great questions of belief off hand by a reference to single texts of Scripture. " Attend," he says to his judges, " attend, I pray you, rather to the great ruling principles which penetrate and sustain the whole structure of Revelation. You interpret a constitution or a code in the light of its general tenor, its prevailing drift. You do not compel the entire instrument to bend itself into conformity with a single sentence here, or a single sentence there, which may appear to be at variance with the plain purport of the whole. Deal in a like largeness of spirit with the Word of God, and you will perceive beyond question that the Author of it is ' One who will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth. '" In this temper I can easily picture to myself one who holds confidently to the belief that of all creature souls none will finally be lost, dismissing with an impatient wave of the hand the hostile texts with which his adversary's argument bristles, and replying, in a tone almost of injured delicacy, " Hush! spare me your proof-texts, and your trim little demonstrations of endless misery. Broader in their sweep than any menace you can quote are the grand words, 'His mercy endures forever.' Ponder them, and be still."
Following the method agreed upon when we began the present enquiry, I shall state this morning, as well as I can, the arguments that make in favor of the belief that all souls will finally be saved. This done, there will remain the duty of showing why, in the face of the utmost that can be said in its behalf, I should yet have ventured to class this opinion, not indeed as the least likely, but as only the less likely, of the three we have undertaken to examine.
Let me remind you in advance that this doctrine, like the one we considered last Sunday, rests upon the assumed truth of another and larger doctrine still, namely, that of the inevitable immortality of all souls. An advocate of restoration-ism takes it for granted that every one of God's conscious and intelligent creatures is, as a matter of fact, destined to exist forever. Whether this assumption be a reasonable and proper one, I do not now dispute. We shall come to that point before we are done with our subject. For the present, I merely ask you to keep constantly in mind that in setting forth the argument of the restorationist, I am to speak as if I believed with him in the endless existence of every human creature God ever has made, or ever will make.
First, then, I ask you to look at the matter on the ground of what is intrinsically reasonable and in harmony with our common notions about the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty. Is it likely that a just God and a merciful would have created a race of intelligent immortals, endowed with a marvelous capacity for enjoyment and for suffering, if He foresaw, as He must have foreseen, that to some of them their immortality would be one long, never-ending woe? Looking at the Heavenly Father simply in His character of artificer, as God the Maker, ought we not, are we not bound, to credit Him with better foresight in His workmanship? It is true that of the products of the potter's wheel some prove misshapen and worthless, and are thrown away; but that is because the potter is not the perfect master of his craft. If he were the all-wise and all-powerful artist we credit our Maker with being, he would neither err in the choice of the clay nor blunder in the handling of it. Endow the misshapen vase that has been thrown away with consciousness, and not only so, but with everlasting consciousness, and not only so, but with an everlasting consciousness of unutterable shame and mortification, and then you begin to have a parallel to what it would be for a soul of God's own creating to find itself under the ban of His enduring wrath. Bitterest of all, in such a case, we may well believe, would be the stinging sense of a deep injustice. For only imagine the case of a lost soul, hopelessly lost. Let it be, if you will, a soul which, during the earthly life, enjoyed every possible opportunity of knowing and doing the right, but which persistently chose evil, and continually, throughout the full measure of three score and ten of unrepentant years, did wrong. Such cases of persistent wickedness are confessedly uncommon; nevertheless, for the sake of making the case as strong as strong can be, let it be such as I have stated. Now, imagine this condemned soul, after three score and ten, not of years, but of myriads of centuries of retribution, crying to God out of the depths, " Father, have mercy!" and hearing in response only the words, "Too late; the door is shut!"
Again, imagine three score and ten myriads of centuries passed by, and this same lost soul lifting up his voice once more and saying, "Oh God! is it not enough? Those were guilty years, I know, on that far-off earth where Thou didst place me; they were guilty years, but they were short and few. It was an evil life, but Thou didst plant me in it. I chose it not. And now it looks so infinitely far away and so slight. Is not my punishment enough?" Again the answer comes back unchanged, " Too late; the door is shut!" Now, my friends, this is not exaggerated language. On the contrary, it is language that falls far, far short of the fact, supposing the fact to be that souls which here on earth have sinned against light, and have gone out of life impenitent, are destined to endure for ceaseless ages the agonies of remorse. The only way in which we can begin to get a conception of what infinite duration means is by some such cumulative process as this. With what appalling flippancy do people allow themselves to prate about infinity! Eternal anguish? The words fall glibly enough from the lips, but is there one of us, think you, who could be brought face to face with the actual thing and retain his reason? No; there are some sights which no man may look on and live. This is one of them. If the doctrine be true, it is true; but cease then to talk about cheerfulness in religion, and let the Church's one psalm be henceforth " Miserere."
To all this it may be and is replied by the believer in the doctrine of endless torment, that God's judgments are a great deep; that His ways are past finding out, and that for us, His creatures, to criticize His wisdom or to challenge His justice is that presumptuous sin from which His true servant must ever pray to be kept back.
Let us weigh the merits of this rebuke. It may import either one of two things. It may mean that God's justice is different in kind from man's justice, and that therefore to discuss their comparative merits must be as fruitless as an attempt to decide by debate whether blue or red be the more excellent color. Or, again, it may mean that since man's life on earth is part of a widely extended and complicated scheme, of which we see only a small fraction, it is premature for us to say that any of God's dealings are unjust until we find ourselves in a position from which we can look down upon the whole thing, and view it in its entirety. Of these two possible interpretations which the rebuke may bear, the former is fatal to all religion, since if the divine justice be a thing unlike in kind to human justice, how are we to be sure that the divine mercy and the divine love are not also wholly unlike what we among ourselves consider mercy and love to be? In such a case we might indeed persist in raising altars to our unknown God, but the worshippers would be few.
The other meaning of which the rebuke admits is better worthy of our attention. What it amounts to is this—that we have no right to question the justice of God in condemning creatures of His own making to endless anguish, seeing that it must always be a presumptuous thing to blame the work of any builder before his fabric is complete.
But is it always a presumptuous thing thus to sit in judgment on a half-finished work? On the contrary, may it not sometimes be an absolutely necessary thing to do, whether we like doing it or not? Suppose I am compelled to decide whether I will or will not employ a certain architect, and the only specimen of his skill anywhere within reach of my observation is a building in process of erection,—am I presumptuous if I say I see certain lines there which convince me that the man is one I cannot safely employ? I may be mistaken. It is conceivable that, were the building finished, I might discern a meaning or a beauty in features that now strike me as faulty. I may be mistaken, I admit; but am I presumptuous, seeing that the necessity is laid on me of deciding either one way or the other? Now, it must be remembered that, looked at in a large way, the Christian religion may be said to be standing at the bar of the judgment of mankind. We Americans have most of us been brought up within the limits of the Christian Church (understanding that expression in the widest sense); but such is not the case with the greater number of our fellow-men. Of the thirteen hundred millions who make up the population of the globe at the present time, about four hundred millions, or a little less than one-third of the whole number, are reckoned by the compilers of statistics under the head of " Christians." To the remaining two-thirds of mankind the religion of the Gospel presents itself, when it presents itself at all, as a system to be judged on its merits. Moreover, we find even within the pale of nominal Christendom immense multitudes of people of whom the same thing may be said, namely, that they are really looking at the Gospel from the outside, and from what they can see of it are making up their minds whether to accept it as having come from God, or-to reject it as one of the imaginations of men.
Now, who shall wonder if thoughtful heathen (and such there are), or conscientious seekers after truth among the unbelieving portion of nominal Christendom (and such there are also)—who shall wonder if these persons, when informed that the doctrine of the endless sufferings of the wicked is a necessary part of the Gospel system, reply: "There is much, we confess, in this religion of the Christ that draws us; so much, indeed, that we not only feel disposed to embrace it, but we are also willing to accept along with it, and on faith, many things the reasons for which we are unable to see; but when it comes to a doctrine which wounds us most deeply in that very part of our nature where Christ is most welcome, which shocks the very feelings in us by virtue of which we were first attracted towards the cross, namely, our sense of justice and of pity, why then you provoke a reaction, you throw the overweight into the other scale, and your religion, from having seemed to be, when looked at as a whole, most likely to be true, has now come to seem, when looked at as a whole, most likely to be false. It is more probable, in other words, that the Gospel, notwithstanding its many seemingly supernatural beauties, originated with man, than that, with this blotch upon it, it is the message of a merciful and righteous God."
This is a way of putting the argument for restorationism which, I must acknowledge, seems to me, always remembering that we have agreed to assume as certain the perpetual existence of all souls, a very forcible one. We pass now to reasoning of a different sort:
In saying as I did when we began that advocates of the doctrine of restoration were, as a rule, disinclined to argue the question upon purely scriptural grounds, and by an appeal to texts, I did not mean to be understood as intimating that they could find nothing in the Bible to favor their opinion, for such a representation would be untrue.
They have, in the first place, their urgent plea for a more careful and guarded interpretation of the Greek adjective rendered in our English Version by the word " eternal." Whether Aeonian punishment be conceived of as age-long suffering, or simply as the retribution of "the world to come," in either case it is conceivable that, sooner or later, there may be an end. But we dwelt upon this point so fully last Sunday that it is needless to return to it.
Next in importance to this argument about (aionios), or possibly even in advance of it, most restorationists would rank what they hold to be the plain revelation in the Scriptures of the final abolition of evil throughout all worlds, a consummation which would involve, of course, the conversion of all sinners.
They admit, indeed, that there are sayings of our Lord and of His apostles which, taken in their plain, literal sense, make strongly against the expectation that any opportunity of choice other than that offered in this earthly life will ever be granted to man; but these, they argue, are overruled by other sayings of a more comprehensive character, which encourage us to hope.
Especially do they take delight in those grand utterances which occur here and there in Scripture with reference to a far-off restitution of all things, beginning with the promise to the patriarch that in his seed should all the families of the earth be blessed, and coming down to that magnificent picture in the Revelation, where every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, are represented as joining in the anthem, "Blessing and honor and glory and power be unto Him that sits upon the throne and to the Lamb for ever and ever."
This utter and permanent abolition of all evil, this burning up of death and hell, they declare to be the "one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves."
Evidence in support of this hopeful belief they find in the words of our Lord Himself, when He says, "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men [or, as one reading has it, all things] unto Me; " in the words of St. Paul, when he says, "That in the dispensation of the fulness of times, He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth; " in the words of St. Peter, when he says, " Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began; " and in the words of St. John, when he says, " The former things are passed away . . . Behold, I make all things new." To what, it is urged, does all this joyous chorus of prediction point, if not to a time when, from one farthest corner of God's wide universe to the other, whatever lives shall be obedient to him? Apart from these general and comprehensive sayings, which confessedly make the main strength of the restorationist's scriptural argument, there are also certain hints and suggestions scattered here and there through the New Testament upon which some dependence is placed; as, for instance, the parable of the imprisoned debtor, where it is said that he shall not come out thence until he has paid the uttermost farthing, the word " until " seeming to point to a possible release from captivity at last. Again, there is the saying about the servant which knew not his Lord's will, and did commit things worthy of stripes; he, it is affirmed, "shall be beaten with few stripes." This admission of the plea of ignorance of God's will as a ground of excuse is thought to open a wide door of hope.
Christ's guarded reticence when asked, " Lord, are there few that be saved? " is capable certainly of an interpretation which would harmonize with a belief in the final restoration of all souls. His lips, it may be, were sealed, lest, if the whole were told, some might too much presume upon God's goodness, and so postpone their own blessedness.
These are some of the indirect testimonies of Scripture to restorationism, of which it is said that they are all the more precious and the more persuasive for the very reason that they are indirect.
There remains the witness of history. On this side it might seem, at first sight, as if the position of the restorationists were utterly defenseless. But no: in spite of the general prevalence, or, at least, general profession of a contrary belief during many centuries, there is room for something to be said for this doctrine, even from the side of Church history. The fact, for instance, that one of the most acute, most learned, and most devout of the early Fathers of the Church, the illustrious Origen of Alexandria, held this doctrine, and taught it, is a consideration not lightly to be set aside. But far more important than this private opinion of one learned doctor is to be reckoned the adoption by the Church at large of the doctrine about purgatory, which, rising into prominence in the sixth century after Christ, gradually gained ground until it had become the accepted belief of Christendom, or at least of the whole Western portion of Christendom. By establishing this cleansing-place for the soul on the hither side of heaven, the Church did practically mitigate to a great degree the terror of its teaching about hell.
" I constantly hold," says the Creed of Pope Pius IV., one of the leading doctrinal standards of the Roman Church—" I constantly hold that there is a purgatory, and that the souls therein detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful." Another belief prevalent among Roman Catholics, though I am not aware that it has ever been elevated to the rank of dogma, is that there is such a thing as "invincible ignorance," a state of mind, that is to say, so darkened through lack of opportunity to know the truth that the Almighty Judge will not doom the subject of it to that eternal fire which, had he sinned knowingly, he would have deserved. These two doctrines, that of purgatory and that of invincible ignorance, taken in connection, must have saved sensitive hearts many a pang. In fact, they do of themselves constitute a sort of doctrine of restoration, for most if not for all souls; and they, therefore, by their very existence, greatly weaken the force of all arguments for the endlessness of torment that depend for their validity on the alleged general consent of the Church.
These, then, are the main defensive positions of those who believe in the limited duration of future punishment: first, the inherent reasonable-ness of the thing judged by what we know of the Heavenly Father's character; second, the prophetic testimony of Scripture to some final, even though far-off, restitution of all things, in which evil of every sort shall be swallowed up and lost; and, thirdly, the fact that the prevailing opinion of the Christian Church during the greater part of its existence, though nominally on the side of the endlessness of suffering, has really, by dint of the door of escape furnished by the doctrine of purgatory, been a modified form of restorationism.
Here we leave the subject for the present.
Next Sunday it will be my endeavor to show that the reasons in favor of a belief, widely different from either of the two we have thus far examined, are strong enough to justify us in declaring it to be the one which has most evidence in its support, and which may, therefore, fairly be called the likely opinion of the three.
1 PETER 4:17.
What shall the end be of them that obey not the Gospel of God?
PSALM 92: 7.
That they shall be destroyed forever.
WE are to weigh this morning the doctrine of Conditional Immortality. In the progress of out enquiry we have seen that the belief in the endless suffering of the lost soul, and the belief in the final restoration to God's favor of all souls, are built, both of them, upon the assumed truth of the doctrine that every child of man, be his attitude toward his Maker what it may, is destined to an existence that shall never cease. Thus far, out of a sincere desire to judge each of the several beliefs at its best, we have allowed this assumption to pass without serious challenge; but the time has come to face the plain question, Do the Scriptures teach that all men, without exception, are to retain conscious being everlastingly?
Let us be very careful that we understand just what the point at issue is. That all men are to survive the grave and to be judged according to the deeds done in the body is conceded. This disposes of the common cavil that the doctrine of conditional immortality sentences the larger part of the human race to die the death of the brute. It might indeed be questioned, upon grounds of reason, whether a thoroughly imbruted nature could fairly complain if it found itself left to share the heritage of the creatures with which it had cast in its lot while living; but that is aside from the purpose. We are not looking at the matter now from the view-point of reason; we are treading in the paths of revelation, and asking, " What saith the Scripture?" and that the Scripture does say that all souls shall be summoned to answer for themselves at the bar of judgment is clear.
But is it equally clear from Scripture that after the judgment is past an endless existence is to await those who, in the phrase of Paul and Barnabas, have judged themselves " unworthy of everlasting life "?
That is the very thing we are to consider; and assuredly it is well worth considering. No graver question could possibly occupy our thoughts.
When we remember that a single word would suffice to settle the point in the affirmative, it is startling, to say the least, to find that that word has not been spoken. Search the Scriptures through and through, my friends, and point, if you can, to a single sentence in which it is directly asserted that man is a being who will inevitably exist forever. Strong statements to the effect that man is naturally mortal are strewn with melancholy frequency over those pages, but nowhere is he declared to be immortal apart from the quickening power of Him who only hath immortality to give.
In reply to this it is sometimes argued that the immortality of the soul is a truth so generally accepted that any direct statement of it in Holy Scripture was unnecessary; and a parallel to this 'silence is thought to have been found in the fact that none of the sacred writers have felt obliged explicitly to state the proposition, There is a God.
But notice the wide difference between these two cases. The existence of a God, even if it be not distinctly asserted, is yet on almost every page of Scripture as plainly implied as it possibly can be. Everywhere the Almighty confronts us. Take His name and presence out of the Bible, and the book shrivels into nothingness in a moment. Can any such thing be said of the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul? Where is it taken for granted? In what single sentence is it necessarily implied? Which stone in the wide arch of revelation is loosened when the doctrine falls? Grant me, for the moment, that eternal life in the sense of endless existence is really the gift of God to those who seek it, and not the inherent right of all men, whether they seek or not—grant it, I say, for the moment, and then ask yourself, is there a single saying of the Scriptures which such a supposition would invalidate or make meaningless? On the other hand, are there not hundreds of sentences which it would fill with sudden light?
In looking to see what the Bible has to tell about the mortal or immortal nature of man, we instinctively turn first to the primitive tradition embodied in the Book of Genesis. The interpretation of that tradition, uncertain as we must always be how far we are dealing with the language of allegory, and how far with a statement of literal fact, is confessedly beset with difficulty. But, letting go all secondary considerations which do not touch the essence of the thing, what are the main points in the narrative of the temptation and the fall? Are they not these? Man, as represented by Adam and Eve, is put upon the trial of his obedience. He is forbidden to eat, not of the tree of life, which evidently is free to him, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Precisely what eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil may have meant we cannot certainly know. Various conjectures are possible. But this much of inference from the story is plain, namely, that before disobedience man had an opportunity of endless life, which after disobedience was taken away. " And now," the Lord God says, "lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever "—therefore He drove him out. From the way in which many interpreters deal with this passage it would seem as if they were oblivious to the fact that the words "Ye shall not surely die" came from the lips of the" Tempter, not from the mouth of the Lord God.
Thus, at the very outset of our study of Scripture, we find death put forth as the penalty of setting at naught the will of God. But what sort of death? For all that appears to the contrary, total death—the death of the whole man. Nothing is said about any distinction between body and soul. It was not declared " In the day that thou eats thereof thy body shall become mortal; " but the warning ran, " In the day that thou eats thereof thou shalt surely die." The first man's only experience of death being such as was derived from the world of Nature around him, it is hard to conceive how this sentence could have meant to his mind anything else than the utter loss of being. The insect that perished before his eyes went to decay, and evidently was no more; the withered leaf fell at his feet and moldered away; what other purport, then, than final extinction could have been carried to Adam's mind by the word addressed to him, " Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return?" If it be urged that because there had been imprinted upon Adam at his creation the image of his Maker therefore he could not die, it is enough to answer that the dewdrop shows the image of the sun only so long as it quivers unconsumed; presently the burning heat scorches the drop into vapor, and the image flies. Indeed, it seems to be of the very nature of images that they should be perishable unless care is taken to keep them in existence. The image on the sensitive plate of the photographer will prove as transient as it is beautiful if it be not presently plunged in the " fixing-bath " which gives it permanence. Man, made to reflect the image of Him that created him, ceased perfectly to do so the moment the cloud of selfishness came between him and the sun.
But we must not let ourselves become entangled in figures of speech. Be it our endeavor to cling as closely as possible to the plain letter of the Word of God.
Simultaneously with the' death-sentence passed on man, which we are to think of as beginning immediately to take effect (just as we say, and say truly, of ourselves that the moment we are born we begin to die), simultaneously with this death-sentence comes a glimpse, only a glimpse, of a gracious purpose on God's part to set in motion a remedial process. The seed of the woman, it is promised, shall bruise the serpent's head. How the hope thus suggested strengthens and deepens, how in each successive stage of the world's progress the prophecy gains in distinctness, it is needless to show; enough to say that at the last comes One who asserts Himself to be the Messiah, for whom all the generations have been waiting. And what is the burden of His message now that He is come? What are the words in which He defines the purpose of His taking flesh? " I am come," He says—" I am come that ye might have life." Thus he establishes Himself a second Adam, bringing back to man that tree of life from access to which his self-will shut the first Adam out: " For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." Contenting ourselves with this merest suggestion of a magnificent thought which gives coherence and symmetry to the whole Bible, let us go on to look at the language in which the Scripture writers, when appealing to us in a practical way, put the matter of choice. What are the alternatives of destiny as Christ and His apostles picture them? Sometimes the contrast is imaged to us under the form of a dividing path: there is a road that leads to the right, and a road that leads to the left; there is a narrow way, and abroad. Again, the difference is illustrated from the relations of social life: the better choice is likened to freedom, the worse to slavery. Yet, again, the natural world is laid under contribution, and light and darkness are made the symbols of the wise choice and the foolish. But standing out against this faint background of parable and similitude, as if written in letters of flame, shine the two words, LIFE and DEATH. This is the real contrast. These are the two tremendous alternatives between which, according to the teaching of Jesus Christ, the will of man must decide. Is the narrow way to be sought? It is not because it is narrow, but because it leads to life. Is the broad way to be shunned? It is not because it is broad, but because it leadeth to destruction. To those whose spirits languish with thirst Christ promises a well of water that shall spring up into everlasting life. To hungry souls He says, " If any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever; " while with those who persist in turning their backs upon his Gospel, the sad expostulation is, " Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life." We are assured that in these sayings, and in sayings with these, our Savior does not mean life, but blessedness, and that the contrasted thing he has in mind is not death, real death, extinction of being, but a life of anguish.
And yet, why should we twist His words after such a fashion?
The maintainers of the doctrine of conditional immortality argue and very convincingly, I think, that all this strong language about life and death as being the two final destinies between which men must choose, ought to be taken to mean just what it seems to mean, unless some good and sufficient reason can be given for not so understanding it. What good and sufficient reason is there? They do not deny that the word " death " can be, and sometimes is, figuratively used to describe a sort of existence which, though poor and contemptible, is, nevertheless, in some sense existence still, as when, for instance, St. Paul speaks of the woman who lives in pleasure as being "dead while she lives," or, again, when he speaks of people who are still moving and breathing as being " dead in trespasses and sins." This they admit; but they affirm that in all such cases there is something to make it evident that the speaker or writer is using his word figuratively, and not literally. But take such a declaration as this, also from the lips of St. Paul, " If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die." Here the dying is put into the future and made a penalty—ye shall die. If it had been intended to be understood in the figurative sense of being dead in trespasses and sins, it ought, of course, to have read, " If ye live after the flesh, ye are dead, for living after the flesh is death in the figurative sense: " but no; the words run, " If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die." It would seem to be hard for an unbiassed mind to see in such language as this anything less than a threatening of death to the whole man as the final punishment for a sensual life. Were I to marshal before you all the passages of the Bible in which this contrast is set forth, it would consume what little time we have at our command. A single sentence, therefore, from the lips of Moses, shall represent all that might be quoted from the Old Testament, and a single sentence from the lips of Paul all that might be quoted from the New. " See," says the patriarch to his people, " I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil." " The wages of sin," says the apostle to his converts, is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
We pass to another line of argument, that which starts from the language in which our Lord and His apostles describe under the form of symbols the character of future punishment. That this language means something terribly real, whatever that something may be, no one who trusts implicitly the truthfulness of Christ ought to doubt. If He is not to be believed when He speaks to us about the terrors of retribution, why, then let His whole religion go; for if here He is untrustworthy, He must be untrustworthy throughout. To discredit what He says of hell is in the same breath to discredit what He says of heaven, and if into those regions of the future we refuse to follow Him, why should we think Him other than a blind guide when He speaks to us of God and the soul? It is plain, then, that the integrity of the Christian religion is bound up with the truth of what Christ teaches about penalty—not the literalness, of course, but the truth of it. What now does He teach? That is the question at issue. He teaches in plainest words that the wicked are sentenced to unquenchable fire. This, of course, is symbolic language. We must interpret it according to the rules that govern the interpretation of all symbolism. What common fire, such as we know it, does for visible things, such as we know them, that eternal fire must do for souls. But what is the common operation of fire upon the things submitted to its action? It certainly is not preservative, but the opposite. The function of fire is to destroy. " Gather ye together first the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them." " He shall burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." " If any man build upon this foundation . . . wood, hay, stubble . . . the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is." Is it natural or even possible to think of the tares, the chaff, the wood and hay and stubble of these illustrations, as continuing in existence after they have been submitted to such a process as the words describe? Of course not. No more, then, is it natural to think of the lost soul as forever resisting the flame that never can be quenched. To all eternity our God must be what He is now, " a consuming fire; " but it is by a fallacious reasoning process that we transfer the eternity from the consumer to the consumed. " Fear Him," Christ says, " which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." If it be urged that it is contrary to God's method in Nature utterly to destroy any substance, and that the action of fire on matter is simply to change the form of it, not to put out of existence the elements of which it is composed, the answer is ready. Fire does not indeed destroy elementary substance, but it does destroy what we call individuality. A ship at sea, for instance, is struck by lightning and burned. Masts, spars, rigging, deck, and hull are successively overmastered by the flame and disappear. Shall anyone tell us that because the carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and other elements which composed the material of the ship are still in existence, therefore the ship has not been destroyed? To say so is merely to trifle with words. Plainly the ship, as a ship, is gone forever. Its personality, if I may so speak, is lost.
But, passing this point, there remains the question, What are we to make of the very expression itself, " everlasting punishment"? With what propriety can the utter destruction of the condemned be called their " everlasting " punishment?
In order to reply intelligently, w' e must ponder a distinction which is as familiar to jurists as it is to theologians: the distinction between punishments of pain and punishments of loss. The rod and the lash are of the first sort; fines and confiscations of property are of the second. Now, there is one thing that men value more than money or houses or lands, and that one most precious possession is life. When, therefore, a penalty is to be provided for the very worst of crimes it is possible to commit, earthly legislators find that penalty in loss of life. We do not, it is true, call capital punishment " everlasting " punishment; but the reason why we do not call it so is because the life that is taken away by the executioner is one that would only last for a few short years at most, were it to be spared. But suppose the life taken away to be an endless one: have we not then a punishment of loss, which, without any straining of language, may well be called an everlasting one?
Of Sodom and Gomorrah an apostle says that they suffered " the vengeance of eternal fire." We do not deny that their punishment is an everlasting punishment, because as cities they have ceased to be. Why then should we doubt that those are punished everlastingly of whom it is said in our text that they are destroyed forever?
Thus we see how, even without resorting to the demand that a Greek adjective shall be retranslated, and " eternal " made to mean something different from what it has commonly been supposed to mean, it is perfectly possible for the believer in conditional immortality to accept as literally true the terrible words, " These shall go away into everlasting punishment."
That the arguments which have now been briefly and imperfectly presented prove the doctrine of conditional immortality to be, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the teaching of Holy Scripture, I am not prepared to say. That they are strong enough, however, to justify us in regarding such an interpretation as being, upon the whole, likelier to be true than either of the other two we have examined, I most firmly believe.
In next Sunday's sermon we may hope to gather up conclusions with reference to the whole subject. It will then be found, perhaps, that over and above the reasons in its favor already alleged, the view to-day advanced has this further and chief recommendation, that without any stretching of itself beyond its own proper measure, it does wonderfully allow for much that is wholesome and precious in each of the two doctrines with which it stands contrasted, while yet not open to the formidable objections which they provoke.
To those of you who presently are to approach the table of the Lord, let me say a single word. This discussion of a controverted point in theology which has been engaging our minds may scarcely seem the best possible sort of preparation for receiving the Holy Communion. Not in the spirit of debate, not in the polemic temper, would any good Christian ever wish to seek intercourse with Him who is our peace. And yet what we have been considering is only the negative side of a truth of which the Church's Eucharistic service is full to overflowing. We have only to shift our thoughts from the dark face of this subject to the light one, and we not only shall find that we have passed from a region of shadows into a land of sunshine, from the chill air of uncertainty into the warm gladness of clearly revealed truth; but we shall also realize more distinctly, it may be, than we have ever done before, how thoroughly from first to last the Lord's Supper is a sacrament of heavenly nourishment, the symbol and the pledge of a communicated life, a " grace given unto us"—not our own.
HEBREWS 12:29.
For our God is a consuming fire.
PSALM 116:5.
Yea, our God is merciful.
IT is the glory of the true faith that it is bold to state both of these propositions in the same breath, and to stand by them. The two sentences I have just read happen to have been taken from different books of Scripture, but you will observe that the sterner saying is quoted from the New Testament, and the gentler one from the Old. Indeed, there would be no difficulty in finding passages in either Testament in which these two thoughts—that of God's severity, and that of His tender mercy—are put in closest contact and sharpest contrast. This is not a matter in which prophet is arrayed against prophet, or Gospel against Law; but the testimony of all the messengers is that the Being from whom they come and for whom they speak is alike terrible and pitiful, a power to strike dead or to make alive, a God who scatters blessings and a God who " answered by fire." Listen to one of these impartial seers, and notice how boldly he blends the two strains in one: " Who can stand before His indignation? and who can abide in the presence of His anger? His fury is poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by Him; " and then, without the slightest pause or break, he goes on, " The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and He knows them that trust in Him." It is like touching both ends of the key-board of a great organ at once.
We could not have a better introduction than this to the line of thought we are meaning to follow to-day. I suggested, you will remember, that we should test the doctrine of conditional immortality by looking to see how far there might be room in it for such features of the other doctrines previously considered as had most commended themselves to our judgment on grounds of reasonable probability or scriptural warrant.
We shall see now the great advantage gained by our fair treatment (if it was a fair treatment) of those opinions which we felt obliged to classify as the less likely. Having scanned the best that could be said for them, rather than the worst that could be said against them, we are now in a position to avail ourselves of whatever of truth they may have to contribute to our final conclusion. It is one of the commonplaces of scientific reasoning that the hypothesis which brings into harmony the greatest number of ascertained facts is the one most likely to be true. So in our dealing with this obscure but momentous problem of human destiny, that belief is certainly entitled to our best regard which disposes of the greatest number of difficulties with the least amount of strain. I have never at any time affirmed, since we began studying this subject together, that the doctrine of conditional immortality would be found wholly free from embarrassment, or that an absolute demonstration of it on any ground, scriptural or otherwise, could be made out. What I did venture to predict was that an impartial comparison would show this form of belief to be far less encumbered with serious drawbacks than either of the other two that divide with it the allegiance of Christian thinkers at the present day. This may seem to be but a slender claim in the eyes of those who think nothing of a doc-trine unless it can be proclaimed with a trumpet, and yet there are some to whom even the whisperings of truth are grateful, and who rejoice in the opening of any door of hope, be the hinge moved ever so little and the light let through ever so faint.
At any rate, we will try to find out how well the doctrine of conditional immortality can stand the test of comparison by which we have proposed to try it; although before doing so, I shall ask you to allow me carefully to restate the doctrine, so that there may be no uncertainty as to the true purport of it. Believers in conditional immortality, then, hold that a never-ending existence is not the common heritage of all men in virtue of their having been born into this world, but is rather to be regarded as a gift bestowed on those who seek it from the Eternal Himself. They believe that through the life-imparting power of the Son of God, who has taken our nature upon Him that He may lift it up, eternal life becomes rooted, as it were, in those who, in St. Paul's phrase, " by patient continuance in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality." Made thus a partaker of the Divine nature, man ceases to be, what he was before, a perishable creature, and becomes superior to the touch of death. Moreover, as common temporal blessings come to us many times from sources of which we know nothing, so there may be innumerable souls entering upon this eternal life, and many more may have entered upon it in the past, knowing nothing by name of the Christ to whom they owe their enfranchisement with so great a freedom. But this ought not to hinder us who do know by whom immortality has been brought to light, and through whom the grace of eternal life is bestowed, from giving Him the glory and the praise; nor can we imagine that from those who have shared the benefit the knowledge of the source of it will be long concealed. With regard to hopelessly irreclaimable rebels against the love of God, it is held that their final destiny in the world to come will be utter destruction, extinction, cessation of being, death. The word " annihilation," often fastened upon this doctrine by those who dissent from it, is distasteful to those who hold it, not because of the complete reduction to nothingness which the word expresses, but because it seems to point to an arbitrary infliction, a decree suddenly executed upon the offender from without, whereas it is thought to be more in consonance with the Divine methods that the lost soul should, as it were, simply die out, and, with more or less of retributive suffering, gradually perish, just as a plant might do if carried into an uncongenial climate, or as a fountain would waver and sink and finally cease as the water in the reservoir above became exhausted. Some maintainers of this belief go much more minutely into the discussion of such details than others. The more judicious, however, confine themselves to the simple and easily understood ground that the final destiny of those whom Christ calls "the lost " is extinction.
With this conception of the real essence of the doctrine firmly planted in our minds, let us now enter upon the proposed comparison. And first we take the opinion which we were led to characterize as the least likely, namely, that which identifies eternal punishment with endless anguish.
We saw that the strong point in the position held by the maintainers of this belief was their frank acknowledgment of the fearfulness of the penalty which in another world awaits unforgiven and un-forsaken sin. There is with them no sentimental dilution of the threatening of God, no explaining away of the sentence against the sinner, no glossing over the awfulness that rightly attaches to the loss of the soul. So far the doctrine is strong,—yes, impregnable, for it has Christ behind it. But where it betrays its weakness is in its attempt to philosophize about the nature of the soul, and its resolute determination to assign to man an inherent, natural, inevitable immortality, a thing which neither Christ nor His prophets before Him, nor His apostles after Him, ever so much as suggested.
So long as they content themselves with declaring the final sentence passed on sin to be irreversible, Scripture is so manifestly on their side that there are few to dissent; but the moment they import into the Creed their fond notion of the indestructibility of human nature, they provoke, and very properly provoke, rebellion, for they then make the result of the irreversible sentence a suffering absolutely endless, and our sense of justice is outraged.
Observe very carefully what it is that shocks the conscience. It is not the irreversible character of the doom, but the cruelty of making the doom so infinite an anguish.
Take the earthly administration of justice under its best forms. No one finds fault because the decisions of the Supreme Court are final, or because those who lose their causes have to suffer. It is recognized as a ruling of common-sense that there must be some limit to the right of appeal, some point beyond which forbearance can no further go; and it is also agreed by general consent that if a penalty has been incurred, that penalty ought to be executed. No; it is not about the principle of finality or the principle of penalty that there is any serious difference of opinion. But suppose the supreme court were so far to transcend its powers as to decree some exquisitely cruel punishment; suppose it were to sentence a criminal to the torture, as used to be done in old times, and not only so, but were to enjoin upon the torturer that he keep his victim alive just as long as possible by the use of stimulants, and by careful watching of the pulse, what then? Is it not perfectly certain that in the minds of the people at large indignation toward the criminal for what he had done would presently be transformed into sympathy with him for what he is called to suffer? If it be urged that the parallel is a false one, and the case not supposable, seeing that earthly courts exist under constitutional safeguards which forbid the judges to exaggerate punishment, whereas the Al-mighty God is a sovereign absolute, and can do what He will with His creatures, I answer that the plea is unworthy of a Christian. We know that it is written, " My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways; " but we also know that it is written, again, " Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His Throne." To what purpose this last assurance, it may well be asked, if our idea of righteousness is in no sense and to no extent a measure of the righteousness of God? Here, then, is the point where the doctrine of endless torment breaks down, and it does so because it insists on reading between the lines of revelation something which is not there, the indestructibility of man.
But see, now, how wonderfully the idea of our attaining to immortality through the grace of God and under the saving power of his life-giving Son comes to our relief. Here is room for all the Scriptures have to say about the awfulness of judgment. The dark side of retribution is not for one moment winked out of sight, nor " the wrath of the Lamb," the fire of hell and the undying worm forgotten; but all this somber imagery of destruction is recognized as just and true. " The soul that sinned it shall die;" that is the decree: nor is it to be reckoned strange that around such "second death" a horror of great darkness should hang, and the sounds of weeping and of wailing and of gnashing of teeth make themselves heard. During the last fifty years what has been the practical result of the clinging on the part of the Christian Church to this tenet—I will not call it dogma, for, thank God! it never found a place in the universal creed—this tenet of endless torment? The result has been, certainly among Protestants, a perilous and most questionable silence. John the Baptist, an outspoken man, warned Pharisee and Sadducee to flee from the wrath to come. He who was gentleness and pity incarnate scrupled not to ask people of the highest respectability in the social world of that day how they with their whitewashed lives, all rotten with falsehood within, could hope to escape the damnation of hell. A Paul could speak in plainest terms of the flaming fire and everlasting destruction awaiting unrighteous men. A James could say to the oppressors of his day, " Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for the miseries that shall come upon you." A Simon Peter could declare that those who made themselves as natural brute beasts should perish in their own corruption. A Jude could liken the wicked to the swift meteor, the shooting star, to which is reserved the blackness of darkness forever; and a John, mildest of all apostles, and yet sternest, too, could say, "There is a sin unto death." But, why is it that through all these years, for at least half a century, there has been such general avoidance in our best instructed pulpits and choicest devotional books of language such as this?
Certainly if the words are true they ought, at least, to be referred to now and then. On the other hand, if they are false, and those who spoke them acted under excitement, then is the whole fabric of the faith untrustworthy. There seems, indeed, to have been a sort of armed truce prevailing, the maintainers of the doctrine keeping their convictions to themselves, and saying under their breaths to their opponents, " We hold to this because the Scriptures seem to compel us to do so; but if you will only refrain from controversy, we on our part will agree to keep silence and make no trouble." Surely, this was not a healthy state of things, and it is very well that it should be broken up, even though in the process there be the inevitable accompaniment of much blasphemous and flippant talk. Believers in eternal life as the alone gift of Him "who only hath immortality" have nothing to fear, and very much to hope for, from the discussion. They receive Christ's teaching about hell as true. They believe that in His words upon this subject, rightly understood, lies the key to some of the most perplexing questions of modern thought. They do not admit that this view of the matter has any tendency to make people think lightly of the consequences of sin; but, on the contrary, they are convinced that by bringing down the penalty from the scale of infinity, where it simply baffles the imagination, to the scale of measurable time, where it becomes something that can be pictured and made real to the mind, they are in point of fact doing far more to make " the terror of the Lord " a real power for good, a practical instrument of persuasion, than those are who so far overstate the truth of God as to bring it into certain and fatal disrepute.
Men dread punishments more in proportion to the certainty of them than in proportion to their awfulness. Experience in the line of criminal law has abundantly proved this. Many a man, by convincing himself that endless suffering as the punishment of temporal guilt is incredible, has silently settled into the persuasion that punishment of any sort is unlikely—a state of mind, if Christianity be true, fraught with the deadliest peril. But show to such a man a form of belief not chargeable with unreason, hold up to him the promise of eternal life made in Jesus Christ, will he then have any reasonable ground of complaint, any plausible plea of unjust treatment, if in the end he finds a gift which he deliberately refused forfeited in consequence of such refusal? If a parent offers his son at twenty a position which will insure him a successful career, and the boy from pure self-will, or perhaps out of a vain notion that he can do better for himself, refuses it, certainly no one blames the father if at forty the son finds himself in the streets without a home and without a fortune. The force of this illustration may indeed be destroyed by denying free-will, but then if we deny free-will, we at the same time make impossible any religion worth the having. Thus we see that when put into comparison with the belief in endless torment, the likeliest opinion, as we have called it, has this advantage, that it al-lows for much that is plainly true about that form of doctrine, while itself remaining free from the blemishes which make the harsher view incredible.
We have, next, to compare conditional immortality with restorationism. We found that the strength of this last-named belief lay in its tender Christ-like sympathy with all souls, and in its pity for that immense multitude, which no man can number, of whom we feel moved to say that they have never had a fair chance. On the other hand, we saw plainly that the weak point of this hypothesis betrayed itself in an almost utter avoidance of the sterner aspects of Christ's teaching.
The restorationist has it for his aim to persuade us that, after all, no one will finally be lost, no stone missing from the temple "When God hath made the pile complete," a most genial hope, but one to which the words of Scripture, it must be owned, lend little color. A few dim suggestions there may be, scattered here and there through the Bible, which it is possible to regard as looking in that direction; but Christ and His apostles, as we watch them in their teachings, do not seem bent upon impressing men with the belief that it will be well with the ungodly and the sinner in the end. The prevailing strain and drift are of another sort, nor are the parables of Nature any more encouraging.
As respects the lot of those who have never been granted any opportunity of finding the light and knowing the truth in this world, the doctrine of conditional immortality is simply silent. As Christ has not condemned them, neither does it condemn them. Whatever gleams of hope there may anywhere be to encourage us on this score, are at least as available for the Christian who believes that the final issue for those who reject God will be destruction as for those who believe that that issue will be restoration.
In an attempt to answer the question, " What shall the end be of them that obey not the Gospel of God?" speculation as to the destiny of those who have never had any opportunity to obey it is irrelevant.
Christ spoke of bringing other sheep, not of the then existing flock, into His fold. How know we that in ways and places hidden from us He may not be seeking and saving still? Be this so or be it not so, the practical question for you and me is untouched; for ours is not the case of those who have had no light, but the case of those who have all the light there is. What will the end be for us if we keep on in selfishness and pride and contempt of the holy will, if we are full of hardness of heart and bitterness, or sunk in sensual sin? Will all this " when it is finished" bring forth life? No; for the end of these things is death.
Thus we see how it is that the believer in human immortality as a conditional thing can, with equal readiness, assent to the teaching of either one of our two texts. That our God is a consuming fire, he has no reason to deny; that our God is merciful, he is thankful to believe.
There is a substance which enters far more largely than any other into the composition of this earth where we are living, and in the absence of which not one of us could survive an hour. It constitutes one-half of the crust of the globe, more than four-fifths of the ocean, and more than three-fourths of our very bodies themselves. It is one of the so-called "elements," or world-materials, and the chemists name it " oxygen."
The marvelous thing about this omnipresent element is the two-fold character which it seems to bear. It is at once the mildest and the fiercest of all the elements, alike the nourisher and destroyer of whatever lives. It is the up builder and the scavenger of Nature. Nothing can grow without its aid, and yet when that which grows has passed its prime and done its work, it is this same element which is most active in the work of needed destruction. It is the vital ingredient in the very air we breathe; we move in it, we feed on it, we think by aid of it, and yet when we are looking in dismay on a burning city or watching in autumn woods the dank and repulsive processes of decay, how hard to realize that the very same agent which bestows life when it is needed, and fosters it where it is strong, is also everywhere at work tearing down that which has been adjudged worthless, and taking from him which hath not even that which he seemed to have! Have we not here a most suggestive parable of the work of the Spirit of God in the universe unseen? He also is the very atmosphere that wraps and feeds us. In Him we live and move and have our being. The warmth that cheers us is His holy comfort. The spiritual rock of which we drink is He. Yet, all the while, He is, remember, the consuming fire; and when the trial day arrives, if there be nothing in us that shall be worth survival, what wonder if we be devoured as stubble fully dry? Oh, how little we realize, dear friends, the tremendous agencies that are at work all around us, silently and certainly preparing for us a future to which we scarcely give a thought! On we go, coursing through space upon this whirling ball we call the earth, nursing our silly pride, our petty jealousies, our poor ambitions, and all the while on either side, before, behind, above, below, are the chained forces from which were God to loosen the grasp of His hand one single moment, it would be all over with us in a flash. Like the somnambulist, with his eyes holden, man walks along the perilous path of his own choice, safe for the moment, but safe only because he sees not things as they are. Wake him, and he falls. How will it be with us in that waking which is to come with the resurrection morning?
Shall we be among those who stand or those who fall? That depends on whether in this life present we learn to distinguish the shadow from the substance, and choose to fasten our affections upon things which cannot be removed.
PSALM 139: 24.
Lead me in the way everlasting.
JOHN 14: 6.
Jesus saith unto him, I am the Way.
WITH a genuine sense of relief, we turn this morning from the thoughts about the dark side of human destiny which have engrossed our attention during Lent to the bright and cheerful outlook opened to us in the Resurrection of the Son of God.
Whoever the author of our first text may have been, whether David or a later psalmist, it is evident that the question he had in mind was a practical rather than a speculative one. He had observed that the characteristic of most of what went on around him in the world was transiency, and he wanted to find out, if he could, how to live so as to have his life possess some solid and permanent value; hence his prayer, " Lead me in the way everlasting."
Among the figures of speech which date back to the beginnings of things, and are likely to continue in use while the world stands, this one of the path, or way, is prominent. Food, clothing, sunshine, shelter, keep a lasting place in the imagery of religion, for the reason that they stand for universal wants which will always exist so long as man continues what he is. The bread and water of life; the robe and armor of righteousness; the light of the world; the house not made with hands; the covert and the rock—when will these expressions become antiquated and obsolete? We may safely say, Never. Religion cannot spare them. They make the sign-language by dint of which she gets access to the deaf conscience through the eye of the imagination. However short our list of these primary symbols (and we could not make it a long one were we to try) room must at any rate be found in it for the figure which distinguishes both of to-day's texts,—the Way. This also is one of those abiding parables which never can be outlawed by lapse of time. The need of the path to walk in begins when man's conflict with the hardness of savage Nature begins. The world is a wide place, and the fewer people there are in it, the wider it is. Imagine it wholly trackless, and it is hard to see how life could be sustained. There must be means of access to the bubbling spring; there must be some certainty of communicating with the nearest neighbor, or the battle is sure to go against poor, defenseless man. It is absolutely necessary that he should know how to find the places where help lies. He cannot be expected to strike out upon the wilderness at a pure venture and succeed every time. His Maker has withheld from him the mysterious instinct by dint of which the bee goes straight to his hive, and the wild fowl to her nest. A path, therefore, a track, a way, of some sort, he must have or else perish from off the earth.
Hence we find that all along, from earliest times, the roads of a country have been looked at as the measure of its progress in civilization. The greater the facilities of travel, the higher the enlightenment, for intercourse is one of the causes of enlightenment; and intercourse there cannot be without journeying to secure it. We remember the old Romans by their roads almost as much as by their laws, and to-day one of the chief boasts of modern society is that the ends of the earth have been brought within everybody's easy reach by the abundance of all sorts of ways, paths once undreamed of.
Now, the startling thing about our Psalmist's prayer is that in it he asks to be guided in a kind of path to which our experience of ordinary travel furnishes no parallel. One feature which is common to all ways scored on the earth's surface is their certainty of coming to an end. Every one of them brings up at some terminus or other; but this man says, " Lead me in the way everlasting."
Clearly, we have reached a point where we must part company with the things seen, and go out into the region of spiritual experience.
To speak plainly, the thing we want to know is whether there really exists, what the author of this prayer evidently thought there might be, a sort of life which can count itself independent of the shocks of change, which may be depended upon to endure.
If we will survey the history of religion given us in the Bible, as one might look down from a steep acclivity over some extended plain, we shall be convinced, I think, that all through the long reach of time covered by that chronicle there runs a path which, beginning in obscurity, is continually becoming better and still better defined, until there is no mistaking it. The name of the path is " the Way of life: " to be in it is to be safe; to be out of it is to be lost.
Condense the spirit of the Old Testament religion into fewest possible words, and what have we? Something like this: " He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"
That is " the path " as it ran through the centuries before Christ; and everywhere we find those who have anything to say about it ascribing to it this characteristic of permanency, endurance, lastingness. Other paths there are branching off from this royal highway and striking out in all sorts of directions—paths of self-will, paths of ambition, paths of cruelty, paths of covetousness, paths of lust—but they lead to no end; they run out into vacancy, and, sooner or later, the man who has chosen one of them finds himself lost, fortunate indeed if there be time enough left to allow of his getting back before sundown to that only pathway in which there is no death.
The form the promise made to righteousness took in those old times was longevity. When wisdom was personified, she stood with " length of days " in her right hand. Reverence for parents, one of the foundation-stones of religion, looked for its reward, you remember, under Moses' law in this same direction: " Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long." And, again, of the devout and trustful man it is said in the Psalms, " With long life will I satisfy him and show him my salvation. "
How far these promises looked beyond the horizon of the earthly pilgrimage, or whether they looked beyond it at all, it may be difficult to say. It is enough for our purpose to observe this one point, that from the beginning a certain durability, toughness of fiber, power of wear, have been associated with a particular type of character. The wicked prosper; the unrighteous make a brave show; for a time they seem to have a firm foothold on the earth; they call the lands after their own names: but it is only for a time: presently there comes a withering blast, and they are gone. "Yea, even like as a dream when one awakes; so shalt thou make their image to vanish out of the city." The idea seems to be that evil is something which has no principle of stability in it at all.
The Bible is very seldom satirical, and yet if one of the older translations is right—and some recent critics think that it is—there certainly is a touch of satire in what is said in one place of the thoroughly bad man: " Take away his ungodliness and thou shalt find—no one." The ungodliness, that is to say, is all there is of him. Only think of a manhood of which it can be thus declared that it is a mere shell, a painted mask, a crust, a showy bubble-surface enclosing nothing!
The naturalists have had much to say of late years about the newly discovered law of the survival of the fittest; but in the history of religion this is no new discovery. As early as in the family lists of the Book of Genesis we find the principle asserting itself, and indeed the whole Bible, from beginning to end, may be said to be one long illustration and enforcement of that law. But who are the fittest? Ah! there we touch the very point of difference that severs, as light from darkness, the law of survival that rules in the kingdom of Nature from the law of survival that rules in the kingdom of Christ. Who are the fittest? We know the answer Nature has to give us: The fittest are the strongest, and the strongest are the fittest. The lion's paw that can strike the hardest blow, the beak and talons that make shortest work of the prey, these secure survival in the fierce struggle for life continually going on among the lower creatures, these breed the aristocracy of the jungle and the forest. Nor need we, for that matter, stop at the line which sunders man from brute. Take human society as it exists apart from Christ, and it is impossible to deny that here also, to a great degree, the same hard law prevails—the strongest seem to have their way; the weak seem to go to the wall. Napoleon, in his coarse fashion, confessed to faith in this philosophy of life when he threw out the easy sneer, so often repeated since his day, that Providence is on the side of the heaviest battalions. But was he right? Not if our Lord Jesus Christ was right when He laid down His law of survival in words like these:
"Verily, verily I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hates his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal." This also is the announcement of a law of survival, nay, of a law of survival of the fittest; but notice most carefully what the standard of fitness is, for it is widely unlike that which the successful soldier had in mind. Christ's law of survival accounts as the fittest, not those whom public opinion reckons to be the best equipped for the battle of life, and the most likely to win the world's prizes, but those who have the qualities which in His own experience here among us brought Him to the cross—meekness, long-suffering, gentleness, faith, patience.
Now then, we are in a good position to discern the link that fastens our second text to the first. " Lead me in the way everlasting," said the Psalmist. " Jesus saith unto him, I am the way." How much did Christ add to what was already understood before His coming with respect to this way everlasting? What know we about eternal life which David, for example, or Isaiah could not know?
The difference is the difference between our daylight here in the temperate zone, and the day-light of the people far to the north of us at the season of the year when all that can be seen is a faint glow along the edge of the earth's shoulder, enough to certify that there is a sun, and that he does shine somewhere, but not enough to stir men's hearts to cheerfulness or to rouse their wills into activity.
Christ came into the world like morning sunshine, and by revealing Himself as the source and fount of light, "the master-light" indeed "of all our seeing," He brought life and immortality to light. Before the bringing in of the gospel of the Resurrection men had groped after the way of life, and even when they had found it, scarcely realized how far it would carry them. Jesus came and said, " I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever lives and believeth in me shall never die." We bury our dead with these words upon our lips to-day, words of triumph, words of glad, sure confidence; but time was when there were no such words to say; time was when the utmost that could be attained to was a dim, struggling hope as to the future of the souls which sleep.
How wise the Church has been in stating the positive side of this grand truth, and leaving the negative side undefined! The ancient creeds that have come down from primitive times, and which, by common consent, contain the marrow and pith of Christianity, say nothing at all about the nature and extent of penalty. They are content to leave vengeance with Him to whom vengeance belong-eth; they let the curse alone; and what they do ask us to confess our faith in is the blessing. " I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come; " " I believe in the life everlasting." These are the strong affirmations of the Church catholic. Would that modern creed-makers had always shown themselves equally discreet!
There are two senses in which we may understand what Christ says about His being Himself the way of life; and in both these senses what He says is true.
He is our "way," or means of access, to eternal life, in virtue of what He has done; and He is our " way" also, in virtue of what he has taught. In other words, we owe it to Him that a way there is, and we also owe it to Him that we understand how we ought to walk in the way, now that it is opened. Look with me for a few moments before we quit our subject at each of these two points. No one, I think, who reads the New Testament with honest eyes can fail to see that the story spread over its pages is the record of a great work wrought for man. Reject the whole thing as a delusion if you will; treat every Gospel as a fairy tale and every Epistle as a forgery: even then you scarcely will be bold enough to deny that what Gospels and Epistles purport to be, just as they stand, is, as I have said, the account of a great effort undertaken by one called the Son of God, and by Him at great cost achieved. What was that effort, what that achievement? Was it not the lifting of human nature to a higher level, and the opening to man of larger prospects and loftier skies?
The suffering and the death of Christ seem to have been associated in His own mind, and in the minds of those who were nearest to Him, with some signal victory, in the advantage of which all the world should share. We see foretokening signs of this very early in the narrative. Even in the sunny days of the ministries in Galilee and Judea, if "sunny" we have a right to call any of the days of the Man of Sorrows; even then the cloud-shadows, from time to time, move significantly across the scene. He speaks in a way that startles the disciples of the things that are destined to befall Him—the mocking, the scourging, and the cross. He sees beforehand the cup that He must drink of, and the baptism that He must be baptized with. And when, at last, we find Him in Gethsemane, anticipating in His agony the passion which is soon to follow, it is as if we were looking on a leader of armies alone in his tent on the eve of some tremendous battle which is to decide the destinies of a whole race.
Now, what was the conflict, what the victory? The conflict was with all the powers of evil that war against man and spoil his peace. The victory was the rising from the dead, the bringing of many sons unto glory, " the opening of the gates of life eternal" to all who press forward to follow where the captain leads. Let Jesus answer for himself: " I am the Good Shepherd; the Good Shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." " My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, and they shall never perish." " I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." " Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth in me hath everlasting life." "I am that bread of life," " and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." Is it objected that every one of these strong sayings is taken from a single book of Scripture? I answer that they can all be matched for intensity by words from the writings of St. Paul, who certainly was independent of the special influences that may have swayed the author of the Fourth Gospel. Yes, this is the general purport of the New Testament teaching, that just as a daring leader captures and opens a road which is all-important to his army's success, so Christ through sufferings, the necessity for which and the extent of which we can only dimly guess, won for us an entrance into life eternal. Many will call this " mystical " language, and will clamor for something more logical. God forbid that one should disparage logic! But God forbid also that one should talk about divine things as if logic were enough!
In deep-sea sounding it is a sad blunder to suppose that the man with the lead has touched bottom simply because he has let out all the line at his command. It is no proof of my having searched the end of the matter that I hold the end of the rope in my hand. To make positive assertions as to just how much deeper the ocean is than I have gone with the plummet, is indeed an unwarrantable thing; but then to say confidently that there is no deeper depth, is equally an affront put upon the truth.
I said that not only had Christ opened to us a new and living way into the unseen and the eternal, but that He had also told us how we ourselves might be kept in the way. The imitation of Christ—that, for you and me, is the way of life. To be always seeking to be like Him, walking in His steps, bearing His cross, curbing rebellious self, keeping under whatever in us it is which exalts itself against God's holy will—that is what it is to be led in " the way everlasting."
Dare not hastily to stigmatize this teaching by hard names. Dare not to call it " legalism," or " mere morality," or " reliance upon good works," —dare not to do this until you are perfectly certain that in doing so you have the mind of Christ, and that you speak with authority from Him. The " way of the cross " is the " way of life," and on this earth you shall look in vain for any easier way.
Eternal life is not the reward of a momentary flush of feeling; but to those who daily seek it, the daily bread which feeds the soul is freely given.
So deeply did these thoughts about the Savior as the way of life sink into the hearts of His earliest disciples, that they actually for a time gave the name to the new religion. It is a curious fact, and one which escapes the notice of many, even among the careful readers of the New Testament, that before the followers of Jesus had come to be called " Christians " at all, they were already known as " the people of the way." Saul went to Damascus with letters to the synagogue that if he found any of "this way," he might put them under arrest. In one of his speeches, he says of himself, you remember, " I persecuted this way unto the death." Of the unbelievers at Ephesus, it is alleged that they " spoke evil of that way; " and, a little later in the narrative, we read that " there arose no small stir about that way."
So then, as Christ's disciples, we are "the people of the way," pilgrims of the path; and what a magnificent privilege it is! We look backward into the past, far, far away, until the eye is baffled by the distance, we look backward and note the track along which God has been bringing His people through the ages that are gone. It is as when one stands on a ship's deck at night, and watches the vessel's wake as it reaches out across the blackness of the sea, revealed by its own phosphorescent light. All around is the thick darkness, overhead are the silent stars; but there astern, lies the track, witnessing by its very presence in that waste of waters that an intelligent mind is guiding the vessel's course, and that the voyagers are assured whence they came and whither they go.
Looking back over the great deep of human history, so vast, so unintelligible, so strangely agitated by stormy wind and tempest, so mysteriously swayed by current and counter-current—is it not a happy thing to be able to discern the shining wake, and to remember that we are in the ship with Jesus? He leads in "the way everlasting."
JOHN 14: 2.
In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
THE most startling feature of these statements is their positiveness. There is no hint of any un-certainty on the speaker's part. His tone is not that of one who is hazarding a conjecture, suggesting a possibility; it is pure, dogmatic assertion, nothing less. The implication is, " We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen." One is at liberty to reject the speech and the testimony as being those of a deceiver, if one chooses; but there can be no halfway course. This Christ, who thus addresses us as a teacher having authority, must be either wholly welcomed or wholly set aside.
And this very circumstance it is which makes Christian believing a happy thing to those who do believe. It is the dogmatic character of the Gospel, the strong Yea and Amen which it carries on its front, that makes it a message of comfort. Christendom was not built upon the foundation of a peradventure, but the corner-stone of the Church is a person—Jesus Christ. Accepting Him, we believe His words—that is the whole of it. Let us, then, this morning, take this saying of His, and try to see what it contains, how much it suggests, whither it leads.
When we look at the verse critically, we find that it is made up of two distinct statements, linked together by a phrase of reassurance. " In my Father's house are many mansions; " that is the first statement. " I go to prepare a place for you; " that is the second statement. And between these comes the friendly reminder, the comfortable word well suited to re-enforce a fainting heart, that doubts even while it loves and hopes, " If it were not so, I would have told you."
Look at the first statement: " In my Father's house are many mansions." The modern English usage of the word " mansion " makes it mean a building of rather more than ordinary pretensions, something midway between a home and a palace. In the English of the Bible it is evident that this cannot be the sense in which the word is meant to be received, for, so understood, the house ought rather to be within the mansion than the mansion within the house. The precise rendering is, " In my Father's house are many abiding-places," or as we should say familiarly, many rooms, many apartments.
How wonderfully these words have been illuminated and opened out by what it has been given man to discover with his eyes and his mind since the day they were spoken! Observe how entirely Christ grasps the thought of the unity of the whole scheme of Nature. To Him it is, all of it, " my Father's house." Loose thinkers and hasty writers would have us believe that this idea of the oneness of the universe, the correlation of its parts and powers, and its subjection to uniform control, is a modern discovery: but, no; it has lain firmly bedded in the Hebrew tradition from the beginning. The unity of God is the fountain truth from which flows all that the Bible has to tell. The other religions distributed gods through Nature, wherever they seemed to be needed; some for the oceans and the rivers, others for the mountains and forests, these for the heights, those for the depths; but 'the true seers of Jehovah never thought or taught after this fashion. "The heavens are Thine," their invocation ran; " the earth also is Thine; Thou hast laid the foundation of the round world and all that therein is." What if the " round world " meant to them a circle rather than a sphere? That matters nothing, except to the pettiest of critics. We also in our day have many beliefs about the earth and sky which will need revising presently. The point is, that they grasped the grand truth of the unity of the works of God.
They saw the manifoldness indeed, as the others did, but they were not upset by it, as the others were; for behind all outward show of diversity, they discerned a majestic oneness of purpose, plan, and government. All this is summed up in Christ's bold figure, " My Father's house." The universe, with all its marvelous complexity of parts and proportions, is a house, and this house not a mere workshop, not a factory, not a roofed and glazed and boarded shed to hold machinery or stores, but a dwelling: it is a Father's house. Yes, we do greatly need these words of Christ's as a corrective and balance to the desolateness of spirit in which so much of the talk which we hear nowadays about the universe is apt to leave us. Mingle this thought of fatherhood with all that the telescope has to tell of the infinitely great, and all that the microscope reveals of the infinitely little, and every fresh discovery will bring fresh delight. Leave the fatherhood out, and, like the sad king, you shall surely find in that much wisdom much grief, and mournfully confess that " he that increases knowledge increases sorrow." Blank space has in itself nothing to interest us, nor the mere thought of time. Who cares to have a picture of the desert on his walls? Or what charm is there in an endless almanac? Thought and feeling and conscience —these are the realities that carry a joy with them; and when we miss these, we are forlorn. What are the myriads of the stars to me if there is no one anywhere who calls them all by their names? Or why should I care whether it were a billion or a trillion years that the molten earth rolled around in its track, unless I believed that a hand was guiding it all the while to a better destiny, and making it ready for a blessing to come? Oh no, we cannot spare this persuasion of the divine fatherhood! Arithmetic will never fill the gap. Figures, no matter how large, how imposing, you make them, cannot feed the soul; and souls we have, and they are hungry souls.
The God of the chemists and the geologists and the astronomers, if existence be conceded to Him at all, would seem to be pure intellect. The God of the Bible is this; but He is more than this: He is a God who rejoices in the " habitable " parts of His earth, and whose delights are with the sons of men. He " built all things," but He is not an architect without a heart. The house-making does not rank before the fatherhood, but the fatherhood before the house-making.
But notice, as we pass on, Christ's way of speaking of the fatherhood; for it is peculiar. He does not say, " In your Father's house," or " In our Father's house, " but " In my Father's house." This is the language of the heir-apparent, rather than that of the ordinary subject, of the realm. When we take it in connection with other instances of the same mode of speech on Christ's part, we cannot help inferring a special dignity which attaches to His Sonship and does not attach to ours. His way of speaking of the house suggests an intimacy there which no one else might claim. We are reminded by it of those mysterious passages of New Testament Scripture in which the Son is associated with the Father in the work of creation. The Father is pictured to us as the Creator, but it is " by " the Son that He creates. " God, who created all things by Jesus Christ, " is a phrase of St. Paul's. " His Son by whom also He made the worlds," is an expression in the Epistle to the Hebrews. And St. John puts it in the very strongest way when he says that "without Him," meaning the Word which was made flesh, " without Him was not anything made that was made." " My Father's house" indeed! Who shall question His right to use the exclusive " my," rather than the inclusive " our," if in the rearing of the house He bore so signal a part? Nay, more; is it not this fellowship of the Father and the Son which makes the house, which otherwise might be a house only, into a home? But this by the way. What we are chiefly concerned with just now is the characteristic which Christ in these words of His assigns to the Father's house. It is a roomy house, He says—a house of many apartments. Let us make an effort to understand what this may mean.
Some students of the passage see in the reference to the " many mansions," a recognition of the diversities that prevail among men, both as respects their abilities and their tastes. People are sorted out here on earth, so they reason, according to their characteristics, inborn or acquired. Those, who have common likings and common pursuits are naturally drawn together, and enjoy one an-other's society, while those who have not these bonds of sympathy as naturally grow apart. Thus we have race distinctions and class distinctions without number, clubs, unions, associations, societies, and the like, and, according to the interpretation I speak of, the " many mansions " of the Father's house are intended to accommodate these differences. Every man is to find there his right place, associates congenial to him, surroundings that meet his own special needs; in a word, to use the cant phrase—his " true sphere." I state this interpretation of the words, not with a view to maintaining it, but only in order to combat it. As an interpretation, it seems to me to be open to two serious objections. In the first place, it runs counter to the whole tenor of Christ's teaching. It is true that we find human society cut up into hundreds of divisions and thousands of subdivisions; but if I read the New Testament aright, the drift and purpose of our Savior’s mission is the removal of barriers, rather than the maintenance of them. I mean, of course, the barriers that keep men from a larger and better sympathy with one another. The barriers that fence in righteousness Christ strengthened; for the liberty of the Gospel does not mean the liberty to do what we please; but the barriers which the Gospel seeks to break down are barriers that shut heart from heart and soul from soul, the partition walls that rest on foundations of pride and selfishness and prejudice. He shed His blood that He might draw us to God, and, in drawing us to Him, draw us to one another. Not that He might assort them into little companies, and shut them up in little rooms, did Christ die for men, but rather that He might gather out of every race and every clime and every country a great company which should be one family in Him.
The history of modern civilization bears out this view of the case. If there be in the current of affairs, as we are able to observe it, any one tendency more marked than another, it is the tendency toward recognizing the oneness of mankind.
The abolition of slavery, now gradually going on all over the world, is a fruit of the truth first emphasized by Christ that all men are brethren. The international exhibitions, which have become a recognized feature in the landscape of our modern life, are also illustrations of the same longing after a better union and communion. And in all quarters where Christ's doctrine is received, and His influence felt, we see how earnest is the desire of men to be drawn together, how keen their distrust of all that would separate and sunder them.
Again, another objection to looking at the " many mansions " as a device for accommodating the many sorts of people that make up the world lies here—it is too narrow an interpretation, in view of all that we now know about the extent of God's creation. The Heavenly Father doubtless has other families besides His family of men. It was natural, perhaps inevitable, that those who thought of this earth as the theatre of all God's operations, and of the sky, with its greater and its lesser lights, as only an appendage to the earth —it was natural, I say, that such persons, meditating upon this text of ours, should have seemed to themselves shut up to some such interpretation of it as the one I am seeking to discredit. For whom, they argued, could the many mansions be intended if not for the many varieties of people, the many sorts of saints, who were destined to make up the host of the redeemed?
But God in His providence has opened to us larger horizons than they saw; our eyes take in a wider sweep of the universe than theirs could; and we can bring to the study and interpretation of the Word of God helps of which they knew nothing.
And now, in order to make my meaning clearer, I shall ask you to pass from the statement with which the text opens to the one with which it ends, " I go to prepare a place for you." Think of Him as addressing not those twelve disciples only, but as speaking to all who should be His disciples in the long years to come. Think of yourself, if you are a believer in Him, have given your heart, have consecrated your life to His service—think of yourself as one of those to whom this thing is said, " I go to prepare a place for you." The place He went to prepare, so I would have you receive the teaching of this text, was one of those " many mansions." They are not all for us; but He has gone to make ready one of them for us. " For us men and for our salvation, He came down from heaven," we say in the Creed; yes, and for us men and for our salvation, He went up to heaven. At once the profoundest and the most scriptural view of the mission of Christ is that it was intended to lift up humanity. He took our nature upon Him that He might raise it, exalt it, set it up on high. His ascension into the heavens was not a merely personal act only—it was a representative act also; it pictured to the eye, imaged to the mind, the real thing that Christ had done for man, is doing for him now. " I go to prepare a place for you." What He means is that in His death and resurrection and ascension, His " redeeming work," as we are accustomed to call it, there lay wrapped up a power to lift mankind to a higher sort of existence. He will make heaven possible for man by making things ready for him there.
How eagerly a child will say to the playmate who is going in first to some show or merrymaking, " Keep a place for me!" And may we not discern in the longing that fills the upturned eyes of the disciples who watch their Lord as He ascends something of the same natural desire—a childish desire, no doubt, when directed to childish ends, but a most human desire when, looking off from the coasts of the life that is, we gaze wistfully toward the dim edges of the life which is to come? " Keep a place for you?" we hear our Lord reply; " yes, better than that, I go to make a place for you."
It does seem very strange that the thinkers and talkers of our times, who have so much to say about the evolution of man from lower forms of creature life, have so little to say about his possible development in the future. The same reasoning which shows that man has risen to his present position from something that was less than man, ought, at least, to suggest that he may yet rise to something that shall be more than man.
There is nothing to prove that the last rung of the ladder has been touched, the final term of the series reached. The Church not only believes in such a future exaltation of man, but it links that exaltation to the person of Christ. He took " the manhood into God " is the assertion of the strictest and most precise of all the formularies of the faith. By His agony and bloody sweat, His cross and passion, His precious death and burial, His glorious resurrection and ascension—by all this, He was the means of lifting up humanity into a greatness and a blessedness that did not be-long to it before. This is the Church's faith, and has always been. And how grand it is! Monotony and dullness vanish from life when we think of the possibilities that are to open for it in the place which Christ is making ready for His people. History gains a new dignity as soon as we have learned to trace on its pages the hints of this slowly-fulfilling purpose of the patient God. Despondency? Who dares to be despondent in view of the glory which shall be revealed in us? " For the earnest expectation of the creature," exclaims St. Paul, enamored of this high thought, "waited for the manifestation of the sons of God."
That which St. Paul waited for we are waiting for still, and we are waiting for it hopefully; for we have put our confidence in Jesus Christ: we have made up our minds to believe His word, and we trust Him when He says that a place is making ready for us in one of the many mansions of His father's house, and that if it were not so, He would have told us.
Whether the special mansion or abiding-place, the occupancy of which has been secured for man by the incarnation of the Son of God, is to be this earth which we now inhabit, renovated and made fit for the larger needs and better uses that will belong to the heavenly life or not, we cannot certainly know. Some sayings of Holy Scripture seem to point in this direction, while others more readily suggest distance and removal. It is a point upon which it has not pleased God to give us clear light. The things revealed, as we have had occasion to remember all through this enquiry, are few in number—surprisingly few, as compared with the things unrevealed. It is enough if whither He goes we know, and the way we know. The " whither " is upward; the " way " is the way of His commandments.
Looking ever in that direction, and keeping loyally to that way, we may hope to find a home at last in the mansion He is making ready.
I have said that these words of our text, interpreted as we have been interpreting them, add interest and dignity to life; but, oh, how much solemnity they add also! How is it with your daily life and mine? Are we living as men and women ought to live before whom eternity lies open? Are heaven and hell, eternal life and eternal death, the realities to us which the Bible represents them? Or are they mere cloud-pictures that float dreamily across the inner sky, noticed for a moment, and presently lost out of sight? Still it remains true, as one of the sturdiest and most downright of English thinkers put it long ago, that " things are what they are, and that their consequences will be what they will be," whether men believe or disbelieve. These two strong statements upon which our thoughts have dwelt this morning—are they true? If they are, then your not thinking them so, or my not thinking them so, will make no difference whatsoever. One of these days we shall be waked from our fond dream, and roughly waked. Then we may discover, when all too late, that the mansion has been indeed made ready, but that we are not ready for it. I do not say this in the character of an alarmist. But soberly, seriously, quietly, I ask you to ask your own selves whether, if these things be worth thinking about at all, they are not worth thinking about with all the earnestness and concentration you can command. There must have been times in the lives of most of us when we saw plainly enough, if only for a little while, how empty and unprofitable and vain this earthly existence is when taken out of connection with what is to follow. Immersed in affairs, the growth of the soul choked by a thousand temporal interests, we lose this true estimate of life, and take up with the false one instead; but those are our best moments, our best days, our best years, when most we realize the certainty of what is to come, and when least we care for the short-lived satisfactions of the mortal life. They may not be our most frequent moments, days, or years; but, depend upon it, they are our best.
The bearing of St. Paul's polemical training as a pharisee upon his use of the expression and kindred phrases.
WIDELY as critics differ about the question whether belief in a future life did or did not obtain among the Hebrews before the close of the Old Testament Canon, all are agreed that in Christ's time the Jewish mind was keenly alive upon this point. The Pharisees, the orthodox party in the Church, took the positive side in the controversy; the Sadducees, the " liberal " thinkers of that day, the negative side. " For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit; but the Pharisees confess both." (Acts 23: 8.)
Paul, the son of a Pharisee, and the pupil of Gamaliel, a representative man of that straightest sect, must as a student of divinity have been early imbued with faith in a future life, and from the line he took on at least two occasions (at his arraignment before the high-priest Ananias, and in his Apologia pro Vita sua addressed to Agrippa) it would seem that as to this particular point of doctrine he held himself, after his conversion, to be more of a Pharisee than ever.
Of his course at the former of these interviews we read that "when Paul perceived that the one part were Sadducees and the other Pharisees, he cried out in the council, Men and brethren, I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee: of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question." To the Herodian king his language is, " And now I stand and am judged for the hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers; unto which promise our twelve tribes instantly serving God, day and night, hope to come. For which hope's sake, King Agrippa, I am accused of the Jews."
The natural, perhaps the only, inference from such words is that Paul regarded his newly adopted faith largely in the light of its being a grand re-enforcement and authentication of a belief which he had always held from childhood, only with this added feature and signal qualifying clause, that whereas he had formerly maintained the doctrine on abstract grounds of theological reasoning, he now linked it closely to the person of Christ, " the first begotten of the dead," and preached, not simply the resurrection, but " Jesus and the resurrection."
It was this last feature which made his advocacy of the doctrine of eternal life, which otherwise would have been most acceptable, so offensive to the Pharisaic mind.
Link this consideration to another presently to be stated, and the resulting inference will be very strong that what Paul preached was, Through Christ a life which cannot perish; apart from Christ, no everlasting life at all.
The other consideration referred to is this. Knowing that to a Sadducee's thinking the only proper contrast to " eternal life " was extinction, cessation of being, " no resurrection," Paul would scarcely have expressed himself in the way he did about the future, had he meant to be understood as teaching the everlasting survival in conscious wretchedness of "them that perish." The Sadducees, and they probably in every city made up a large proportion of his Jewish auditory, would naturally and unless specially warned take what he said about the loss of eternal life as meaning the forfeiture of continued existence. Surely, had he meant them to understand it as an important part of his teaching that the losers of eternal life were, nevertheless, equally with the finders of it, to live on forever, he would have told them so. But, in point of fact, we do not find that he ever did tell them so.
Believers in the necessary immortality of the soul, when arguing among themselves, and with no one to dispute their postulate, may perhaps use the expression " life everlasting " in the sense of " unending blessedness " without danger of being misunderstood. But Paul, we must remember, habitually addressed listeners who were divided as to the reasonableness of this very postulate, and on his lips such a lax use of synonyms, which cannot without much compulsion be made even to seem synonymous, would have been most blameworthy.
Atomic and molecular analogies in the case of the soul.
The alleged indestructibility of the " atom " has, ever since the days of Pythagoras, formed a basis with theists for belief in the endless survival of the soul. No doubt the atomist philosophy, as taught in the early Greek schools, had its atheistic developments, but it was also, as Cudworth amply shows, open to a better interpretation, and capable of being turned to the uses of belief. At any rate, Bishop Butler lends the great weight of his authority to a modified, and as one might say, Christianized form of this argument, when he writes, in the first chapter of The Analogy "We have no way of determining by experience what is the certain bulk of the living being each man calls himself, and yet till it be determined that it is larger in bulk than the solid elementary particles of matter, which there is no ground to think any natural power can dissolve, there is no sort of reason to think death to be the dissolution of it, of the living being, even though it should not be absolutely indiscerptible."
This is very carefully guarded language, and does not necessarily teach (observe the phrase, " natural power ") the indestructibility of man, but inasmuch as it seems to suggest the strong probability of a permanent survival of all souls, it deserves attention and reply from the advocate of conditional immortality.
Butler's argument has usually been met by the method, always ungracious, and in this instance peculiarly infelicitous, of the reductio ad absurdum. This reductio has taken two forms: first, it has been alleged that the argument is one, which, if good for man, must be equally potent in behalf of the brutes; and, secondly, that it suggests not only the sempiternity, but also the pre-existence of the soul, according to the maxim of the atomists, well formulated, although in sport, by Persius: "De nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti."
But to the former of these enforced corollaries, no doubt many modern philanthropists, and presumably the members of the " Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," would give a cheerful assent, while, as to the latter, it falls to the ground the moment Butler or his advocate chooses to say, " I am not only an atomist but a creationist."
Since the publication of the Analogy, however, there have been discoveries made, which the illustrious author of that work would have been among the first to recognize, and the quickest to appreciate, even though they render, in the case of this particular argument of his, a resort to the reductio ad absurdum unnecessary for the overthrow of his reasoning. I refer to the distinction drawn in modern science between the " atom " and the " molecule." One of these, the molecule, is the ultimate unit of the physicist; the other, the atom, the ultimate unit of the chemist. Butler's argument knows no such distinction, and yet in the light of it his conclusion falls powerless, since we are absolutely without any ground for determining whether the molecule or the atom be the true analogue of the soul, the essential man. Take, for example, one of the accepted definitions of the molecule,—A molecule of any substance (substance is here used in the popular, and not the metaphysical sense) is the smallest particle of such substance in which the qualities of it in here.
Evidently the molecule (which under the name of " atom" was a supposition in Butler's day, but has become for us an ascertained reality) is " the elementary particle " of the argument of The Analogy, and indeed it is the only elementary particle known now, so far as physics is concerned. But at this point steps in the chemist, and affirms that this " elementary " particle, which is the unit of all mechanical structure, is in his hands discerptible, and that, as a matter of fact, it is constantly, in the processes of Nature, undergoing disruption. Here, for instance, is a molecule of the familiar substance called alum; you cannot subdivide it mechanically, you cannot split it into smaller molecules, for then, under the terms of the definition above quoted, it would cease to be alum; but you can, by methods of recombination, by bringing stronger affinities into play, sunder that molecule into atoms of aluminum, potassium, Sulphur, and oxygen—the true " elementary particles " of which it is composed. Now, my point is this, namely: that there is no more ground in reason for comparing the "soul " (or whatever we may please to call the human entity) to the " atom " of the chemist than there is for likening it to the " molecule " of the physicist. If forced to take up with either one or the other analogue, we might well (considering the manifold characteristics of human nature) give the preference to the molecule of a highly complex substance, rather than to the atom of an uncompounded element. But really there is no ground for any such discrimination. Science presents us with two sorts of units, the one dissoluble, the other not. Which of the two most accurately reflects the nature of the created soul, we are absolutely powerless to say. Hence the atomist argument, which is the strongest of all for the absolute immortality of the soul, must be ruled out of the discussion, and our conclusions as to human destiny based on other premises.
The teaching of the book of Common Prayer as to life in Christ.
As these Sermons will be likely to fall into the hands of some who, like the writer, are in the ministry of the Episcopal Church, and amenable to her discipline, it may be worth while to say something about the attitude of the Book of Common Prayer toward the doctrine here preferred.
Even for readers who are not Episcopalians such an enquiry need not be wholly without interest, for the Prayer-Book is, in a true sense, the heritage of all English-speaking people, and ap-peals to the educated mind through Arethusan channels that underlie, by a great depth, the moats and trenches of our " unhappy divisions."
It is to be observed, then, that the Anglican formularies are not merely patient of such an interpretation as the doctrine of conditional immortality would require, but that they even seem to solicit it.
Of course, it is not for a moment pretended that this result is traceable to any conscious purpose on the part of the compilers (or, rather, the revisionists) of Edward's and Elizabeth's day to inculcate the belief in question. The fact stands as it does simply in consequence of the perfectly loyal adherence on the part of those sixteenth-century scholars to the early Christian tradition, as that has come down embodied in the writings we call the New Testament.
Because the Prayer-Book faithfully reflects Scripture with all its antinomies as well as with all its harmonies; because the Prayer-Book is explicit where the Bible is explicit, and reticent where the Bible is reticent, therefore, and for no other reason, is it that the Prayer-Book presents conditional immortality as the likeliest purport of our Lord's teaching about the future of man. When it is remembered how thoroughly the popular the-ology of the Reformation period, both Roman and anti-Roman, was committed to the doctrine of endless torment, it seems little short of miraculous that the revised service-book of the national Church should have been kept clean from so great a blemish. That it was so kept is virtually affirmed in a judgment which, whatever its status in the dim region of ecclesiastical law, is certainly valuable as being the deliberately expressed opinion of a select number of clear-headed men specially trained to the careful interpretation of language.
But waiving the appeal to legal precedent and authority (a poor weapon at best in controversies about things divine), take the plain English of the Prayer-Book, as it stands before our eyes, and consider what is the most obvious and natural import of so much of it as' touches the question of the final award.
Instead of assuming the apologetic tone, I am bold to assert, that were a believer in the doctrine of " endless life only through Christ " to undertake the compilation of a liturgy, such as should best set forth, under a devotional form, the truth he desired to teach, he could not frame one better adapted to the purpose than that which already exists under the name of The Common Prayer. Of course the doctrine might be made more obtrusive in a manual of worship contrived on purpose to express it; but I am supposing the case of a liturgist who is not merely a man of one idea, but who works with a due regard to the proportion of the faith.
And this point will be the more readily conceded, after attention has been drawn to the many instances in which the "aeternus" of the old Church Latin has been rendered by the translators " everlasting," rather than " eternal." For granting, for argument's sake (and it is a large concession), that our English " eternal " need not, any more than the Greek ainos, " necessarily connote endless duration," it will still remain a thing impossible to say the same of " everlasting." It is conceivable that a sound exegesis might require us in some cases to accept the word " ungodly " as the logical contradictory of " eternal; " but no one will have the hardihood to claim for " everlasting" any other logical contradictory- than " not lasting forever." Hence, if the Prayer-Book be found representing "everlasting life " as a thing given to us only in Christ, it is a fair (not to say the only fair) interpretation of such language, to infer that all life which is cut off from Christ's life is a non-everlasting, perishable thing.
So far as direct and precise dogmatic statement is concerned, the Prayer-Book is simply silent upon the point at issue. Having made in the two great catholic creeds its massive affirmation of the life everlasting, it rests content.
No Article of the 39 of the Church of England, or of the 38 of the American Protestant Episcopal Church, so much as touches the question.
The history of the famous Forty-second Article, in which a negative view was once formulated, is well known.
The Catechism is almost equally guarded in its language, although, by sanctioning, in one of its answers, the significant phrase (also employed in the Burial Office) " eternal death," it does suggest a conclusion which, as will be shown further on, grows easily out of its sacramental teaching.
In the face of this reserve on the part of Articles and Catechism, we are thrown back for suggestions upon the devotional utterances of the Prayer-Book. And here, no doubt, there occurs at once to many minds the familiar deprecation of the Litany, " From everlasting damnation, Good Lord, deliver us," of which Mr. Blunt, in his Annotated Book of Common Prayer, says, " If the force of this deprecation can be evaded in the interests of Universalism, no words can retain any meaning." But however formidable the bar which this phrase puts in the way of a restorationist interpretation of the formularies, it must be remembered that to the believer in the doctrine of conditional immortality it offers no difficulty whatever, since he accounts that to be strictly an everlasting damnation (a pa na damni sterna) which adjudges to the offender the inevitable loss of what is dearest to him of all things—his very existence.
But only consider the phraseology employed when it is the positive side of the truth which is to be brought out (and for one word about deprivation, the Prayer-Book has twenty about bestowal), and the reasonableness of the strong claim that has been made will become plainer.
Almost at the threshold of the Morning Prayer, the Declaration of Absolution meets us with these words, " Confirm and strengthen you in all goodness, and bring you to everlasting life; " while in the " Prayer of St. Chrysostom," with which we close this same daily worship, there stand out distinctly the two requests—first, that in this world present we may have the knowledge of God's truth, and, "in the world to come life everlasting."
In one of the special prayers for use upon several occasions, we ask that we may be led to " apply our hearts unto that heavenly wisdom which in the end will bring us to everlasting life."
In the first of the Advent collects, we pray that now, " in the time of this mortal life," we may so cast away the works of darkness that in the last day we may " rise to the life immortal;" while in the second, we ask that " we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life which thou hast given us in our Savior Jesus Christ."
The whole doctrine of conditional immortality may be said to be contained in these two collects.
In the collect for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, one leading purpose of the manifestation of the Son of God is declared to have been that he might "make " us " heirs of eternal life."
On the Sunday before Easter we are bidden to pray that we may not only be led to follow the example of Christ's patience, but may also be "made partakers of His resurrection."
At Easter, the day of all days when we should naturally look for sure indications of the truth about the world to come, we find the collect opening with this most suggestive invocation, " Almighty God, who through thine only begotten Son hast overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life," and, again, in the " proper preface" for Easter, in the Holy Communion, we are met by language which, if possible, is stronger still: "who by his death hath destroyed death, and by his rising to life again, hath restored to us everlasting life."
And now, leaving quotations of this sort, which might be multiplied if there were need, and which, in a sense, are even more indicative of the spirit and temper of truly catholic theology than the most precise dogmatic definitions could be, let us pass to the Sacramental offices, and see whether there is anything in the structure of them that looks in the same direction.
Take the form for the administration of the initial sacrament of the Church, the Baptismal Office. This, when analyzed, is found to be built upon the contrast drawn out by St. Paul between the first Adam and the second; between man as he is in his natural helplessness, and man as he is when lifted up and restored in Christ. The idea is that the child is transferred from the state typified by the first man which " is of the earth, earthy," to that state now made possible under the second man, which is " the Lord from heaven."
Accordingly we begin by asking in behalf of the child for something " which by nature he cannot have," and a little further on, we find the climax of our prayer for him in the beautiful petition that he "may so pass the waves of this troublesome world that finally he may come to the land of everlasting life." Let anyone who will take the trouble to do so only read the Baptismal Service once through from beginning to end, upon the supposition that everlasting life is the gift of God through Christ, and he may be surprised to find how many of the difficulties under which the language of that formulary has been supposed to labor will disappear before such an interpretation. It is not claimed, of course, that Baptism imparts, ipso facto, the gift of eternal life, but rather that it introduces the subject of it to all those influences and helps which may best dispose his mind " towards the attainment of everlasting salvation."
Look in a like spirit at the symbolism of the Eucharist, the other great sacrament " ordained by Christ Himself." Has it not, over and above its commemorative character, retrospective of the sacrificial death of Christ, another aspect kindred to this, and yet distinct, namely, the presentation of the Son of God as One whom we are to feed upon in order that we may be strengthened and built up in that life which alone is permanent and abiding? Without food our natural bodies shrivel and perish; is not one chief significance of the Holy Communion this, that similarly our souls must starve and die if they also are not fed? Christ plants anew in the garden of His Church that tree of life on which the door of the first Paradise was shut. Certainly no plainer interpretation can possibly be suggested for the words of delivery:
"The body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life."
"The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life."
And the Catechism rightly represents the purport of this sacrament as being two-fold, for in answer to the question, " Why was the sacrament of the Lord's Supper ordained?" the child is taught to reply, not only that it was " for the continual remembrance of the sacrifice of the death of Christ," but also that it was for the continual remembrance of " the benefits which we receive thereby "—benefits afterward summed up as follows: " The strengthening and refreshing of our souls by the body and blood of Christ, as our bodies are by the bread and wine." Thus faithfully, in prayer, in creed, and in sacramental symbolism, does the Anglican manual of worship reflect the great central truth of the revelation of Jesus Christ:
"I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly."