A collection of letters, essays, and other papers concerning the life and death to come.
BY J. H. PETTINGELL, A. M.,
Author of the
"Homiletical Index,"
"Theological Trilemma,"
"Platonism versus Christianity,"
"Bible Terminology,"
“The Life Everlasting,”
"The Unspeakable Gift," etc., etc., etc.
http://www.creationismonline.com/TSK/Immortality.html
Yarmouth, Maine.
Scriptural Publication Society, 1. C. Wellcome, Director.
Copyrighted By 1. C. Wellcome.
1887
ESSAYS
1 The Unity of Man
2 Post-mortem Probation
3 The Gospel of Life in the Syriac, N. T.
4 The Two Ways
5 The Resurrection of the Dead
6 The Intermediate State
7 Bible Terminology
8 What Did Christ Teach?
9 Paul's Earnest Desire
10 Baptism for the Dead
11 Will Satan Live Forever?
12 Coming of Christ and Sinner's Doom
REVIEWS AND REPLIES.
13 Life and Death in the N. T. Reply to Rev. J. Greene A.M.
14 Endless Punishment. Reply to Prof. Shedd
15 What We Think. Reply to Congregationalist
16 Annihilation. Reply to Dr. J. H. Brookes
17 Science and Sentiment
18 This World Not a Failure
19 Letter to a Congregational Minister
20 The Unspeakable Gift
21 The Soul Hero and Hereafter. Review
22 The Soul and the Resurrection. Review
23 Resurrection of the Wicked. A letter
24 The Resurrection-An Important Doctrine
25 The Life Beyond
26 A Chapter of My Experience
27 What Shall I Do? Reply
28 Have Any of the Rulers Believed on Him?
29 All Fullness in Christ
30 A Letter to the American Board of Foreign Missions.
IT seems the duty of the editor and publisher of this volume to say to the public that the distinguished author was too ill to edit it, or even to read and correct the proof sheets. Therefore any improper words or erroneous expressions which may appear should be attributed to a lack on the part of the editor or printer to comprehend the copy.
The author put a large amount of manuscripts into my band to publish in a book -as his last. On examination I found they contained thoroughly digested views and arguments on the most vital Scriptural subjects which man should consider, also Reviews of various theological questions, Replies to various criticisms, and perversions of opponents, and important public Addresses, and valuable Letters and articles written for the press in this country and Europe. There was much more matter than should go into the book I had designed, and I found it difficult to decide what portions to leave out, for much must be left out. All seemed so valuable that I have been beguiled to publish much more than can be afforded in a book of the price put upon this volume.
These are the last written efforts of this eminent Christian minister, scholar, writer, and theological student of the Bible. During the last year his health has been rapidly failing, and while his book is going through the press, he is about to die. Yet his writings will live and preach while time continues. Fie has done much to advance the great theological reform which is in progress, and to stay the tide of neological principles which are flooding the church. His writings will yet be more highly appreciated and do much to aid in a proper understanding of the "gift of eternal life." His fidelity to the Word of God, his large-heartedness, his abundant charity for those in error, and those who perverted and slandered his writings, misquoted and misrepresented his teachings, show very clearly in all his works that the Spirit of Christ, and of love for His Gospel, governed him in all his efforts to exalt the "Life-Giver," and to lead men to "the fountain of life." And this admirable principle, so seldom manifested in polemic discussions of religious views by theological writers, has won for him a host of friends throughout the Christian world, and will gain the admiration of all candid men who read his productions.
I. C. W.
January, 1887.
BESIDES the several volumes in advocacy of the doctrine of Eternal Life only in Christ, which the author has given to the public within the last few years, he has had occasion to write various addresses, letters, essays, and polemical articles, to repel attacks, or to define and defend certain misrepresented points of doctrine, together with various miscellaneous papers on the same general subject, for periodicals in this country and in Europe, many of which were of too ephemeral a character to be worth preserving; but some of the others, it has been thought by those to whose favorable judgment he defers, might still further serve the cause to which they were devoted, by being gathered together and published in a more permanent form, before they all, as many of them already have, passed beyond the hope of recovery.
It will be found that the collection here made touches the main question on almost every side, and presents it in a variety of aspects. It is to be hoped, however, that while these papers have been put forth through such a variety of channels, at home and abroad, and under such a variety of circumstances, through a series of years, they will be seen to be in harmony with each other, and, what is more, in harmony with the spirit and teachings of the Gospel. It may appear to those who desire to criticize, that he has " used sharpness," or undue severity, in some of his strictures or reviews. But he is sure that if they could know under what extreme provocation some of these papers had been written, and could compare them with the articles that called them forth, and indeed understand how many sharp things he has refrained from saying, to which he was tempted, they would be inclined rather to praise his forbearance.
I have endeavored, so far as I was able, to reply to my antagonists in terms of Christian courtesy and kindness, " speaking the truth in love," however unfair, sophistical, perverse and personal their assaults may have been. What I have written has been written under the supreme conviction that it was not my own personal interests, but the cause of my Divine Master, that I was endeavoring to uphold, and His glory that I was seeking to promote. I have always tried to believe that the opposition of my Christian brethren, however unchristian it might be in manner and form, or even in spirit, must be due to a false education, erroneous views of the doctrine they opposed, or to a misunderstanding of the question in discussion, rather than to any real opposition of heart to the truth itself, and that if they could only be persuaded to look at this doctrine of Eternal Life only in Christ, apart from their human philosophy, they could not help seeing how it agrees with the teaching of the Scriptures from beginning to end; how it magnifies both the Law and the Gospel; how it stops the mouths of infidels and sceptics; how it honors the wisdom, justice, goodness, and grace of God, and scatters the dark clouds that a false theodicy has thrown around Him, and clarifies those so-called "dark and mysterious doctrines" of our religion, and reflects infinite glory upon Jesus Christ, our Savior; and seeing all this as we see it, they could not fail to accept the view we would urge upon their attention, as so many of them have already done, and instead of opposing, would cheerfully join with us in proclaiming it to the world. And as for others, who are determined,- whatever the Word of God may say to the contrary -to believe the lie of the great Deceiver, that so flatters their pride and encourages their hopes even in sin, and is so popular in the world, we cannot hope, by any arguments we may bring, to make them either see or love this truth until it shall please God to open their hearts to receive it.
I have great cause for encouragement and thankfulness, that my writings have been received with such favor by so many Christian friends of all denominations, both at home and abroad, and for the assurance that is coming to me daily, by letters from all? parts of this country and from Europe, and even from mission fields in various parts of the world, that the precious truth for which I contend is dear to many other hearts, and that the seeds that have been widely scattered are springing up and bearing fruit on every side; that not merely inquirers, but converts, are multiplying, and that under this new view-or rather the old primitive view restored - they are coming to see a new beauty and glory in the Gospel plan of Salvation, of which they have heretofore had no conception; that the doctrine of the Resurrection, which Satan's falsehood has so greatly perverted and obscured, is again invested with its true power, and the scepticism to which they had been so severely tempted-and under which so many are falling-in the light of the glorious Gospel of Eternal Life, as the gift of God's grace through Jesus Christ our Lord, is gone with the error that begets it.
While it is sad to see how far the church of Christ has fallen away from " the faith once delivered to the saints," and how extensively she has become demoralized by the dogma of the natural immortality of all men, and what delusive fancies are taught with respect to the life to come, and how largely sinners are comforting themselves, and are encouraged by their teachers, in the hope of "another chance hereafter," and how little power this adulterated Gospel is having over the lives of professing Christians, yet we "do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice" that Christ is preached by so many faithful disciples, and that even the opposition which we have had to encounter "has fallen out rather to the furtherance of the Gospel," and that this ancient Scripture doctrine of Eternal Life by Redemption, through Christ, arid Him only, after an eclipse of ages, is today better understood and more extensively accepted than in any age since the time of the Apostolic Fathers. We have no more doubt of its general prevalence among the true disciples of Christ than we have of the final triumph of the Gospel itself. The Lord hasten it in His time.
There is one other question in which all who recognize Christ as the only Life-giver of perishing men are especially interested, and which is closely connected with this great central doctrine-that of the Second Coming of our Lord-which I had hoped to discuss more fully and somewhat at length in a separate essay as a fit conclusion to this series; but I am forbidden by the complete failure of my health to prepare it, or to do anything more than to bring these miscellaneous papers together for publication, without any such revision as I would be glad to give them. Indeed, I am quite unable to make the ordinary proof corrections. This delicate and important duty must be relegated to other hands, or be left undone.
It is, however, to me, a cheering thought that I have been permitted to spend so many of the closing years of my life - now continued beyond my expectation - in the advocacy of this glorious truth, and that my efforts, though feeble and imperfect, have not been altogether in vain, and that, with my waning strength, the Master whom I have tried to honor and serve has "laid up for me," at His coming - which cannot be far away-unworthy as I am, "a crown of righteousness, which He will give to me at that day," and not to me only, but "unto all that love His appearing."
J. H. PETTINGELL.
New Haven, November, 1888.
An Essay read before the Philadelphia Association of Congregational Ministers, July 1880; printed as an Annex to "Platonism vs. Christianity." and incorporated with that monograph into the larger volume, "The Life Everlasting."
That there is a certain threefold manner in which God makes Himself known -as in Nature, in Christ, and in Grace by His Spirit - and, consequently, a threefold aspect in which He may he viewed, is no doubt true; and for aught that we know, there may be an actual trinity in His nature. But this doctrine of the Trinity may be, and has been, carried to such an extreme as to become a monstrous error, and to differ but little from absolute Tritheism.
As a natural protest against this error, we have Unitarianism, which insists, as it should, upon the perfect unity of God; but in doing this, it has become obnoxious to the charge of error in the opposite direction. We are prone to extremes; and even in the line of truth we may, and often do, go beyond its limit and end in an untruth.
Have we not done this in respect to the nature of man, as well as that of God? Because he is endowed with a twofold or rather threefold power of action - physical, intellectual, and spiritual -and may be viewed under these several aspects, and regarded in a certain sense, as a dual, or tripartite creature, philosophy has come to regard him as actually two or three creatures in one.
Over against this extreme, we have materialism protesting against this error, and insisting so strongly on the complete unity of man as to discredit the existence of either soul or spirit within him, and to attribute all his exercises to the operations and changes of matter alone. Hence science, which has its proper sphere within material limits, comes, as in other questions of philosophy and theology, or rather philosophical theology, into antagonism with what is called the orthodox doctrine of the true nature of man. It finds its justification in the erroneous manner in which this doctrine has been held and advocated.
Whatever objections, in a religious point of view, may be brought against the scientific materialism of the present day-and it is certainly open to serious objections as now held and advocated by some of our leading scientists-it emphasizes and insists on a truth which we do well to consider in discussing man's nature and destiny - the complete unity of man.
It is no doubt true, that man in a certain sense stands midway between the spiritual and the natural world, and may be considered as the connecting link between the two, and fitted to control in the one while be has intercourse with the other. He has his roots in the earth, like the tree, but the blossom and the fruitage are in the air above. But because he possesses, on the one hand, a physical body, in common with the brutes beneath him, and, on the other, " partakes of the divine nature" which is spiritual, it does not follow that he is two or three creatures in one. And yet our philosophical theology teaches us something very much like this. Indeed, it teaches exactly this. He is said to be, in the first place, a perfect animal; and then within this animal there is another complete nature, or rather being - for so it is regarded, according to the philosophy of Plato, which is the foundation of our popular theology-and this being is entirely spiritual.
Though that part of Plato's philosophy which teaches that this spiritual being within is untreated and therefore eternal, is dropped, as essentially atheistic, yet the conclusion that it is actually and necessarily indestructible on account of its spiritual nature, is still insisted on. If instead of this dichotomous division, we adopt the trichotomous, which certainly better harmonizes with teachings of Scripture-if we are to make any division at all-there are two beings in this one body in its normal state; a soul and a spirit. Bat without considering this point on which Christian philosophers differ, they may be said to agree very generally in regarding the lower and higher natures of man as so distinct and complete in themselves as to be actually divisible at death. Their union in this life is but temporary. Death dissolves the bond and lets them go apart. It is like the dissolution of the marriage tie, or of a partnership between individuals. However disastrous it may be to one of the parties, it only gives greater freedom and power to the other party or parties. Death is not death to the entire man, but only to one of the parties. The word "death" has no application to the other, excepting in a figurative sense, to denote a depraved condition of being.
That this is the popular notion, and that it is sustained by the current theology and literature - both secular and sacred-of the present day, no one will deny. But is it true-we do not say according to the teachings of science, for science teaches no such thing-is it true according to the teachings of God's Word, which must be our final appeal on questions of this nature? It is certainly true that man may be supposed to be divided into two or three or any number of subordinate parts for the purpose of analysis and philosophical treatment; and so may the brute animals, or indeed anything else in Nature. But is it true that any two or three or more of these parts are so independent of the others, as to be able to live and thrive and fulfill their proper functions apart from the rest? The Scriptures speak of the body, the soul, and the spirit; so also they speak of the mind, the heart, the head, the eye, the tongue, etc. But do they speak of them as so many separable and independent entities, and as having independent responsibilities of their own?
Science may indeed be in error in ignoring the radical distinction between the physical and the psychical, the noetic and the material in man, and in asserting so positively that all thought, feeling and action in man, and in brutes alike, is due entirely to material agencies; and yet it may be fulfilling an important service to truth in calling attention so especially to the actual unity of man - a truth which is essential to any true understanding of the future state, and which has been greatly overlooked, if not quite subverted, in discussing the destiny of man.
It must be admitted that those who have insisted the most strongly on the duality or trinity of persons in man, have never been able to find any proper cleavage between the parties in this partnership, nor to agree with each other, nor with themselves, as to the proper division of the whole estate among the several partners. Indeed, when hard pressed, they have been constrained to confess that their arguments, for the most part, are as applicable to brutes as to men.
Have we any better warrant from Scripture, or sound philosophy, than we have from science, for our loose notions of the relation between the body and the soul-for the popular notion that it is a kind of marriage relation for this life only - a mere limited partnership, that may be formed and dissolved as between two individuals - that the soul, which is but one of two or. perhaps three partners, may assume the liabilities of both, and fulfill all the functions of life unimpaired?
Do not the Scriptures represent man as a complete solidarity? Was he not created as such in the beginning? The body, soul, and spirit which were requisite to constitute him a complete man, were not three persons with separate responsibilities, but were united in one responsible person. The law was laid upon man as one undivided and indivisible unity - not upon his body, nor upon his soul, nor upon his spirit, but upon the whole in one: " Thou shalt not eat," etc. And the penalty was not threatened against any one part of his complex nature more than another, but against his whole being: " Thou shalt die." He could not have understood it otherwise, nor did he, until the tempter suggested another solution. Nor could we, without this false philosophy, which shows us how to read another meaning into the plain and positive language of Scripture, and to say and believe that the threatening of actual death applied to but one of the partners in this firm, but as to the other or others, it is to be understood only in a figurative sense, as implying a sinful and miserable condition of being endlessly perpetuated. And so, when the Bible speaks of the death of man, as the natural and necessary result of sin, and of the utter destruction of the wicked, no matter how emphatic and definite the language it uses, we have learned to interpret it in this double sense, as applying to the body only in any actual real sense; but as to all the rest of man - to the man himself, the real, responsible sinning agent-it can have only a figurative application! The diseases, pains, and infirmities of the body which result from sin are regarded as the precursors of its death, or symptomatic of the certain end to which they point; but the disorders, pains, and distresses of the soul which result from the same cause are not regarded as the precursors of its coming death, nor as symptomatic of the approaching end, but as the end itself - for it can experience no other death.
Dr. A. A. Hodge, in his Outlines of Theology, truly says: " While the senses are several and the bodily organization is constantly changing, yet in every comslips away from this fundamental truth when he comes to speak of the penalty of the law and the future plex experience, and through all time, the central I, But he which thinks and feels, is an absolute unit. The penalty, Thou shalt surely die," "Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return," is not addressed to the man that thinks and feels, but to the body, which, apart from this " central I," cannot think or feel. But, in order to save both their philosophy and their theology- which, indeed, are in opposition to each other they say that while the body dies actually, the soul undergoes a kind of moral transformation metaphorically called death, and lives on as sensitive and as active as ever and infinitely more so, to sin and suffer forever. They constantly affirm that the man himself does not and cannot die. So said the tempter; so said Plato; and so says our traditional theology which is founded on his philosophy. But in opposition to all this the Word of God says, and repeatedly and constantly and uniformly says, throughout the whole inspired volume: " Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth DEATH "death to the sinning man - not merely to one part of him, but to the entire man. And so it is now working out its fearful and inevitable results in every sinning soul, and when its sad work is finished, whether sooner or later, the sinner must die; and were it not for that new life which is begotten in the children of God through grace in Christ, which is not natural, but altogether supernatural, there would be no hope for any man.
How clear and simple the teaching of the Scriptures when viewed apart from this blinding, bewildering philosophy! "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." Precisely the same thing is said of all the other animals which God made, though it hardly appears in our present version. hen man dies he gives up the ghost, or breath of life, which God breathed into him, and he then becomes a dead man or a dead soul, and so he remains till he is raised again in the resurrection-the righteous to live again forever in His kingdom, and the unrighteous to perish in the second death, from which there is no recovery.
The denial of the true unity of man not only obscures the Divine Law, and constrains us to such an interpretation of its penalty as to bring reproach on the justice of God, but it also obscures the Gospel, and robs Christ of His real glory in our redemption. He did not die, they say, to redeem us from actual death - excepting so far as the body is concerned - but only from a state of sin and misery. The new life which He offers us is not actually a new life, but only an improved condition of our old life. "The Life Everlasting," of which He so continually spoke, and which He promised to all who would believe on Him, is no more enduring than our old Adamic life, which is also everlasting. It simply means a purification of our own immortal natures. The exhortation to "fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on Eternal Life," must mean infinitely less than the words seem to import, and the expostulation, " Why will ye die?" seems like bitter irony. For the death of the body cannot be avoided; and as to what is called "spiritual death," it has already fallen on man; and what other death to come can there be but the second death? But this, in the sense of the actual death and destruction of the soul, cannot, according to this philosophy, be allowed.
Those pregnant passages of Scripture which set forth the love and mercy of God in our redemption - such as, " The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord "; "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life"; " I give unto them Eternal Life," etc., etc., - cannot be literally understood, but must be taken in a modified and tropical sense to mean man's recovery from a state of sin and misery to a state of purity and blessedness.
Here is the source of Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism, and the various phased of ghostism, which prevail at the present day. We are now told by Christian preachers and teachers that in dying we do not really die, we merely cast off our bodies like worn-out garments at the door of death, and rise, at once, into greater freedom of thought and action. Death is a natural process; it simply marks one stage in the normal development of our immortal natures. There is nothing supernatural in the continuation of our lives beyond the grave. Not merely the supernatural character of the resurrection is denied, but the doctrine of the resurrection itself, as taught in the Scriptures, which Paul so much insisted on as the foundation of all our hopes for any life whatever beyond the present, and on which the early Christians fastened their hopes, is either denied altogether, or reduced to an unmeaning pageant. And so, deprived of all its real significance and power, this great doctrine has fallen into neglect.
Well did the other early reformers insist upon this unity of man in life and in death, the unconscious state of the dead, the miraculous character of the resurrection and of the future life, in opposition to the Spiritualistic fancies of the Papal church concerning the intermediate state, the purgatorial sufferings of the wicked, and the ghostly bliss of the righteous.
This philosophy of Plato concerning the nature of man - so flattering to his pride, but so inconsistent with the simple teachings of God's Word - has been a fruitful source of error and confusion in the church. Notwithstanding Paul warned the early Christians against it, they soon fell under its corrupting influence, and suffered it to mold and shape their whole system of doctrines. Although we have rejected some of the grosser errors of the Papal church, and modified others to bring them into a better harmony with the spirit of the age, our Protestant notions of the intermediate state, and of the final destiny of man, and our interpretation of the teachings of the Scriptures on these questions are still controlled to a great extent by the same philosophy.
A theological friend, in speaking of a recent volume entitled The Soul here and hereafter, says in a private note: " What we want is a book on MAN here and hereafter. So long as men occupy their thoughts with the 'soul' of modern philosophy and theology, they will miss the real vital question, ' What is man, and what is his future' Man is the subject of Divine Revelation, not a separate soul. A living man is a living soul. God created man; placed man under law; banished man from Eden; and made man the subject of redemption; and as to his future, the great question is, 'If a man die shall he live again? "This vital question the author ignores, and so do most writers on this question. They annihilate man as?
God made him, and devote whole libraries to a part of man -' His soul here and hereafter.' We shall never have a Biblical and scientific theology of man until he is studied and treated as a unit. Man is one being - genus, homo. He has body, soul, and spirit, all essential to his manhood or humanity. Man is greater than body, greater than soul, greater than spirit. He is the perfect combination of all. And yet Christendom, for centuries, has magnified the soul to the utter neglect of man. The Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, magnifies man. ' God made man a little lower than the angels.' Christ honored humanity by appearing ' in the likeness of men." He tasted death for every man,' and the whole economy of redemption is designed to bless and save man."
Christ did not take upon Himself the body of a man merely to redeem that from death, nor the soul of man simply to redeem that, nor the spirit of a man, but the whole nature of a man, body, soul, and spirit. He redeemed them all together in the redemption of man. And when He lifts man into life again, it will not be a life of the spirit alone that He will give him, nor the eternal life of his soul, but of spirit, soul, and body, again united in one. The body will, indeed, be purified, and "made like unto His own glorious body." But it will, none the less, be a real body- the fit receptacle of the soul and the spirit, and the medium and agent as it now is, through which they shall act.
Viewing man from the Scriptural stand-point, as one undivided and indivisible creature, the teachings of God's Word concerning him, here and hereafter, appear to be as they really are, beautifully clear and consistent; the difficulties, perplexities, and contradictions into which our Platonic philosophy, with its spiritualistic fancies, on the one hand, and materialism, with its infidel tendencies, on the other, lead us, all vanish; nor can we hope to reconcile these doctrines, or understand them, or reason correctly about them, until we come back to the simple Scriptural .doctrine of the actual UNITY OF MAN.
POST SCRIPTÜM: -
The tendency of scientific thought at the present day is toward materialism, and, when divorced from religion, it says that "there is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit." This is a result, in part at least, of a reaction from the extreme spiritualism of many religionists, who have gone quite as far from the plain teachings of God's Word in the opposite direction.
It has not seemed important, in considering this question of the Unity of Man, to discuss the theories of either party to this controversy between materialism and spiritualism, nor to employ their perplexing terminology. It is an old controversy, and has assumed many phases, as those who are acquainted with the history of philosophy well know. We have endeavored, in our studies, to follow the current of this history from the times of Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, to make ourselves acquainted with their various theories; and to understand, as far as we were able, their subtle distinctions. We have read, with some care, the discussions of the earlier and later Fathers of the Christian Church, and the speculations of the schoolmen during the Middle Ages, and have paid considerable attention to the spiritualistic fancies of Swedenborg, and those of his school at the present day. We have also attentively listened to what such scientists, of the opposite school, as Haeckel, Huxley, Darwin, Tyndall, Spencer, and their disciples, have to say of cytods, monera, protista, dormant gemmules, spores, cell-germs, protoplasm, bioplasm, spontaneous generation, evolution, natural selection, and many other things in the arcana of Nature, and have tried to understand the meaning of the learned words they use. We have been impressed with the great wealth of imagination, the inexhaustible treasury of words, the dialectic skill, and keen logic of many of these thinkers and scholars, both ancient and modern; but we have to confess that we have found nothing upon which to rest our faith, nor indeed one single ray of light concerning the nature and destiny of man, beyond what comes to us from the Word of God. Like the bird from the ark, we have found no place over the whole wide waste of waters upon which to rest the sole of our foot, until we returned to the ark we had left.
However attractive the speculations of these philosophers may be to the intellect or the imagination, so far as they depart from the Word of God, they seem to have nothing but assumption upon which to rest. They show more skill in demolishing the positions of their antagonists, than in establishing their own. Indeed, some of our Christian scholars who are enamored of the philosophy of materialism on the one hand, or of dualism on the other, are candid enough to admit that the point from which they start is, and must be, a simple hypothesis; but the theories which they build upon it seem so perfect and beautiful in their eyes that they must be true, and the Bible must be so interpreted as to sustain them!
Mr. A. Wilford Hall, in his remarkable work entitled The Problem of Human Late, dashes into the arguments of Haeckel, Tyndall, Spencer and those of that school, like a bull into a China-shop, and fairly demolishes much of their fine ware; but he is quite as weak and open to attack in the position he undertakes to establish for himself. He makes much sport of Haeckel's doctrine, that "life and mind are nothing but the complicated motions of the molecules of the brain and nerves, placed together in a most, varied manner," and with the doctrines of spontaneous generation and evolution which are so earnestly advocated by not a few of our popular scientists; but, while he would seem to be arguing for the doctrine of the opposite school, his philosophy is nothing better than a sublimated form of materialism, or the double materialism of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and of Swedenborg, very much refined. He frankly admits that his theory is founded on a hypothesis in the first instance, but it so clearly answers all the conditions of the problem that it must be true. It is this: That man is composed of two organisms, each complete. Both of them are material, but the one is of gross matter, and the other matter in its highest state of refinement, answering, we suppose, to the fourth state of matter of which Lockyer speaks, or, perhaps more truly, to Aristotle's quint-essence. His own language is as follows:- It is a fundamental law of Nature, that every animated being, including man, is a dual organism, or double entity; the outer or physical structure being the visible and tangible half, while the incorporeal, though invisible and intangible, constitutes the other half, the one being the exact counterpart of the other. (P. 98.)
This interior organism, could we see it after the body dies, would stand out a transparent manikin-with every outline of the human body intact - a perfect representation of our organic form in all its parts, as would a manikin of the arteries, veins, and nerves, could they be lifted from the body, without disturbing their relative position. (P. 46.)
Thus inter-woven and inter-dependent upon each other it is not surprising that a blow on the brain should temporarily paralyze the vital and mental structure, in proportion to the physical injury received; and should such injury prove sufficient to result in a complete dissolution or separation of the two organisms, it is not inpresumable but that the mental and vital entity might remain for some time in a state of entire unconsciousness, or until the effects of the dissolving shock should have a sufficient time to subside. I say this is a reasonable supposition on the view that we are really dual, substantial beings; and then it is equally rational that our interior, incorporeal entity, after recovering consciousness, may actually continue on forever in a state of personal activity, as all religionists must hold, if their religion is to be of any practical value in this world or the next. (P. 37.)
Because these philosophers cannot understand just how the noetic and physical properties in man are combined, or, indeed, how it is possible for the Creator to unite them in one substantial organism, they must needs resort to the hypothesis of a double organism, as though this would solve the whole mystery; but in reality it only throws it one remove further back. It is quite as difficult to conceive how the manikin within can fulfill its spiritual functions unaided, without another still more ethereal manikin within itself, or this third, without another, and so on ad infinitum.
This kind of philosophy is very much akin to that old philosophy which required something underneath the earth to keep it from falling and something under, this, and so on. And the arguments to prove it are certainly no better than the old philosophers used, nor is the theory any better. The philosophy, and the reasoning to sustain it, remind us of the method used by the old lady with her inquisitive grandson. " What," says he, " does the world stand on?" "On a great rock," she replies with promptness, supposing that would end the matter. But not quite satisfied, he inquired again: "And what does that rock stand on?" "Why, on another great rock," she replied, with some irritation at his dullness. But still unsatisfied, and determined to get at the bottom of the matter, he again asks: " Well, what does that rock stand on?" This was more than she had expected, but she was equal to the occasion, and cut off all further questioning by exclaiming, with a great show of astonishment at the boy's stupidity: " Why, you foolish boy, don't you know, it is rocks all the way down?"
Some of our good Christian men have become so fearful of the materialism of the present age, and of the atheistic, agnostic, or infidel position which some of its strongest advocates have taken, that they have run to the opposite extreme of error, and felt it incumbent on themselves to insist on this double-entity doctrine, as though the Christian religion depended on it. But it really explains nothing. Indeed, it tends directly to the Infidelity which they so much fear; for, so long as scientific thinkers are assured by those whose office it is to expound the Scriptures, that they teach a philosophy concerning man that is contrary to the teachings of science, and actually absurd, they will sooner reject the Scriptures, and the God of the Scriptures, than stultify their own reasons. But there is no such necessity on either hand. There is nothing in the Word of God in which the sober men of either party may not unite.
What if we cannot understand how the mind and the body can co-exist and act together in one organism, any better than the ancients could understand how the earth could float in space without something beside the power of the Creator to sustain it? We can understand it as a fact, if we cannot explain the mode.
For the one party, Professor A. Bain, in his Mind and Body, well says: " The alliance itself is unaccountable, because it is an ultimate fact; of it no explanation is competent or relevant, except generalizing it to the utmost.
He also quotes Professor Ferrier as saying in his Institute of Metaphysics:-
In vain does the spiritualist found an argument for the existence of a separate, immaterial substance, on the alleged incompatibility of the intellectual and physical phenomena to cohere in the same substratum. Materiality may very well stand the brunt of that unshotted broadside. This mild artifice can scarcely expect to be treated as a serious observation. Such an hypothesis cannot be meant to be in earnest. Who is to dictate to Nature what phenomena, or what qualities, inhere in what substance; what effects may result from what causes? Matter is already in the field as an acknowledged entity - this both parties admit. Mind, considered as an independent entity, is not so unmistakably in the field! Therefore as entities are not to be multiplied without necessity, we are not entitled to postulate a new cause, so long as it is possible to account for the phenomena by a cause already in existence; which possibility has never yet been disproved.
For the other party, Dugald Stewart, who had no partiality for materialism, says: Although we have the strongest evidence that there is a thinking and sentient principle within us, essentially distinct from matter, yet we have no direct evidence of the possibility of this principle exercising its various powers in a separate state from the body. On the contrary, the union of the two, while it subsists, is evidently of the most intimate nature. And he goes on to adduce some of the strong facts that show the dependence of mind on body., He says that the mental philosopher is rightly occupied in ascertaining the laws that regulate their connection, without attempting to explain in what manner they are united."
John Locke also admits, that he cannot see that we are in any way committed to the immaterial nature of mind, inasmuch as Omnipotence might, for anything we know, as easily annex the power of thinking to matter directly, as to an immaterial substance, to be itself annexed to matter. In his Essays on the Human Understanding, he uses this language:- We have the ideas of matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know whether any mere material being thinks or not, it being, in respect to our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that God can, if He pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking, than that He should superadd to it another substance of thinking, since we know not whence thinking consists, nor what sort of substance the Almighty has been pleased to give that power. For I see no contradiction in it, that the first eternal-thinking being should, if He pleased, give to certain systems of created senseless matter, put together as He thinks fit, sense, perception, and thought.
Professor Bain concludes his History of the Theories of the Soul with these words:- The rapid sketch thus given seems to tell its own tale as to the future. The arguments for the two substances have, we believe, now entirely lost their solidity; they are no longer compatible with ascertained science, and clear thinking. The one substance, with two sets of properties, two sides, the physical and the mental- a doable faced unity-would appear to comply with all the exigencies of the case. We are to deal with this as in the language of the Athanasian Creed, 'not confounding the person. nor dividing the substance.' The mind is destined to be a double study- to conjoin the mental philosopher with the physical philosopher; and the momentary glimpse of Aristotle is at last converted into a clear and steady vision.
It has not been our purpose to favor, or oppose any particular school of psychology, but merely to set forth what we think to be the simple doctrine of Divine Revelation as to the nature of man, namely: That man, however constituted, is one person in his life, and in his death, and in the world to come; that the second life, for which he hopes, is not the natural of the present into another state of being, but is altogether supernatural.
It is only through Redemption in Christ that he lives again, and lives forever. We believe that this is not only the truth of God's Word, but it is the only doctrine that will meet the skepticism of the present day, whether in the direction of spiritualism or materialism, and give efficiency to the Gospel, which human speculations have so long perverted and obscured.
It is rather to what is falsely asserted to be the doctrine of the Scriptures concerning the nature and destiny of man, than to what they really teach, that so many of our scientific men are opposing themselves. They cannot be made to believe without any evidence whatever - and in spite of much to the contrary - that man is a creature with two organisms, when all the phenomena of his being, according to their view, can be quite as well and even much better explained on the theory of one. They cannot be made to believe, in spite of the evidence of all their five senses, as well as the analogies of nature, that man is naturally exempt from actual death, and that he naturally and inevitably rises into greater freedom and activity when he seems to die.
It is because the professed expounders of God's Word have insisted upon their acceptance of these fictions of a false philosophy, as the very foundation of the Gospel, that they have been repelled from it, and forced to declare themselves agnostics or unbelievers.
But there is nothing in the doctrine of a resurrection from death by Divine power, and of an Eternal Life through a new spiritual birth from above, that conflicts with the teachings of reason or science, however much it may be beyond them. This is just what the Gospel does teach; and just what must be preach ed, if we would save them from Infidelity, or save a world of perishing men. “I am the Resurrection and the Life," says Christ. "And this is the will of Him that sent me, that everyone which sees the Son and believeth on Him may have Everlasting Life; and I will raise him up at the last day."
From THE RAINBOW, London, April, 1882.
IS THERE AFTER DEATH AN INTERMEDIATE STATE OF PROBATION?
Among the advocates of the doctrine of eternal life only in Christ., there is considerable diversity of sentiment on many minor questions, more or less intimately connected with the main question. A perfect agreement upon all points of doctrine among independent thinkers could hardly be expected; and, perhaps, in our present state of imperfect knowledge, is hardly to be desired. But while this diversity of views, upon what may be called minor points," shows that their decision is not essential to the main question, and that a valid argument may be made in support of it independent of these other questions; yet, if we were united on some of these more important and collateral questions that are intimately connected with our common doctrine, we could present a better front to our adversaries, and meet more successfully their most plausible arguments. I refer more especially to those questions that relate to the nature of man and the intermediate state. It has long seemed to me that those of my respected fellow-advocates of this great Gospel doctrine of immortality only through Christ, who still hold that the soul of man is an immaterial substance residing within the body, yet independent of it in the fulfillment of its legitimate functions-and, (consequently, that the intermediate state between death and the resurrection, is a state of consciousness and activity, and probably, a state of second probation for a portion, if not for the whole human race-) concede to their Platonic adversaries their strongest position, and indeed the main postulate upon which they build their argument for the natural immortality of the soul, and unnecessarily hamper themselves in the conduct of their own argument. Indeed they seem to be led away insidiously by the sophistry of their adversaries from the discussion of the real essential question, the immortality of MAN, to the discussion of a hypothetical question concerning the soul of man, which neither science nor philosophy is able to fathom.
May I be permitted to offer, through the medium of this valuable Magazine, some reasons for the consideration of my Christian brethren in Europe why I cannot agree with them in holding the intermediate state to be one of consciousness and activity; and especially, why I cannot believe it to afford to any mortal man an opportunity of laying hold of the salvation that is offered through Christ in the Gospel to sinners in this life.
1. It assumes, as I have already intimated, the chief postulate of the Platonic philosophy; the independent entitative existence of the human soul. This is the real battle-ground of the whole question, so far as philosophy and science are concerned. It opens a question concerning the nature of man in which neither of them, apart from revelation, has ever been able to settle; and which even revelation does not undertake to settle for us; certainly not, as I think, in favor of the Platonic theory.
So far as science has anything to say on this question, especially modern science, its testimony is all on the side of the complete solidarity of man, and of the entire unconsciousness of the whole individual in death; while on the other hand, if the philosophical claim be admitted, which is purely one of sentiment and human conceit, a wide door is opened, not only for all the worst errors of the Romish Church - such as that of purgatory, invocation of saints, as well as the doctrine of a future probation, and even of universal restoration - but also for a very plausible argument in behalf of Plato's dogma of the natural and necessary immortality of the soul, which has engendered and fostered all these other notions. They all stand together, as it seems to me, having one common root, and they all must fall together when severed from that.
2. This doctrine assumes that man is a double personality; that he can be dead and alive at the same time; which is not only contrary to reason, but to the uniform teaching of God's Word. It is not necessary for us to know of how many parts man is composed, nor what these parts are; but it is necessary for us to regard man as a complete unity or solidarity. The personality resides, not in one of these parts, but in the whole or we are led into inextricable confusion on this whole question. This is just the predicament of our adversaries.
If the personality, or the real responsible man, resides in one of these parts and not in both united, then man is not dead when the irresponsible part is cast off, and it is a delusion and a falsehood to call this change that comes upon him, "Death.
there is no death at all; for the body of flesh, considered by itself, is not a living thing. It is the whole person that lives, and the whole person that dies, or, there is no death of the person. If the real, responsible person only escapes from his imprisonment when this change, called death, takes place, then we have good reason to conclude that it is actually deathless in its very nature; and that, though it may be again incarnated in the resurrection, the second death - which must indeed be like the first in its nature, or there is no analogy- will only again release it, or will, at any rate, fail to put an end to its personal conscious existence. It may be said that God is able to destr9y the soul as well as the body in the second In fact, death. This cannot be denied; but, if the soul has such a vis vita; of its own, its destruction would seem to be possible only by a positive, act of annihilation; and this term, to which we object, as granting the assumption to which we object, would seem to have our sanction. And besides this, we are adroitly led away from the discussion of the real question in issue, the immortality of man, to a metaphysical discussion concerning the nature of man, and especially, the nature of the soul of man.
It is just here that the Tempter, who is the real originator of this doctrine of natural immortality, has shown his cunning. He has entangled the Church in the meshes of philosophical and metaphysical discussion concerning the destiny of the soul, which he has substituted in place of the real question, concerning the destiny of man. Hence this new terminology has been introduced into our systems of theology, and we have been taught to use the Bible terms in a new sense, and to talk of the immortality of the soul," "the salvation of the soul," "the loss of the soul," when the real point to be considered is, the immortality of man, the salvation of the man, the loss of the man himself.
Nothing is more evident to the Bible scholar than that the Scriptures never employ the word soul (nephesh, psuche) in that exclusive, metaphysical sense which this Platonic philosophy has engrafted upon it. But it denotes the person, the whole person, or the life of the person, which amounts practically to the same thing, and might usually, as it often is, be translated by the personal pronoun, or by the word " life," to designate the life of the person, without any reference to that spiritual substance which this philosophy assures us is temporarily residing in the body of man, and which unfortunately has come to be its accepted sense with so many in reading the Bible, and which so many of my good Christian brethren who are but partially emancipated from the blinding power of this false philosophy, to the prejudice of our cause, persist in indorsing.
The Scriptures regard man as a complete unit; one solidarity, however composed; one in his creation; one in his fall; one in his death; one in his redemption; one in his resurrection; one in the life everlasting, or in the everlasting destruction that awaits him beyond the judgment. And so we must regard him, if we would rightly apprehend their teaching concerning his destiny. If Christian men had adhered strictly to the phraseology of the Bible, and to its simple teaching on this question of the destiny of man, and not suffered themselves to be " spoiled [or rather despoiled] through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ," this heathen dogma of " the immortality of the soul" would never have gained a foothold in the church, nor prevailed, as it has, in the world.
And now, if those who have come so far into the truth, on this question, as to deny the natural immortality of the soul, could be persuaded to renounce this vain philosophy altogether, and to take their stand on the simple platform of God's Word, and insist on discussing the real question - the immortality of man - their position would be impregnable, and our adversaries would have no point d'appui against it.
In doing this, it is not necessary for them to adopt the principles or the arguments of materialism. I do not myself adopt them. I do not profess to know what that mysterious principle, called the " soul " or the " life " of man, or indeed of any living organism, is; I have no theory whatever on the subject, nor do I find it necessary to have one; much less, to have one that concedes to error its main support. But I do insist that if anyone undertakes to argue the immortality of the human soul on the ground of its entitative, independent nature, I will not concede to him this postulate. He must make good his foundation before he is allowed to build any argument on it that I will accept. And still further I will say, that I do not believe that the human soul, whatever it may be, is capable of fulfilling the functions of an intelligent, responsible, sensitive person, apart from some material organization; and I have come to this conclusion from the extreme Platonic view in which I was educated, after years of a more careful and reverent study of this other question whatever.
than I ever gave to any I have been compelled, reluctantly, I might say - at any rate, unexpectedly to give up by piecemeal, as it were, one position after another of this Platonic philosophy, that I might come squarely on to the platform of the Scriptures, until there is nothing of it left. And I am confident that my Christian brethren will be led in the same direction, just so far as they shall succeed in freeing their minds from the bias of a false education, and in bringing them to the careful study of God's Word on this question. They will come to think, with me, that the body, or some organized body, may be quite as necessary to the soul, whatever it may be, as the soul is to the body, and that both together are requisite, and neither alone is sufficient, to constitute us intelligent, active, sensitive, and responsible subjects of God's moral government either here or hereafter.
3. But if it be admitted - which can only be for the sake of argument-that death does not interrupt our consciousness, but that the soul can exist, and does exist, in a separate state of consciousness between death and the resurrection, it does not follow that its conditions are such as to make it possible for it to become the subject of any moral change, especially of such a change as is requisite to become, what the Scriptures call, a new creature, an heir of everlasting life.
For aught that we can know to the contrary, a physical condition is necessary to any adequate probation. We are here tempted and plied with motives that act upon our senses. Our characters are formed under these circumstances, and we know not that they can be formed under any other. It is not to be supposed that we could be plied with such motives in a disembodied state, even if we were conscious. There is a necessary limit to the probation of every responsible creature, a time when his character becomes fixed and unchangeable. That this life affords the appropriate season for such a trial, is evident, even in the light of reason; and for aught we can know, the only season. But the Word of God seems to be very emphatic and positive in its teachings in this regard; and all its warnings and exhortations, and invitations and promises, appear to be founded -on this great principle.
We act here in view of motives. We weigh them. We choose between them. Our action is free and volitional. But we have reason to believe that the action of the higher orders of beings, and that our moral action in the life beyond, will be so fixed that, like theirs, it will be spontaneous, and not the result of deliberation and choice. It is toward such a character as this that we are led by the Providence of God in this life; and even if a ghostly state, outside of any organism, between death and the resurrection, were to be admitted, we have no reason for the inference that it would be, or could be, a probationary state, or that a change of character would be possible.
4. This assumption cannot be allowed without ignoring and contradicting the fundamental principles "of the Christian system. It requires us to believe that man's psychical (psychical) life naturally extends beyond the grave; that death simply marks one stage in his career, and that by a certain law of natural development, it introduces him to another and higher stage of life. But the Gospel, on the contrary, assures us that, if there be any such life, it is, and must be supernatural, and altogether miraculous; that were it not for the death and resurrection of Christ, all men would "perish," go to naught when they die; and even the term "sleep," which is especially applicable to believers in death, would have no appropriate application to them, much less to unbelievers, were it not for the assurance that is given in the resurrection of Christ, that they shall awake, and live again, when He shall call them. Human philosophy is unwilling to recognize the full extent of the ruin which sin has wrought, the full significance of the penalty which has fallen upon man, as a sinner, or man's indebtedness to Christ for the restoration of the life which has been forfeited; hence it prates of the life beyond as though it were man's natural inheritance, as though he comes into it by a natural law of development; and good Christian men have been so far seduced from "the faith once delivered to the saints," as to accept of this anti-Christian doctrine, and to deny to "the Prince of VIEWS AND REVIEWS.
Life " -or rather, as it is in the margin, and should be in the text, the Author of life, (Acts 3: 15) -this supreme prerogative, as " the Resurrection and the Life." Hence the great doctrine of the resurrection, upon which so much stress is laid in the Scriptures, has lost its high place in our sophisticated theological system, and Christ himself is recognized, not as our Redeemer from death, but only as a Savior from sin and misery.
And still further: those who attribute to mortal man this power within himself of living after he is dead, seem to be oblivious of the fact, that the Word of God everywhere makes a radical distinction between the life that now is, and that which is to come, in the use of two separate words.
This is to be pardoned in the unlearned realer of our English version; for the same word " life " is employed to translate them both. But in the Greek Scriptures, two words, psuche and zoa, are used to designate these two kinds of life; and even in the Old Testament, before the distinct revelation of a future life through Christ is given, we have set over against nephesh, which answers to psuchë in the Greek, the word chai, which answers to the word Zoe. And every careful scholar must have observed this, and noted the fact, that 'the former words nephesh and psuche designate man's natural life, that which he has in common with the animals; and that it is always represented as brief and transitory, and coming to an end with the death of the body; the adjectives olam and aiönios signifying eternal, are never, never in one single instance applied to them. But on the other hand, the new life of the world to come, which Christ gives, is always designated in the New Testament by the word zoé, and, so far as it is distinctly spoken of in the Old, by chaff; and to these words the epithet " eternal " is constantly applied. Indeed in the Gospel, "the life everlasting" or "everlasting life," or eternal life, is the common designation of this new, life. No one has any authority or reason from Scripture for regarding the future life of the believer as the prolongation of his natural life, reformed and purified, into the eternal future. It is distinctly declared to be a new life altogether, another sort of life, the life of Christ, which is imparted to the believer when he is born again; and it is by this life and this only that he lives again, and lives forever. And as for the unbeliever, he cannot be supposed to have any more natural vitality than the believer in Christ. Ile lives again, not because he has not actually died, but because he is raised up for the purpose of judgment by the Almighty power of God, to die again in the second death; for there can be no second death unless there be a first death and a second life. "It is appointed unto men [all men] once to die, but after this the judgment."
But only those who are found written in the book of life (zöê) shall escape the second death.
5. That another probation is necessary to vindicate the character of God in His dealings with mankind cannot reasonably be urged. And yet this seems to be the thought in the minds of those who advocate this doctrine, whether they express it or not. Perhaps they would not say that those who intelligently and deliberately reject the Gospel in this life have any reason to expect the offer to be renewed after death. But it is thought that those who have never had any such offer in this life, will have it, and should have it hereafter. But who are these? Certainly not the so-called heathen only; there are multitudes in Christendom who die without any true conception of what the Gospel is. Indeed it is but very imperfectly presented, at the best, and mixed with a great deal of human error. There are but very few, perhaps none, who have any true idea of what it is they reject when they turn away from the Gospel. So this larger hope coming to include the whole family of man, greatly weakens all incentives, not only to missionary effort, but to all effort, in urging the claims of the Gospel upon our fellow-men in this life. The doctrine of Origen, or of Restorationism, is its legitimate outcome, and sinners everywhere will postpone, for the present, the claims of the Gospel, under the thought that, if repentance and faith shall be found to be actually necessary to their salvation, they will be better able to see their danger and their need, when the exigency is actually upon them, and then they can easily turn to God and be saved.
But not to urge the demoralizing influence of this hypothesis, it is founded on a misapprehension of the very nature and grounds of the provisions of the Gospel. Why is it that this life everlasting is offered to any mortal man, even in this world? It is not because the justice, or truth, or even goodness of God requires it. It is a pure act of grace. It is in no sense a reward of merit. It is pre-eminently the gift of God. A gift of sovereign grace.
If the Platonic doctrine were true, and the Augustinian theology that is founded upon it, viz., that we are constituted by creation, naturally and necessarily immortal, and that every child of Adam, since the fall, is born under condemnation to eternal sin and misery, and unless he shall be rescued, under the provisions of the Gospel, from this terrible doom, he must inevitably suffer the pains of hell forever: - if this were so, then every principle of justice, to say nothing of goodness or mercy, would require God to redeem man, and not only to redeem him, but to give him every possible opportunity to save himself from so horrible a fate. I cannot wonder that those who hold to this view should seek, in some way, to free the Almighty from the abominably cruel aspersions their false theology casts upon Him, by resorting to the hypothesis of another probation for those whom the Gospel has not reached in this life, and that they should try to find arguments in reason and justice, and in the Scriptures, to support it. There can be no doubt that it owes its origin, as it does the force of all its arguments-so far as they have any force-to this Platonic philosophy of the indestructible nature of the human soul. Nor can I wonder that those who hold this view should feel obliged to fall back on the hope of a universal restoration, in order to justify the ways of God to man, and earnestly endeavor to find authority for such a hope in the Scriptures.
But we who have discarded this false dogma are under no such constraint. We believe that the children of Adam, by ordinary generation, are mortals, and not immortals; that their natural life terminates in death; that no one can live again, much less live forever, unless he is raised up by the Almighty power of God; that it is only by a new spiritual birth and the impartation of the Divine life, through Christ, that he becomes an heir of everlasting life; and that God acts as truly in His sovereign capacity in the bestowment of this higher life, as of any other; that no one can claim it. All that any creature can claim is, that he shall be treated justly, according to the conditions of the life that has been given him. And so we believe that God will reward and punish all the children of Adam, for the deeds done in the body, according to the light that has been given them, and for none other; that some will be beaten with few stripes, or none at all, unless they shall deserve them, and others with many. It behooves everyone to make the most of the opportunities that are accorded to him; and so we are exhorted to do; and he will find the full measure of his just reward in doing this. No one can reasonably complain that the higher privileges, and the consequently higher responsibilities of others, have not been accorded to hint. No subject of the British Government can reasonably complain that he was not born a prince or a noble, nor that the opportunity of becoming one is not accorded to him. The toad cannot complain of injustice in that he was not constituted a bird; nor any brute, in that he was not constituted a man; nor any luau, in that ho was not constituted something different front what God made him. Nor can anyone reasonably demand another life after the present life is ended; certainly not, if he has failed to make the most of the privileges, whether many or few, that are given to him in this. Why should those who close their eyes to the light which is now given them, who aspire to nothing better or higher than the gratification of their animal appetites and passions, and who are constantly violating even the law of their lower natures, and who sink themselves even below the level of many of the brutes around them, be thought to have any claim on their Maker for still higher gifts and opportunities?
What expectation or desire will be disappointed in them - excepting the desire to prolong their unworthy lives, which is common to all animals - when their natural life shall end? or, what loss will there be to the universe of God? His resources are infinite, and there will be no lack of guests in that world of light and life: as there is no lack in the harvest, though many of the seeds are lost in the gathering.
I cannot but think that this hypothesis of another probation for man after the termination of his natural life, which is so contrary to reason and to the teachings of Nature, as well as of God's Word, is a device to soften somewhat the hideous features of the Augustinian system which the Platonic doctrine of a compulsory immortality has fastened upon it. But that those of my Christian brethren who have come out so far from under the dark shadow of this great delusion as to see the falsity of its main postulate, should stop half way in the twilight, as it were, and still cling to this fancy that owes, not only its origin, but all its plausibility, to this false postulate, and that by their position and arguments in support of it, should contribute so much to strengthen the cause of our common adversaries and weaken our own, is to me a source of deep regret, and indeed of discouragement.
Let me beg of them carefully to reconsider this question in the light of the suggestions above made, and of others which may occur to them, but which cannot now be noticed.
The Scriptural argument on this question must be deferred to another time.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March, 1882.
Christ spoke and discoursed in the Syriac language. -Francius. "The greater part of the New Testament was originally written -I believe-in Syriac and not merely translated, in the Apostolic age."
Pres. E. Stiles, of Yale College.
It is natural to suppose, from its great antiquity, that it must deviate in many cases from the Greek manuscripts, the oldest of which were written above four hundred years later, and are mostly the productions of countries remote from Syria.-Michaelis.
It is the opinion of many scholars, that the Hebrew was the original language of man; that it was given to our first parents directly from heaven; first, in the oral form, and afterward, in the time of Moses, and not till then, in written characters. For this opinion they urge many sound reasons. But, be this as it may, we know that the Hebrew language was the vernacular of the ancient Israelites, and that the Old Testament Scriptures, some parts in prose and some in poetry, excepting a few fragmentary parts, were written in Hebrew.
The language of the Chaldeans, by whom the Jews were carried into captivity, about 600 years before Christ, was a branch of the same root, though it differed widely in both its oral and written form. In consequence of their long detention in the country of the Chaldeans, the pure Hebrew tongue of the Jews became corrupted, and after their return to Syria, it was still further corrupted by their subjugation to other nations, and by the importation of other races into their country: so that, at the commencement of the Christian era, their vernacular,-though still retaining the general characteristics of the old Hebrew,- had become what is called the Syro-Chaldaic, or Syriac language. This was divided into two principal dialects; the Eastern Aramean, which prevailed along the Southern and Eastern coasts of Syria; and the Western Aramean, which prevailed in the regions to the North and West. These dialects, however, were substantially the same language, differing more in the form of the written characters employed and in the pronunciation of the words, than in the words themselves.
After the conquest of this country by Alexander, in the fourth century before Christ, the Greek language was introduced, and came generally to prevail as the language of the learned and ruling classes, throughout Syria and all the surrounding regions. Still later, in the century before Christ, the Latin tongue was introduced by their Roman conquerors. Though it had some standing, as the language of their rulers and law-givers, it was never very extensively used in this part of Asia; but, after a time, it came to prevail to a considerable extent, to the West of Syria, and especially in Europe, as the language of the educated classes.
Thus, it will be seen that, at the beginning of the Christian era, there were three languages,-not to notice others of minor importance,-that prevailed to a greater or less extent, in Syria or Palestine: The Syriac or Syro-Chaldaic, which was the vernacular of the common people, of the synagogues' and other pub-lie assemblies of the Jews; The Greek, which was the language of what are commonly called the upper classes, the educated and the refined; The Latin, which was the language of the government to which they were subject.
The state of things, with respect to diversity of tongues, in Palestine, in the time of Christ, was similar to that which now obtains in some of our larger cities, and especially, some of the cities and countries of the Old World. Take, for example, the city of Antwerp, in Belgium, with which,- having resided there for several years,-I am familiar. The basilar language of the people is Flemish, which is a corrupt form of the Dutch. Every citizen is supposed to be able to understand, and to use this language, both in its spoken and written form. The uneducated and laboring classes know no other. It is the vernacular of the streets, of the workshops, of the markets, and of most of the Churches. But the French also prevails very extensively. It is the language of business and trade among all the higher classes. It is taught in their schools, and is the ruling language of their higher seminaries of learning, of their literary, artistic, and social circles. No one makes any pretension to a fair education, who has not added to his native Flemish, a knowledge of the French also. The streets of the city have two names; one in Flemish, and the other in French. The daily papers, in each of these languages, circulate side by side, and men of affairs take and read both. Beside these, both the English and the German are used to a considerable extent, especially by the merchants. It is not difficult for an Englishman or an American, who is familiar with only his own tongue, to do business in most of the principal shops, and to make himself understood at the hotels of the city.
That our Lord, whose intercourse was chiefly with the common people, preached and taught in their own Syriac vernacular, there is no doubt. "The common people heard Him gladly." Indeed it is not certain that He ever used any other. He grew up among them as a laborer, and probably had no other education as a child, or mere man, than was common with the class to which He belonged. Of course, I am not speaking of His knowledge as a divine person. The same is true of His twelve Apostles, and His more immediate disciples. That all of them were familiar with the spoken Syriac, there is no question. How many of them were sufficiently educated to be able to read or write it, or whether any of them were familiar with the Greek, which would indicate a still higher education, and if so, which of them, must be a matter of conjecture. We know that most of them were taken from the lower walks of life, and those of them who were natives of Galilee, no doubt, spoke with the brogue, which was common in that region, and which differed from that of Judea, as perhaps that of Scotland differs from that of England. When Peter denied his Lord in Jerusalem, his speech betrayed his Galilean origin.
The inscription over the cross, THE KING of THE JEWS, was written in the three prevailing languages; Hebrew (or Syriac), Greek, and Latin, that it might be read by all classes. Here, perhaps, we may see an unwitting prophecy of His future universal Kingship. When the chief priests would have had it changed to "He said, I am King of the Jews," Pilate showed a little of the firmness he so sadly lacked in giving Him over to their will, by replying, " What I have written, I have written."
That Paul, as an educated man, the divinely commissioned Apostle to the Gentiles, was familiar with both the Hebrew-Syriac and Greek languages, and perhaps also,- aside from his supernatural endowments,- with the Latin, and other languages is quite probable. But he expressly tells us that, when the Lord revealed Himself to him, on the way to Damascus, He spoke to him in the Hebrew (that is, in the Syro-Chaldaic) tongue. No doubt, also, Paul's missionary companions, such as Silas, Barnabas, Mark, Luke, and Timothy, -none of whom, however, were of the twelve Apostles,-were well educated for their work. When Paul had been rescued from the violence of the mob at Jerusalem, Claudius Lysias, the chief captain, who had rescued him, not knowing his antecedents, seems to have been surprised that he could speak Greek, and was glad to confer, privately, with him in that tongue. Then, when he had permitted him to address the surging multitude, that were thirsting for his blood, Paul beckoned with his hand, and began to address them in their own vernacular; and when they heard that he spoke in the Hebrew tongue, they kept the more silence.
The foregoing remarks are introductory to the more interesting and important inquiry: In what language, or languages, were the twenty-seven books of the New Testament first written? It may not be so easy as many seem to suppose, to answer this question, which has taxed the scholarship of our most learned biblical scholars for many generations, in a perfectly satisfactory manner, with respect to some of these books, nor, indeed, with respect to any of them; for none of the original manuscripts are known to exist.
Although there are many old manuscripts now extant, in Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Latin, Gothic, and other tongues, containing parts, or in some cases, nearly, if not quite the whole of our present canon, there are none that reach back beyond the fourth century of the Christian era; and these, of course, must be translations, or copies of still older ones, now lost. These manuscripts vary, to a greater or less degree, from each other. There are said to have been found not less than one hundred thousand variations in such of the Greek manuscripts alone, as have been collated,-most of them, minute and of little apparent importance, but still, they show how impossible it is to be sure of the exact words, or ideas of the original; even supposing that to have been the Greek, which can only be a matter of inference, at the best. The only way of deciding what is the true reading of any passage in which these manuscripts differ, as well as what was the language in which the first manuscripts were written, from which these later ones have been copied, or translated, is by a careful comparison of all these various codices with each other, and by the citations that are found in the writings of the Fathers, and by such hints or more positive statements as may be found in them; and then it becomes simply a question of the weight of evidence bearing on one side or the other. There is hardly any question of importance, with regard to the authorship of any one of those books, or the original language in which it was written, or to any important diversity of reading, that has not given rise to conflicting views, or opinions, among learned men, which they have stoutly contested. It is only by a majority, or two-thirds vote, according to previous agreement, that our translators, or revisers, have been able to determine these questions among themselves.
The amount of learning and research that has been expended on these questions, during the centuries, is immense. No one man, however diligent he might be, could possibly possess himself of all that has been -written on them, were he to devote a long life to this special study. All that any ordinary student of the Scripture - without professing to be an adept in Oriental literature and paleontological science, - can hope to do, is to make himself acquainted, as far as he is able, with the gist of what these scholars have written, and then, with their help, and by his own independent study, to satisfy himself as best he can in regard to these matters.
I propose nothing more in this paper than, in a modest way, to give the results of my own inquiry in this line, for the consideration of others.
1. The common impression that the entire New Testament was first written in Greek, and that all the copies we now have, in whatever tongue, are copies, or translations of the original manuscripts, when seriously examined, is found to have no certain foundation. And yet this has been taken almost universally, for granted. It is probable, that this is true with respect to some, possibly a majority of these books. But it is more than probable, if not quite certain, that some portions of the New Testament, such as the Gospel of Matthew, the Epistles to the Hebrews, and others, which will hereafter be mentioned, were first written in the vernacular Syriac of the Jews, and were afterward translated into Greek; and that other portions, perhaps most of the books, were duplicated, at the time they were written, by their authors, or under their direction,-one copy being furnished to those who were familiar with the Greek, and another to those who knew only the Syriac.
2. The reason why such a strong partiality has been shown to the Greek, over all others, by the translators and revisers of our English versions, and the true reading of disputed passages has been determined almost wholly by the most reliable of the Greek manuscripts, is easily accounted for, when we consider the commanding position which was held by the language and the philosophy of the Greeks, in the early ages of the Church. The almost universal prevalence of this language - supplemented by the Latin, which afterward came into vogue - as the classical language of religion, of literature and of science, the knowledge of which was indispensable to a liberal education, has tended to this result.
The Christian Church came early, after the days of the Apostles, under the influence, not merely of the Greek language, but of the philosophy of the Greeks. The tendency in this direction was apparent even in the times of the Apostles. It was against this very influence that Paul so often, and earnestly warned the early Christians; "Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ." " Avoid profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science, falsely so-called, which some professing, have erred concerning the faith.
beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ." Almost immediately after the Pentecostal I fear lest by any means, as the serpent ingathering into the Church, we find a murmuring among the Grecians against the Hebrews, " because their widows were neglected in the daily ministrations." In order to satisfy them, and to make sure that they were properly cared for, seven men, all of whom bear Grecian names, were chosen deacons. Though Stephen, one of them, contended so boldly with "the Libertines, and Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and them of Asia and Cilicia, that they were not able to resist the wisdom and spirit by which he spoke," yet we find them coming more and more under the influence of these and other worldly factions, and it was not long before the Grecian philosophy had become dominant and controlling. Their schools of literature, and especially of theology, were Grecian schools. Grecian philosophers became their teachers and leaders. This was the language they used in their lectures, and other discourses. Meanwhile the vernacular of the Jewish converts, even in Syria, fell more and more into desuetude, and at length became so nearly obsolete as a spoken language, that their Syriac Scriptures, that continued to be read in their Churches, needed someone to interpret them to the people. For it is a matter of history, that they had the Scripture canon, in this language, even before the close of the First Century; and they have always clung to it with great tenacity, down to modern times.
The first one or two generations after the time of Christ are almost barren of any Christian literature that is now extant: but after this, came Justin, Theophilus, Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Origen, and others, whose Greek manuscripts, that have been preserved, contain numerous Scripture citations. Greek copies of the Scriptures, in whole or in part, were greatly multiplied during these early and subsequent ages of the Church, before the invention of printing, so that there are said to be known to European scholars, some sixteen hundred, or more of them, now in existence. It is also said that citations from these early copies are so abundant, in the writings of the Fathers, that, if all of the originals were to be destroyed, it would be possible to restore the whole of the New Testament from their writings. Latin versions from the Greek were also very early made, as early probably, as the beginning of the Second Century, and many of them, though very imperfect, became quite numerous, especially in the Western Churches.
When we take into account the fact that versions of the Scripture in languages, other than the Greek and Latin, were comparatively rare, and but little known in Europe, and the languages in which they were written were not generally cultivated by biblical scholars, it is not difficult to understand why the Latin and the Greek, especially the latter, have had such a paramount influence in determining the rendering of our English version. " It is admitted by critics that the learned men of Europe were ignorant of the very existence of a New Testament in Syriac, until 1552, when they heard of it at Rome, from Moses of Mardin. They then took steps to get an edition of it, and the cost was borne by the Emperor of Germany, Ferdinand 1. But for nearly fifteen centuries, the Syrian Christians had firmly adhered to it as a truly apostolic document. It is true, more than one attempt was made to break through their attachment to it, and win them over to a Greek representation of apostolic teaching, but it could not succeed. They knew their ground too well to suffer either Philocenias, in the sixth century, or Thomas of Heraclea, with his bundle of Greek manuscripts gathered at Alexandria in Egypt, in 616, to win them over to another Testament.
The adhesion of the Syrian Churches from the beginning, for eighteen centuries till now, has been as constant and as cordial, as ever happened to any New Testament in the World. But this statement is far too feeble; for to no other version, or text, has there been any such unswerving adhesion."* When Dr. James Murdock undertook the translation of the Syriac (Peshito) New Testament into English, in 1845, he supposed, as he tells us, that he was producing the first translation of these Syriac, Scriptures into English, that had ever been made. It was not until he had completed it, that he learned that an English gentleman. J. W. Etheridge, was engaged in the same task: But now as the Peshito is becoming better known, and its great antiquity- even if it does not ante-date all other texts - is universally admitted, its value as an auxiliary to the interpretation of Scripture, is conceded by all competent scholars.
3. It would seem to have a claim to equal, if not paramount authority, in determining the reading of disputed passages. For it is to be remembered, that the Syriac was the vernacular of the Jews, in the time of our Lord, and the very language which He used in addressing them, as well as the language of His Apostles in addressing the people of Palestine. In the record which was made of the words of Christ by the Evangelists in the four Gospels, they would naturally, if not necessarily, first write them out in the very language He employed. Even if it could be shown that any of them wrote their narrative in Greek, they would, even in this case, be under the necessity of translating His words from the Syriac in which He spoke, into the Greek, and then, instead of the original, we should have but a translation at best. But it is by no means to be taken for granted that these sacred writers gave such signal and ''exclusive preference to the Greek, over their own tongue, as is generally supposed.
The question as to each of these books cannot here be considered in detail; but it may be summarily said that, it is generally conceded that MATTHEW wrote his Gospel in Syriac; for it was written expressly for the Hebrews. This is the opinion of Papias, Eusebius, Epiphanius, Jerome, and of other Fathers, as well as of not a few modern scholars, and even those who give their preference to the Greek, admit that a Syriac copy might have been prepared at the same time. It is the opinion of Olshausen, that Matthew prepared two copies, either by his own hands, or by the assistance of others, one in Syriac for the Hebrews, and the other in Greek for those who required it.
As for MARK and LUKE, neither of whom were of the twelve Apostles, but as the associates of Paul, were probably familiar with the Greek tongue, and who wrote more especially for the Gentiles, it is not unreasonable to suppose that they would furnish transcripts for the Syrian Christians in their own tongue. Eusebius supposes, that Mark, whom tradition credits with having been Peter's companion and interpreter, wrote his Gospel from the dictation of that Apostle.
I have never seen any good reason for supposing, with some, that JOHN wrote his Gospel in his extreme old age, sixty or seventy years after the death of Christ. He records more of our Lord's words than all the other Evangelists together. It is not possible, without a miracle, that he should have remembered them so long, and been able to record them so minutely, nor is it reasonable to suppose, that he would have deferred this duty to so late a period. I am inclined to believe, with Drs. Lardner, Owen, Michaelis, and others, that it was written about the year 65: and with Salmatius, Grotius, Bolton, and others, that he first composed it in Syriac, for it is only in this language he could give the very words of our Lord Himself. There is no objection to believing, however, that at the same time, or soon afterward, another copy was prepared in Greek.
We notice in the Greek manuscripts of all the Gospels, but more especially in that of Mark, the occurrence of Syriac idioms, and words, with an explanation introduced, by way of parenthesis, which would be quite natural in translating from this language to another, in the case of words and phrases that could not well be exactly rendered, or that were more emphatic in the original. Thus, we are told, in our Greek versions, that Christ said to the maid, when He restored her to life, Talitha-cumi, and then, in parenthesis, in the Greek version we are informed that this means Damsel arise: but no such explanation is given in the Syriac, or original, for the very good reason that it is not needed, for it is all in the same language: and so when He said Ephatha, to the deaf man, we are told in the Greek, that it means Be opened: and so of Abba, that it means Father, and of Corban, that it means Gift, of Raca, that it means Fool, and Golgotha, a skull, etc. These are all Hebrew Syriac words, which appear to have been transferred unchanged from the original manuscript, into the Greek, with a parenthetical explanation. Both Matthew and Mark record the dying words of our Lord, just as He uttered them; Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani, and then, in the Greek copy or version of Mark's Gospel, we are informed, in Greek, that these words mean, My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?
There is no question, but that scattered manuscripts of the several books of the New Testament, in Greek, were in existence very early, for the Fathers quote from them,-but there is no evidence that any attempt was made to collect them into one code, or canon, till after the Second or Third Century. But it is certain, on the other hand, that the Syrian Churches had their canon long before this collection was made; tradition says, between the years 55 and 60, and that this was done by the Apostle Jude. This canon is known to have contained all the books now included in our New Testament, excepting the Apocalypse, and the brief Epistles of 2d Peter, 2d and 3d John, and Jude. This tradition is strongly corroborated by the fact, that these closing portions of our present canon were not then written; and this is a good and sufficient reason why they were not included in the first collection. The abrupt closing of the Book of Acts-for it was evidently written at about that time -that it might be ready for inclusion in this collection, goes to confirm the tradition as to the date of this collection. The Apocalypse and the four short Epistles which were not in readiness to be included at that early date, were afterward received into the Syriac Canon, but not till the sixth century.
By whom this first collection of Syriac manuscripts was made, must be a matter of conjecture and inference. It has been supposed by some writers, and not without reason, that the editing was done by the Apostle Jude, and that he was assisted in the labor of collecting them from their various sources by Silas, the companion of Paul, and that we are indebted to him, and not to Paul, for the Epistle to the Hebrews. That this Epistle was written first in the vernacular of the Syrian Christians is very generally conceded. It is not improbable that Paul, though he might have written most, or all of his Epistles in Greek,-which be was well able to do,-would have taken care that the Syrian Christians and others, who spoke the Syriac language, should be furnished with copies which they could read. For while Paul and the other writers addressed their manuscripts to particular Churches or classes of persons, writing under inspiration, they evidently wrote for the Church at large, not only in their own day, but for all coming time; and if their writings were needed in more than one tongue to make them more generally useful, it is not unreasonable to believe that they would take some pains to provide for this want. Indeed, we see that Paul, in writing to the Colossians. gives special directions, that his Epistle be read also in the Church at Laodicea, and vice versa.
-That my own conclusions as to the importance and authoritative character of the Syriac New Testament may not seem to be peculiar to myself, and without good reason, let me refer to what some others, who have made this subject a special study, and whose opinions are not to be despised, have said in regard to it:
It may be noticed that we write Syriac readings, and not renderings, and this we do advisedly, for we wish to avoid words which would lead the reader to think that we admit that his Syriac is only a version from Greek. We see proof ever augmenting that the Peshito is no translation, but an original production of the first writers, slightly revised, perhaps, and enriched, by here and there, a note from the pen of inspired revisers, but in its main bulk, the work of those holy men whom Jesus told the Jews, in His last public discourse, would yet appear and make a final appeal to the nation before its final overthrow. These were His words: Behold I send you prophets. wise men and writers." This last part of His intended gifts is obscured to our people, when translators retain the word "Scribes," and this antiquated Latinism is retained in the revised New Testament. The Saxon word, Writers, is better known, and of more modern use. Is there not a little pedantry, in our learned revisers reproducing the half-antiquated word, Scribes? It was not such a class of men as the Jewish Scribes that Jesus meant to send, but men who could write His memoirs, and direct the faith and practice of His people." James holding.
"The Peshito is the very best translation of the Greek Testament that I have ever read. The affinity of the Syriac to the dialect of Palestine is so great as to justify, in some respects, the assertion that the Syriac translator has recorded the actions and speeches of Christ, in the very language in which He spoke. The difference between the dialect which was spoken by Christ, and that of the Syriac translator, consisted almost wholly ill the mode of pronouncing. It is natural to suppose, from its great antiquity, that it must deviate in many cases from the Greek manuscripts, the oldest of which were written above four hundred years later, and are mostly the productions of countries remote from Syria." Michaelis.
Let those who speak lightly of this version. know that the Syriac, if not the very language in which Christ Himself conversed with His Apostles, approaches very nearly to the vernacular tongue of our Savior, and His companions, and that into it the recent books of the New Testament were the first of all translated, and that, too, at the very time when the Apostles were laying the first foundation of the Christian Church among the nations. I admit that it is a version, but it is the first and most ancient of all versions. It is to be preferred before all others, as being more authentic and more correct. Made either by some one of the Evangelists, or certainly by one of those who had the Apostles present with them at Antioch, whom they could consult, and hear speak on many of the obscure passages. And therefore to this version only can we safely go, when any obscurity or difficulty occurs in the original Greek. This only can be safely consulted, and relied upon, whenever there is doubt respecting the import or rendering of any passage." Professor Martini.
This version, all the learned pronounce, and declare to be the purest of all versions. and doubtless it was so exactly transferred by holy men, because' Christ spoke and discoursed in the Syriac language; so that we cannot doubt, that the Apostles and apostolical men carefully inquired after and laid up the very words of Christ, and with holy veneration endeavored to record them in their version Among all the versions of the New Testament, that which holds the first rank, and is the most exact, felicitous and divine, is certainly the Syriac, which, undoubtedly, was most faithfully handed down by apostolical men, who remembered well the recently uttered words of Christ and His Apostles, and understood their meaning. For Christ Himself used this language. Professor Francius.
It is entirely consonant with truth, that this version was formed at the very commencement of the Christian Church, either by the Apostles them-elves, or by their disciples; unless we should suppose, that, in writing they had regard only to strangers, and cared little or nothing for their own countrymen. Emanuel Tremelius.
From these most ancient versions we infer that this language is of the highest importance, because the writers of the New Testament to whom this language was vernacular, first preached the Divine Oracles in it to the Jews and the nations around them, and afterward wrote them out in Greek, yet retaining the spirit of the Syriac. Nay, it was the vernacular of the Lord and Savior Himself. He drew it in with His mother's milk, and in it the Only-begotten Son of God revealed to the world the will of God and the express promise of Eternal Life. This language He consecrated by His holy lips; in this language He taught the doctrines of the Gospel; in it He offered His prayers to the Father, laid open the mysteries hidden from the world, and heard the voice of the Father coming from heaven; so that we may say, Lingua hominum est lingua nobilitata Dei. Bryan Walton.
Dr. Murdock, who cites some of the above-mentioned authors and others, says: " The great value of this translation depends on its high antiquity, on the competence and fidelity of the translators, and on the near affinity of its language to that spoken by our Lord and His Apostles. In all these respects it stands pre-eminent among the numerous versions of the New Testament." Prof. Bolton, in his German translation of the Epistles, maintains that nearly all the Epistles must have been first composed by the Apostles in Ara-mean, their native tongue, and then committed by them to some of their Gerecizing companions, by whom they were translated into Greek before their publication. Bertholdt expresses the same opinion. He thinks that, after due time for reflection, the learned world will generally come to it, for such a hypothesis does not militate against the authority of the Greek, because it supposes the Greek translation to have been made by the special direction of the Apostles, and to have been inspected and fully approved by them. But it does show us that the Syriac version may be something more than a mere translation, and may have nearly or quite equal authority with Greek.
Dr. Ezra Stiles, late President of Yale College, in his Inaugural Address, says: " Kindred with this [the Hebrew] is the Syriac, in which the greater part of the New Testament, I believe, was originally written, and not merely translated, in the Apostolic age. The Syriac New Testament, therefore, is of high authority; nay, with me, of the same authority as the Greek." As for myself, without making any pretension of unusual scholarship, I cannot but concur in the opinion of these two last cited authorities.
4. Though there is found to be a substantial agreement between the Syriac and the Greek Scriptures, on all the fundamental doctrines of the Gospel; and though their differences are mainly with respect to the integrity of certain passages that are included in the one and not in the other, and as to the rendering of others that are found in both, yet no critical reader can fail to notice the greater prominence that is given to the central Gospel doctrine of LIFE, - ETERNAL LIFE ONLY IN CHRIST, in the Syriac Scriptures, and how much more emphatically, He is here set forth as not merely the Savior, but as - the LIFE-GIVER of men.
It is true this great truth stands out very prominently in all our versions - it could not be otherwise in any fair version - but still, there is often an ambiguity or vagueness of enunciation in the Greek, that is not found in the Syriac, and this is still greater in our English version that is made from the Greek. In the Greek, there are two words psuche and Zoe that stand for "life "; the former refers exclusively to our natural, temporal life, and as such, is contrasted with natural death; the latter is always employed when the higher life of the world beyond, which we receive only by a new birth, is in question, and to this the epithet aiönios, signifying eternal, is commonly joined; and to render it still more emphatic, the definite article (ha) "the" is prefixed; as he zöë aiönios "The Life Everlasting"; and this higher life is contrasted with the death that is final and remediless, Now this otherwise called, The Second Death.
Now this word psuche occurs more than one hundred times in the Greek New Testament, and always, invariably, refers to a life that is transitory in man or animals; and the word zöe, either with or without the adjective signifying eternal, occurs, at least one hundred and fifty times, and is always employed when the divine, higher life is spoken of, and scarcely in any other sense. It seems to have been set apart and consecrated to this special end in the Scriptures, of setting forth the peculiar life of the children of God by a new birth. But unfortunately, we have but the one word life,- unless the word soul, which is quite ambiguous, be used,-in our English version by which to designate these two sorts of life, and consequently, the English reader often fails to observe the broad, and indeed, the infinite distinction there actually is between them. The Greek, therefore, in the clearness with which this distinction is indicated, is much superior to our English version. But the Syriac is much superior to both, in its treatment of the words Save, Savior, Salvation, bearing on the same general question. For Salvation may have respect either to this life, or the life to come; for example: When the disciples, in the tempest on the sea of Galilee, came to Jesus in their distress saying, perish," or when Peter, who was trying to walk on the same sea, on another occasion, cried out, "Lord, save me," the salvation in question was evidently a temporal salvation, a rescue from bodily peril; and Christ may be called their Savior without any regard to His Lord save us; we higher prerogative, as the Savior of sinners. But when the Samaritans said of Him, at the well of Sychar, This is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world," or when one asked Him, "Lord, are there few that be saved?" that higher salvation, which it is the express object of the Gospel to announce through Christ, is evidently meant.
Here then, there are two sorts of salvation, a lower and physical, and a higher and spiritual salvation spoken of in the Scriptures. In the Syriac they are always distinguished by separate words; but in the Greek, and in our version, which follows the Greek, they are both included under one broad term. Thus we have sözö, to save; Sötër, Savior; Söteria, salvation. But in the Syriac, the higher act of saving to eternal life, the agent by which it is effected, and the great salvation itself, are all designated by the use of the root word Khya denoting Life-giving, the Life-Giver, the gift of Life, and when a mere rescue or deliverance of any sort is spoken of, another word is employed, as parak, parakna, or some other word to express it.
As our version is made from the Greek, the same ambiguity in the use of the words "to Save," " Savior," "Salvation," runs through our English Scriptures.
Indeed, the ambiguity is still greater, for while two separate words in the Greek are employed to distinguish between our physical life and the new life of the world to come; viz.: psuche and zöe, we have in English, as we have seen, but the one word "life," to express them both. But as I have remarked at length on this point elsewhere, I pass on to the more special object of this paper: The treatment of the words "Save," "Savior," "Salvation," in the Syriac, compared with what is found in the Greek and English versions. This is a point to which sufficient attention has not been given, by those who have discussed this question of Immortality or Eternal Life only in Christ.
5. It is agreed on all hands that we are saved by. Christ, that He is a great Savior, and this salvation is a great salvation. But when we come to consider the nature of this salvation, we differ widely from our opponents. They assert that it is not from actual death and destruction to a new life that is everlasting; for all men are by nature possessed of a life that is everlasting. It is therefore from sin and misery everlasting that men are saved. But when we turn to the, Syriac Scriptures, which record the very words of our Lord and of His immediate followers, we find this salvation spoken of not as a mere rescue, or deliverance FROM evil, but also as the impartation of a LIFE. Christ is set forth not simply as a Savior; He is all this, but He is infinitely more, He is a LIFE-GIVER. And when sinners are saved, they are not simply rescued from sin and misery or from death, but a new life, a divine life, the life of the Savior which is immortal, is imparted to them. If then, due credit be given to the Syriac Scriptures, our opponents can no longer find shelter under those ambiguous terms, in the Greek and English versions, nor evade the issue to which we would hold them; that the Salvation of the Gospel is not a mere rescue, recovery or deliverance; it is all this, but infinitely more, it is pre-eminently THE GIFT OF ETERNAL LIFE THROUGH JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD, THE ONLY LIFE-GIVER OF PERISHING MEN.
I have gone carefully through the Greek New Testament, and noted every instance of the occurrence of either of the words Sozo, Sotèr, or Soteria, and compared each passage with the parallel passage in the Syriac Peshito, and will now submit the result of this examination to the consideration of those who are interested in this inquiry. I find that the verb sözö, to save, under its various inflections occurs eighty-seven times; the noun Söter, Savior, eighteen times; the noun Sötëria or Suterion, Salvation, thirty-seven times. It will be hardly necessary to cite every case, where the same thought and form of expression are repeated. But I would cite the great majority of the cases - indeed, all that involve anything new, or that call for any special notice.
That is to say, He will give them life again from the death, which is the penalty of sin. This agrees with the words " The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is Eternal Life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
In this case, it was merely temporal rescue or deliverance, they asked, and so it is the lower word (pat-sah) that is employed.
Here, while in the Greek the word sozo is used three times; the first and the last times referring to a bodily cure or deliverance, and the second only to the higher gift that was bestowed in answer to faith; we have in the Syriac two words to indicate this difference, and the higher word denoting the Life of the world to come, is employed only in the second instance.
There is no temporal deliverance promised to the persecuted in this passage; the promise has evident reference to the Eternal Life of the world to come.
It was evidently a bodily or temporal rescue that Peter asked for in this case, and this is all that is indicated in the Syriac.
Here again, it appears in the Syriac, but not in the Greek, that the object of Christ in coming to the world was, not simply to save or rescue men from evil, but to bestow the boon of Life upon, those who had forfeited everything by sin.
This is the exclamation of the disciples after hearing what Christ said to the young man, who came to inquire " What good thing shall I do that I may have aiönion) eternal life?" and when the young had gone away sorrowful, He took occasion to tell man them how difficult it is for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. This calls forth their exclamation of surprise, as above. It is evident that they understood by having eternal life and entering into the kingdom of heaven, the same thing. This is made to appear by the use of the higher word in the Syriac, but in the Greek it is vaguely called being saved.
Here again, the true nature of this salvation is declared only in the Syriac. It is not a mere rescue or salvation from sin and consequent misery, but it is the bestowment of an actual gift-the gift of Life that is promised.
His own life He cannot save.
Here we have the Greek verb sozo four times repeated by those who mocked Christ on the cross. In the first and last cases, they are speaking only of a rescue or deliverance from the cruel death they are inflicting upon Him; in the other two cases, they are taunting Him with the doctrine He had preached concerning the life of the world to come, and concerning Himself as the Giver of that life. These two ideas are not distinguished in the Greek, but in the Syriac, they are kept distinct by the use of two separate words. For in the first and last cases, a word signifying rescue is used, but in the other two cases the word signifying the impartation of LIFE is employed.
It will not be important to re-cite under this Gospel the cases occurring in the parallel passages in Matthew, unless some peculiarity attaches to them.
The ruler of the synagogue desired simply the restoration of his daughter to health, her rescue from the fatal effects of her disease, and our translators have very properly rendered the Greek word sözö, - not saved as they have usually done, but - "healed," and this is the word (khalam) that is employed in the Syriac.
The story of the woman who "was made whole," into which the above incident is interpolated by way of episode, has already been noticed in Matt 9: 21.
Here also our translators have very properly rendered the verb sözo, " made whole," instead of, were saved, as it is in the Greek; so it is healed in the Syriac also.
Our English revision has rendered the Greek word sözö "made whole," but the Syriac text reads, "hath procured thee Life." The restoration of his sight, or rather the cure of his blindness, was all this man asked or expected, but on account of his faith, our Lord gave him - as he often did to those who had faith in Him-more than he sought -even the Life of the Gospel.
It will be observed that hitherto we have found only the verb sözö, " to save, or to be saved," but in the cases that are to follow, we shall find the noun Suter, which is translated " Savior" in our version, but which in the Syriac is LIFE-GIVER; and also the noun söteria which we translate "salvation," but which in the Syriac reads LIFE, the life which the Life-Giver bestows.
This is a part of the "magnificat " of Mary on her visit to Elizabeth. Commenting on this, Holding says: " Could the doctrine of natural immortality and eternal pain have lived beside the constant joy of a people who sang of God having sent His Son into the world, 'that all men might live through Him'? Surely we have suffered much in the conception of the high meaning of the Gospel, by using ' Savior' instead of LIFE-GIVER. This word has for its root, khya, preceded by mem, the characteristic of the participle, and also used to form a noun from the verb, and then the possessive noun follows the root, ' my Life Giver.”
Here in the Greek, we have the word Sötaria, Salvation three times. In the first two cases, Zacharias evidently refers to a temporal or political deliverance - as it is rendered in our version - but in the last clause he speaks prophetically of the greater gift of LIFE through Christ. So in the Syriac, in the first two cases, we have porkina, paraka, words meaning simply redemption or deliverance, but in the last clause, the higher benefit-the gift of Life is plainly set forth by the word (khya) LIFE.
These are the words in which the angel announced to the Shepherds the birth of Christ. The Jews had now come under the Roman power and severely felt the humiliation, and the burden of the taxation that Cesar Augustus had begun to levy upon them. They were looking for the Deliverer or bond breaker that had been so long foretold by their prophets. This was the joyful news that was now made known to them,-that He had actually come, and was "this day born in Bethlehem." This was not intended to be a full declaration of His office and work. They were not yet ready for all this. They were told only just what was first in their thoughts and desires. So the term of highest signification " Life-Giver," is not here found in the Syriac - the lower word (Paroka) Deliverer only is employed.
These are the cheering words of Jesus to the " woman that was a sinner," who so kindly and penitently ministered to Him in the house of Simon. They are the very words He also addressed to the woman whom He cured of the issue of blood, and to the blind man, to whom He gave sight. (Matt. 9: '22; Mark 5: 34.) They came to Him seeking only a temporal benefit, and carried away, on account of their faith, the infinitely higher blessing of ETERNAL LIFE. This is shown by the use of the higher word in the Syriac, but not in the Greek.
Here again the Syriac, more clearly than the Greek, shows what the salvation of the Gospel is, viz.: LIFE, and how it is received through belief of the truth.
This is just what Satan would prevent.
Omitting several passages that have been considered in the foregoing Gospels, we next note:
This is a noteworthy passage, both on account of the question asked, and the reply that our Lord made to it. It is evident from the context, that this is not a question simply of rescue from impending evil, but of heirship in the everlasting kingdom, that Christ had come to institute. For He goes on to tell those who heard Him, that many shall seek to enter in and shall not be able; that they shall come from the East and from the West, and from the North and the South, and shall sit down in the kingdom-and they themselves shall be thrust out. So we have, not simply saved, but LIFE in the Syriac.
This is a very unfortunate rendering in the English version; and even in the Greek it is quite ambiguous. Our Lord had healed ten lepers, but only one of them turned back to give thanks, and to glorify God for the benefit conferred. To him our Lord replied that his faith had -surely not saved him or made him whole, as the Greek and English would seem to imply, in the sense of restoring him to health, but had - given him LIFE - the great Gospel blessing which it was Christ's special prerogative to confer-and was given only to those who exercised faith in Him. All these lepers had received the lower boon of restoration to health; but only this one, the Samaritan had, through his faith, received the infinitely higher gift of LIFE at the hand of the LIFE-GIVER. So it reads in the Syriac, the very language in which Christ spoke, " Thy faith hath given thee LIFE."
Such was the result of our Lord's visit to the house of Zaccheus. He was a son of Abraham according to the flesh, for he was a Jew; but this did not constitute him an heir of the kingdom of heaven. It was only by faith - the same that Abraham exercised, that he could receive the LIFE of that kingdom. This faith he showed by bringing forth fruits meet for repentance.
3: 14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up:
15 That whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.
16 For God so loved the world, that lie gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.
This is one of the most important, among the many very explicit passages in this Gospel, in its decisive bearing on the doctrine of Eternal Life only through Christ. That the full force of it, and the superiority of the Syriac to the Greek reading may be the more obvious, the two preceding verses have been cited to be read in connection with it. Although the nature of this salvation spoken of in verse seventeen, is shown to be a salvation - not simply FROM sin and misery, but exaltation TO Everlasting life, by the preceding verses, yet in the Syriac this is not left to be 'inferred, but is emphatically declared: - That the world through Him might have LIFE.
This is the divinely appointed channel or medium through which salvation was to come.
The interview of Christ with the woman of Samaria, and with her fellow-townsman of Sychar, offers many interesting points for remark, bearing on this question of LIFE through Christ alone. I can notice only very briefly a few of them. The Samaritans were not Jews; but they were mainly Hebrews, with a large intermixture of other races, that had been imported into the country by their conquerors. Though widely alienated from the Judeans, in their worship, and in social life, they still retained the books of Moses, the traditions of the Hebrews, and their forms of worship. They were, like the Jews, looking for the Messiah, but evidently without any true conception of the spiritual nature of His mission. The gentle and effective way in which Jesus made Himself known to the woman at the well, as the Messiah, and enlightened her as to the true object of His mission, is very instructive. After exciting her surprise, by asking the gift of some water to drink, at her hands, He says: " If thou knew the Gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldst have asked Him, and He would have given thee living water " -that is, the Water of Life. Then, when, in her astonishment she inquires, if He is greater than Jacob, from whom the well had been received, He replies: " Whosoever, drinks of this water shall thirst again, but whosoever drinks of the water that I shall give him, shall never thirst (will not thirst forever, Syriac), but the water that I shall give him, shall be in him a well of water springing .up into Eternal Life."
Having had awakened, in her mind, some ill-defined desire for such a wonderful gift, and some imperfect conception of Him, as the Giver, she begins to inquire about the true place of worship - a question in dispute between the Samaritans and the Judeans. Our Lord replies (verse 22 above) that the salvation (notice the definite article the) is of the Jews. Olshausen thinks that by this term " the salvation," is meant, the one bringing salvation, the Savior, is not of the Samaritans, but of the Jews. The Syriac is still more explicit, for, instead of "the salvation," it reads The Life, or the LIFE-GIVER is of the Jews.
After receiving some further instruction concerning the spiritual nature of true worship, she says:
that the Messiah (which is called the Christ) when lie cometh, will tell us all things." Note: The word Messiah is the Syriac word for " Anointed"; in the Greek it is " Christ." This parenthesis, explaining the meaning of the word Messiah, is not found in the Syriac -for it is not needed, -it has evidently been introduced by the Greek editors, and retained in our English version. And now the way having been fully prepared, Jesus declares Himself to be the Messiah. This is the first direct announcement He made to any one of Himself as the Messiah, the Christ, for whom the people were looking: and she, at once, as it would I know appear, believed on Him. And after her neighbors had been called, and had heard His words - for He remained two days with them-they too believed and said: Now we know that He is truly the Messiah, the LIFE-GIVER of the world., It is difficult to perceive how any one can so read, or rather mis-read this narrative, whether in the Greek or in our English version, so as to see in Christ nothing more than a Savior from sin and misery, or at most, a Giver of pardon and purity and happiness to repenting sinners. lint reading it in the Syriac it would seem to be utterly impossible for any one to take Him to be anything less than the actual Glynn, of ETERNAL LIFE to perishing men.
The chief topic of our Lord's discourse to the Jews, as recorded in this and the next following chapter, is The Life Eternal which God had provided for men, and which was now offered to them, through Himself, as the true Messiah. These words, though spoken on two different occasions, may be summarized as follows:
1. That man has no principle of eternally enduring life in himself;
2. That God has given us Eternal Life in His Son;
3. That man's actual enjoyment of Eternal Life depends
on the closest union with the Incarnate Life of God in Christ;
4. That the Eternal Life bestowed on us includes and requires the immortality of the whole humanity, and therefore carries with it the Resurrection of the dead." (Life in Christ, p. 219.)
After asserting most emphatically His own divine authority and power to raise the dead and to give life to whomsoever He will, and that he who honoreth not the Son honoreth not the Father who sent Him, and that as the Father hath Life in Himself, so hath He given the Son to have Life in Himself, and he who heareth and believeth His words has Everlasting Life and shall not come into condemnation - He says in reply to their murmurs -" These things I say that ye may LIVE. So it reads in the language in which He spoke to them. Why these words should be changed in the Greek, and consequently in our version so as to read "that ye might be saved," I know not, unless it be to afford some apology, under this ambiguous word, for the dogma of the Grecian philosophy, that was so early injected into the creed of the Christian church, that this salvation is simply a rescue of immortal sinners from an endless life of sin and misery, and a restoration to the love and favor of God, and to a state of blessedness that is also endless. Such indeed, is the popular understanding of this word "saved," at the present time. But any unprejudiced reader of these remarkable discourses especially in the Syriac, cannot fail to perceive how utterly inconsistent this doctrine is with the whole tenor of our Lord's teaching, from beginning to end. The sixth long chapter, throughout, is a continual reiteration under a variety of illustrations, of this one leading theme. And what was the result? The very same as when this great Gospel truth is preached at the present day - They were offended. "From that time many of His disciples went back, and walked no more with Him." And Jesus said to the Twelve, as all others were leaving Him, " Will ye also go away? Peter replied, Lord? to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of Eternal Life."
Ah, men are willing enough to be told that Christ will save them from the consequences of their sins, if you will but grant them their favorite dogma of Immortality in their own right. If you will only flatter them with the notion that they have never forfeited this -that they cannot forfeit it by sin -just what the Tempter told Eve-they are quite willing to listen. But when you tell them that they have no Eternal Life in themselves-that they must receive it as a Gift from God by repentance and faith in Christ, or they will utterly perish - they are offended - they will turn away from such preaching, as they did from Christ, when he preached this doctrine.
The doctrine of Immortality through the Incarnation, and of death eternal coming upon all men out of Christ, is the chief stumbling-block of the Gospel. It was the last truth for the church to learn, and the first for her to lose; -as it will be the last that she will consent to receive again by unlearning the notion which represents man's immortality as independent of Redemption. Edward White.
The superior reading of the Syriac is here seen, as in other cases, and is still further confirmed by the verses following: "I am come that they might have Life, and that they might have it"-not more abundantly as in our old version, but as it is in the revision - " abundantly," or in abundance, or as it is in the Syriac -"that life which is excellent." Our natural life is limited and transitory; the LIFE that Christ gives is unlimited and ever enduring.
This was the reply made by the disciples to our Lord, when He had said to them, "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth, but I go that I may awake him out of sleep."
The English rendering, " He shall do well," is better than the Greek, "He shall be saved," and so it reads in the Syriac, " He is recovering." For reference is here, not to the salvation of the Gospel, but to the recovery of his health; hence the higher word (Khya), LIFE, is not employed, but the lower word, implying deliverance; for the two ideas are always kept distinct in the Syriac.
The second clause in the above verse is to be read as an interrogation, as well as the first, as it is in the Syriac. Christ naturally shrinks from the dreadful death to which He is consciously hastening, and He inquires, shall I ask to be saved from it? - and immediately answers in the negative His own inquiry; No "For this very purpose have I come.
It is not a question of life simply, much less of the Life of the Gospel, but of a Salvation or rescue from the dreadful experience that awaits Him. He submissively resigns Himself even to this, because it is the will of the Father, and the very object for which He had been sent into the world, - to give His own life for the redemption of the world. The superiority of the Syriac to the Greek, in consistency and clearness, must be evident to every one.
This is the last occurrence of this word sozo in this Gospel. It is almost identical with the first (3: 17). It needs no further comment. It is to be remarked that LIFE, ETERNAL LIFE, through Christ and through Him alone, is the great leading theme of this Gospel. It is partly obscured in our version and in the Greek, which we have followed by the use of the words Save," "Savior," "Salvation," when the words Sözö, Soar and &aria occur in the Greek; but still, it stands out so prominently in the word zoa; zoa aiönios; Ile Zoe aiönios, Life, Life Everlasting, the Life Everlasting-repeated as it is, thirty-six times in this, Gospel, and seventeen times in the other three Gospels, that it would seem to be impossible for any one to misapprehend it. It was the very first thought in the intercessory prayer of our Lord on the night before His crucifixion.
These words spoke Jesus and lifted up His eyes to heaven and said: Father, glorify thy Son, that thy Son may also glorify thee: as thou hast given Him power over all flesh, that He should give ETERNAL LIFE, to as many as thou host given Him. And this is Eternal Life, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou halt sent.
John, the writer of this Gospel, is so impressed with it, that he carries it into his chief Epistle, and makes it the leading thought there, and gives this emphatic record in the closing words of the Epistle:
This is the Record that God hath given to us Eternal Life, and this Life is in His Son. He that hath the Son, has Life, and he that hath not the Son, has not Life.
In this book-undoubtedly written by Luke the writer of the third Gospel, - the same superiority of the Syriac to the Greek in expressing more explicitly ideas which are translated " save, salvation, Savior, is apparent. It will not be important to cite every case.
The former of these two passages is a part of Peter's address on the day of Pentecost; the latter gives the result of the outpouring of the Spirit on that day; in both of which the nature of the salvation spoken of is unmistakably described in the Syriac. It is not a temporal salvation, but one that is spiritual and Eternal; it is not merely a salvation from sin and misery, but also a salvation to Life; and those who had become partakers of this new Life were gathered into the church. Would that only such now, and always, were gathered into the church!
In this narrative of the restoration of the impotent man, and Peter's defence of himself for his agency in the matter, the Greek words save and salvation occur three times. In the first instance it is very properly' rendered in our version (not saved, but) " made whole, for he is speaking of the temporal or bodily cure of this man. But Peter now takes occasion to proclaim in the unwilling ears of these priests and rulers, the higher truth of the Gospel. Hence the radical distinction between the lower and higher blessing, both of which are indeed from the same source, though the difference between them is not indicated in the Greek or English, but it is conspicuously brought out in the Syriac, by words that are radically, distinct.
This is a part of Peter's bold speech before the Sanhedrim after his miraculous deliverance from prison, into which he had been cast with the other Apostles.
The angel that delivered them, told them to go and speak all the words of (tas zoos tautes) this Life, and they went into the temple and began to preach as they had been bidden. And when the officers, the next morning failing, to their astonishment, to find them, in the prison, and to their greater astonishment, found them preaching the Word of Life, in the temple, they took them without violence, fearing the people, and brought them again before the council to answer for their disobedience. Then Peter addressed them in the words quoted above (see context 29-32 verses).
How fitting that Peter should call Him a ' Life-Giver,' both in view of what the angel who opened the prison doors bid the Apostles do, and also in view of his former words to the same council as noticed above (see 4: 12). It was Syriac or Syro-Chaldaic that Peter spoke, and no doubt but he used not Sotër, the Greek word for Savior, but Makhyna, Life-Giver. Now how fitly one who knows the preaching of Christ to be a message of Life, calls its great Subject the LIFE-GIVER. (Holding.)
Stephen is here speaking of deliverance from their bondage in Egypt, and not of the salvation of the Gospel- certainly not of the boon of Eternal Life- and so the word soteria is very properly rendered, " to deliver," or "deliverance," in our version. So it is also expressed in the Syriac.
Peter is here giving an account of his mission to Cornelius, and what the angel had said of him to Cornelius. We learn from the Syriac what sort of salvation is meant, and what is necessary to it. In commenting on this passage, it has been well said by the author just cited:
If a company of modern teachers, whose reputation as leading men stands high, had sat in judgment on the question of character, as set forth in Luke's account of Cornelius, they would have decided that he was all right. Mark the points of -excellence as briefly sketched by the historian. (1) Be was a devout man (Syriac righteous man). (2) He was one who feared God. (3) He, like Abraham, taught all his house, children and servants to do the same, and succeeded. (4) He did many righteous things among the people. He gave much alms, or showed active benevolence. (5) He prayed at all times. Surely, such a man was one whom neither minister, apostle, nor angel need feel any concern about. But whatever men might have decided about Cornelius, God did not deem him safe without more light from Gospel teaching. And hence, an angel was sent to tell him what to do. And what he must do is to send for Peter who could preach to him, and his household words,
by which they might lay hold on Life.
Do not the Scriptures here teach us very plainly, that, no matter how moral a man may be -whether in heathen or in Christian lands, - he needs to know Christ and His Gospel in order to Salvation unto Eternal Life? " How shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? How shall they hear without a preacher? and how shall they preach except they be sent?" And when they (the objectors at Jerusalem), heard these things, they held their peace, and glorified God, saying: "Then has God also, to the Gentiles granted repentance unto (zoén) Life."
We have in this chapter an account of what Paul and Barnabas said to the Jews at Antioch (Pisidia) when they showed themselves unworthy of the Life that was offered them, and of the effect of their preaching to the Gentiles of that city.
Paul begins his address to the Jews, not by speaking at once of Christ in the higher sense, as the Giver of LIFE,-but not to offend their prejudices, he first speaks of Him, simply as a Deliverer- as is evident from the Syriac (verse 23). Then after having gained their favorable attention, he guts on to say more explicitly, "To you is this word of LIFE sent. The Gentile part of his audience seem to have been especially impressed by his address on the first Sabbath; and so, after the Jews had retired, they requested that this truth might be further expounded to them on the next Sabbath. This excited the envy of the Jews, and stirred them up to violent opposition. On the next Sabbath, almost the whole city came together to hear the word of God." There was great excitement. The Jews turned against the Apostles, " and spoke against those things which were spoken by Paul, contradicting and blaspheming."
Here we have - instead of soterian, Salvation, as it is in the Greek and English - the higher and more definite word LIFE in the Syriac, and this, it will be seen, agrees with what had just been said of " Everlasting Life" in verse 46.
After their return to Antioch (Syria), a controversy springs up in the church with respect to imposing the Jewish rite of circumcision on the Gentile converts.
So a delegation was sent down to Jerusalem to inquire of the church there, "about this question." After much controversy, Peter closed the discussion, in a very catholic and liberal speech which concludes with these words:
Now in both of the above passages, instead of söthenai, to be saved, as it is in Greek and English, we have in the Syriac the more explicit word, " have Life," showing what is meant by being saved.
16: 17, 30, 31. The incidents of this sixteenth chapter suggest many interesting topics for remark, but we must confine our attention to the one point in hand. The Greek noun söteria, salvation, occurs once in verse seventeen, and the verb sözö, to save, occurs twice in the thirtieth and thirty-first verses, under the following circumstances. Paul and Silas, in their missionary tour, were now at Philippi. Here followed from day to day by a noisy damsel, ness, who continually cried, saying:
The apostles were unwilling to receive any patronizing testimony from such a source. And so, after suffering this for many days - following their Master's example, who rebuked the devils when they cried, saying, " Thou art Christ, the Son of God (Luke 4: 4) - they turned and exorcised the spirit that possessed her. By doing this, they brought down on themselves the wrath of her masters, whose gain, by her soothsaying, was now at an end. The consequence was, they were cruelly beaten, and then cast into the inner prison, and their feet were made fast in the stocks. There, in their dark cavern, at midnight, while, in spite of their sufferings, they were singing praises to God, " suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken, and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one's bands were loosed.
The jailer, who was responsible with his own life for the safe keeping of his charge, in the terror of the moment was about to do, what many men have done, to commit suicide - hoping to escape from present evils by flying to others we know not of, just what Brutus and Cassius did in this very city of Philippi, - when Paul interposed to prevent him. After he had become assured of the safety of his prisoners, and had had time for reflection, better thoughts took possession of his mind. He thought of the character of these two men, and of what the damsel had said, " They teach the people the way of LIFE." Perhaps he had heard the message from their own lips. He thought of their unjust and cruel treatment, and of their wonderful demeanor through it all; and of the miraculous interposition of heaven in their behalf. Sudden conviction seizes him. He trembles before these servants of God, as in the presence of God Himself. His only thought now, in this midnight hour, is not of the concerns of this life, but of the Life to come. Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas:"
The mission of Paul and Silas to these Philippians was not to proclaim any temporal salvation, nor mere salvation of any kind, as many interpret the Gospel, but LIFE, Eternal Life, through Jesus Christ. The damsel correctly characterized it as " The Way of Life." So the people understood it. So did the jailer. Hence, he did not simply ask, as might be inferred from our version, and from the Greek -what must I do to be saved? but " What must I do that I may have Life? " that LIFE through Christ which you have come to announce. And their reply is equally explicit, "Believe on the name of our Lord Jesus Messiah, and thou wilt have LIFE, thou and thy house." Every one must observe how much more explicit is the Syriac than the Greek and English, in this case as well as in the many others that have been already noticed.
There are several other cases in this book, for instance, in Chapter 27: 20, 32, 34, where the words evidently refer to salvation in its lower and physical sense; but as there is nothing peculiar in these cases, we need not stop to give them particular notice.
The cases where the Greek words Sozo, Soter, and Soteria, occur in these epistles, are so numerous, and we have commented so freely upon similar cases already, that we must now deal with them in a more summary manner. This we can well do; for the same principle and method of rendering are carried through the whole of the New Testament; namely: whenever temporal or physical salvation is in question, or deliverance of any sort, the Syriac uses such words as imply rescue, cure, release, deliver, etc. But where the peculiar gift of the Gospel through Christ is evidently spoken of, the words signifying to Live, Life, the Life-Giver, are always employed to designate it. But on the other hand, in the Greek, no such distinction is made; nor is it often made in our English version, which follows the Greek.
There are eleven cases in this epistle. They may all be grouped together, the rendering from the Greek and the Syriac side by side, without remark, and the reader can make the comparison for himself.
In this epistle there are thirteen cases, all of the Greek verb sözö, to save, and all but one, referring to the Gospel gift of LIFE, are represented in the Syriac by (Khya, the root word for) LIFE.
Here the thought is fixed, not on what is gained hut on what is avoided or escaped, and so instead of Live we very significantly have (Shazab) escape.
This passage raises a perplexing question. I know not how to put any other interpretation on it than what lies on the surface. Reference is here made to what is said in the verse next, above quoted, (15 verse) and to the two following, 16 and 17 verses, in which the body is declared to be the temple of God. The merciful result of this severe church discipline is seen in Paul's second Epistle to this Church, 2: 5-10.
We are taught here the hard lesson of yielding up everything in the way of personal preference or convenience - everything but principle - to the prejudices and weaknesses of our fellow-men, in order to win them to Christ. This thought is repeated in our next citation.
The word Soterias, salvation, occurs twice in the Greek in this verse, and is so translated in our old version, but only once in the revised version, and this is in accordance with the Syriac.
The radical and permanent nature of true repentance is much more distinctly brought out in the Syriac than in the Greek and English readings.
In the Epistle to the GALATIANS there are no cases; and in the Epistle to the EPHESIANS there are only two or three; but as they bring nothing new to the question we are considering, they may be left without further notice; and pass on to the next Epistle, where there are three cases of &aria, and one of Suter, which it may be well to cite.
Paul writes this letter while in prison at Rome, awaiting the issue of his trial. It may be thought that he here refers to the salvation of his natural life. In that case, the lower term in the Syriac, signifying deliverance, would have been appropriate; but as the higher term (Khya) LIFE is employed, it is to be understood in the Gospel sense, and is appropriately rendered "Life."
Although the Divine Life is a pure "gift," and not a reward of merit, this Life is to be cultivated by the diligent and faithful use of the means of grace.
When this passage is read in connection with the next following (21 verse, which we have also quoted above) referring to the doctrine of the Resurrection, and the change which our corruptible bodies are then to undergo, through the almighty power of this LIFE-GIVER, we see how much more clearly this term sets Him forth as "the Resurrection and the Life."
In the Epistle to the COLOSSIANS there are no cases to be noticed.
2: 16 Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be (söthösin)saved.
That they may have LIFE.
The Jews regarded themselves as the special and exclusive favorites of heaven. Even those who had embraced Christianity could scarcely tolerate the idea of receiving Gentile converts to the same privileges with themselves under the Gospel.
5: 8 But let us, who are And take the helmet of the of the day, be sober, putting hope of LIFE; on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of (Solërias) Salvation.
13 But we are bound to give thanks always to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to (Soterian) Salvation, through sanctification of the Spirit.
Chosen you unto LIFE.
The Living God has given life to all who live; for Ile is the Source of all life; but lie is the LIFE-G1VER, in a special sense, of those who believe, even the Life that is Eternal.
Here, as elsewhere, the Syriac makes clear the broad distinction, which is not manifest in the Greek or English, between a rescue from evil, and the gift of the heavenly LIFE in the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
The Epistle to the Hebrews could hardly have been written by Paul, for various reasons, which we cannot now stop to consider, - though it might have been written by his associate Silas; and this is quite probable. That it was originally written in Syriac, like the Gospel of Matthew, and then translated into Greek, whatever may be true of the other Epistles, is generally admitted by the best critics. It gives us two cases of the verb Sözö, and seven of the noun Söteria, all but one of which refer to the heavenly Life, and are so indicated in the Syriac by the use of the (root) word Khya.
The reference in verse 7 is to Christ's agony in the garden. It has commonly been regarded as a very difficult passage. Commentators have stumbled over it because they have construed the Greek verb to save, as meaning to hinder, or prevent, to save him from dying. But the Syriac reading to resuscitate, or to raise again to life from death, makes the meaning perfectly clear. We know that He was heard in regard to this very thing, -the restoration of His life after death. For we are told, 2 Cor. 13: 4, "For though working of His (God's) mighty power which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead.
This last example is the only one of the nine in this Epistle in which the word "save" in Greek, and "Life" in Syriac, does not evidently have prime reference to the life of the world to come. Perhaps, however, even here, both sorts of life should be included under the one term "Life." This was an act of faith - and the salvation should not be understood as restricted to this life only.
The Old Testament saints unquestionably had some true ideas of that future Life immortal -that length of days forever and ever," which it was the purpose of God to give to His people, by a Resurrection from the dead. They prophesied of it, and warned sinners against the second death, from which there was no recovery, saying: " Why will ye die?" But it was only through types and figures and vague promises that this great doctrine was assuredto them. Their faith laid hold of it as that "some better thing," that was yet to be more clearly revealed to His people. They did not, indeed, fully comprehend these promises, as we now read them in the Gospel, through which this " Life and Immortality are brought to light." They did not, indeed, comprehend the full import of their own prophecies, as we now comprehend them, but they searched diligently, that they might know them.
How happy are our ears, That hear this joyful sound, Which kings and prophets waited for, And sought, but never found.
How blessed are our eyes, That see this heavenly light; Prophets and kings desired it long, But died without the sight.
This passage last cited, and the last to be cited, is one of the most important of them all. It is only in the Syriac that the distinction is made clear between the Redemption of all the children of Adam, from their natural or Adamic death, by the death of Christ, and their salvation to Eternal Life. The word Suter in Greek, always rendered Savior in English, usually reads LIFE-GIVER in the Syriac, because it is His chief prerogative to give the boon of Eternal Life to those who believe on Him. But here in the Syriac it does not read LIFE-GIVER, but Redeemer, for He is indeed the Redeemer of the world, the whole world. Redemption by Christ is as broad as our death by Adam. "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive." But this does not entitle all men to ETERNAL LIFE; it only brings them before the bar of God to answer for their own individual sins. It is only the righteous that enter into ETERNAL LIFE - the wicked are condemned to the second death, from which there is no recovery. The Syriac reading takes from the Universalist this, which is one of his chief proof texts. Christ is not the Savior of the world in the sense in which this word is usually taken by them- but He is a Redeemer of the world, as the Syriac shows, but the LIFE-GIVER of only those who believe on His name. " It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment." "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have Everlasting Life."
The Syriac Peshito canon of the New Testament closes here. Without going on to notice the few cases of this word that occur in the remaining books, as they were subsequently added, we may well conclude our review with the following summary remarks.
Our criticism lies, not against the Greek words Sozö, Soter, and Sotëria, nor against their rendering in our version, because of what they express, but because of what they fail to express. These words - or rather this word, for they may be treated as substantially one-may have respect to a mere temporal or temporary rescue, a salvation from physical evil, or peril, or to our redemption or resurrection from our Adamic death, which includes the whole human family, as in the passage last cited (1 John 4: 14,) or, supposing the doctrine of endless sin and misery to be true, it may have respect to our salvation from this fearful doom. But all this, in the popular mind, is a salvation only FROM, and not To, anything. The force of the word seems to have expended itself, and to stop just here-a salvation from? And this is just where our modern theology is deficient. Man is said to be immortal without any Savior. He has incurred by his sins the penalty of endless sin and misery. Now what he is thought to need is, not the gift of an Eternal Life, but to be rescued or delivered or saved from this doom, that he may pass his eternal life in the blessedness and joy of heaven. As for an endless life, he has it now, in his own right. It has not been forfeited; it cannot be. But he must be rescued or saved from the fearful doom to which he is exposed. This is the great salvation of the Gospel, and Christ, who saves him, is his Savior.
But this is a very low and meager view of Christ and; His Gospel. It takes no account of the great boon, the gift He brings us.
“The gift of God is Eternal LIFE through Jesus Christ our Lord." " I give unto them Eternal LIFE," says Christ. This is indeed constantly reiterated throughout the New Testament, in all our versions, but the Grecian philosophy, that dominates our theological schools, and which has put its interpretation on our Greek and English versions, has contrived to give such a spiritualistic, ethical interpretation to this word Life," and to its opposite " Death," as to save the Platonic doctrine of the natural immortality of all men, and to make these words "life" and " death " mean, simply states of being; one a state of endless blessedness, and the other a state of endless sin and misery, so that these words Save, Savior, Salvation, simply in the sense of rescue, exactly express all its advocates would have them express, and only this.
But when we turn to the Syriac (Peshito) New Testament, which certainly ante-dates as a collection of the sacred writings every other collection; which was made even during the lifetime of most of the Apostles, and which is in the vernacular of the Jews of that age. and which gives the very words of our Lord and His immediate disciples, we find this great Gospel truth brought out so fully, so clearly, so emphatically, and so repeatedly, as to put it beyond the possibility of cavil or dispute with those who receive these Scriptures as the Word of God.
In the one hundred and twenty or more instances cited in the foregoing paper, in which the Greek word S5z5 occurs, either as a verb or noun, and generally translated Save, Savior, Salvation, in our version, we find that in every case, where the salvation in question is evidently a temporal rescue or deliverance, a salvation from .9 a word is used in the Syriac to express this idea, such as rescue, restore, cure, redeem, or save, etc. But in all the other cases, where the Gospel boon or gift is spoken of-including the great majority of cases-the higher specific word signifying TO GIVE LIFE, The gift of LIFE, The LIFE-GIVER, is employed. If this distinctive representation had been carried into the Greek, as it is not, and into our version, where it is also wanting, it would seem to have been absolutely impossible to have lost this prime Gospel doctrine out of our Christian theology, or to have obscured it to the mind of the common reader.
And now; if all who believe in this central doctrine of IMMORTALITY and ETERNAL LIFE only in Christ, would go back to the primitive mode of expressing the doctrine they hold, and use, instead of the words Save, Salvation, Savior, which are but partial and ambiguous at best, the more expressive and definite words To LIVE, LIFE, Our LIFE-GIVER, as the first disciples did, we might perhaps do something toward restoring the primitive faith in this leading doctrine of the Gospel:- ETERNAL LIFE AS THE GIFT OF GOD THROUGH JESUS CHRIST OUR LIFE-GIVER.
PHILADELPHIA, PA., March, 1886.
The way of life and the way of death, according to the scriptures and the apostolic fathers, versus the teachings of modern theology.
An address before the young ministers' Christian union, at Providence, Rhode Island, August 6, 1885; repeated before the association for the promotion of Christian knowledge, at Brooklyn, New York, September 27, 1885.
BY J. H. PETTINGELL, A. M.
Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.
I have taken for my text or motto on this occasion this opening sentence of the old Greek manuscript recently discovered, and brought to the notice of the Christian world by Bishop Bryennios, entitled, Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, a document which, though not included in the New Testament canon, was evidently written during the same century, and not many years after the Gospel of John, and which, though not claiming Divine inspiration for itself, certainly claims our highest respect as reflecting the mind of our Lord and His immediate disciples.
My simple object is to set forth the doctrine of Life and Death according to the teaching of the Scriptures and the Apostolic Fathers, and to restore the central doctrine of Eternal Life through Christ alone, to its original place in our Evangelical system, which it has lost through the influence of the Platonic dogma of the Natural Immortality of all men.
The limits to which I am restricted forbid anything more than a general view of this question. I cannot stop to argue at length any one point, however important it may be; much less can I particularly notice the many minor incidental topics that are often associated with the question before us.
Upon some of these we are not altogether agreed among ourselves. They are too obscurely revealed to admit of any positive opinion. But happily the main question, upon which we are so fully united, does not depend on their solution. It is to this and its hearing on our popular systems of Theology, that I would direct your especial attention. Nor is it needful to state very definitely and in detail, if it were possible, what is this popular system of Theology which is commonly called "The Evangelical System." This might have been done more easily half a century ago, but there has been, within the last few years, such a loosening of the bonds that formerly held Christian men to ecclesiastical and traditional dogmas, such a breaking away from old lines of thought; and so many divergent schools of doctrine have arisen, even among those who call themselves "orthodox," that it would be difficult to say what is the prevailing belief of our theological schools, or of the Church at the present day, especially on questions of eschatology. New ways have been invented of interpreting the old Creeds, so as to admit of views directly the opposite of those once held under them; and the new Creeds that are being prepared, by way of compromise, are so general and vague in their definition -as indeed they are intended to be - as to include almost every possible variety of doctrine under one common formula of expression.
There are some, perhaps, who actually and cordially accept the teaching of the Westminster divines in their larger catechism, which is still the acknowledged standard of the great Presbyterian Church in its various branches, and to which its ministers must, at least, profess allegiance. It sets forth the final doom of sinners in these words:
The punishments of sin in the world to come are everlasting separation from the comfortable presence of God, and most grievous torments in soul and body, without intermission, in hell-fire forever. (Answer to Question 29.)
They shall be cast out from the favorable presence of God, and the glorious fellowship with Christ, His saints, and all His holy angels, into hell, to be punished with unspeakable torments, both of body and soul, with the devil and his angels forever. (Answer to question 89.)
Though Edwards, Hopkins, Davies, Jeremy Taylor, and indeed all the "sound" theologians of yesterday, unflinchingly preached this doctrine in all its literalness, there are very few of their disciples who are bold enough to do it today, or who would be tolerated if they should venture to do it. But under this form of words every variety of views concerning the fate of the wicked, from that which this language expresses. and was intended to express, down to that of the mildest sort of suffering imaginable, is held and openly avowed by their legitimate successors. With many of them the punishment of the wicked - if indeed it can be called punishment - is held to be quite optional with those who suffer it, as regards its nature, its degree, and the length of time it is to be endured. God is said to do the very best He can to make it pleasant for them, even in hell. They are excluded from heaven because they prefer it, that is, so long as it may please them to stay out, for the door is always open for their return, whenever they shall change their minds, which, no doubt, most of them, and perhaps all of them, will do sooner or later, and so come at last to share, with those who were earlier saved, in the blessedness of heaven forever!
The manifest drift of theological sentiment, at the present' day, even among those who claim to be evangelical, is strong and rapid toward this latter phase of doctrine, under such various terms as "The Larger Hope," " The New Theology,” “Evolutionism," "Progressive Development," "A Fair Chance, and other designations. This I might show by citations without number could I spare the room for them.
So is it with these theologians, whether of the old or the new school, - and with them we might include skeptics and infidels of every grade excepting atheistic materialists, - starting out from one point, with one common postulate, - the natural immortality of all men -they arrive at conclusions that, on the one hand, are at war with the moral sense of every man, and that reflect infinite dishonor on the character of God, or, on the other, that discredit His Word, and sap the foundations of the Gospel.
In saying this, it is not the intelligence nor the virtue of our Christian brethren that we would call in question. Though we differ so widely from them with respect to the fate of the wicked, we claim no superior wisdom or virtue on this account. Our difference arises mainly from our different points of departure; it is this that brings us to conclusions so widely apart. The old Ptolemean system of Astronomy that dominated the wisdom and learning of the world for so many centuries, and which was wrought out with consummate skill and genius by the wisest of men, brought them to the most astounding conclusions, not because their logic was at fault, but because they
started from a false premise. They took this earth as the center of their calculations, when they should have taken the sun. With such an error in their starting-point, no process of reasoning, however correct, could bring them to anything else than a false result. It was not until the true heliocentric standpoint was taken by such scientific and religious heretics as Copernicus and Galileo, - as they were accounted in their day, and that not so very long ago,-and men began, amid much learned opposition and ridicule, to change their true point of observation from this earth to the sun, that the real simplicity and beauty of our Solar System was made apparent. So is it with the theological system that is founded on Plato's philosophical postulate of the natural immortality of all men. It must lead, as it ever has done, to error and confusion. And the more logical its devotees are, the greater the fallacy of their conclusions.
If our dear Christian brethren, whose opposition and reproaches we are now called to bear, could be persuaded, despite their prejudices and their fears, to make with us the Word of God instead of Satan's lie their point of departure, they would see a simplicity, a beauty, a glory running through the whole system of Divine Truth, clarifying and illuminating all its doctrines, of which they have hitherto had no conception.
It is to some of these more prominent doctrines, and to the bearing which this leading crucial doctrine of Life only in Christ has upon them, that I now ask your attention.
Leaving scientific speculators to discuss among themselves, either with the Scriptures or without them, questions relating to the genesis of man, the time, manner, and process of his creation, or whether created at all, we take the words of Scripture as phenomenally true, and sufficiently scientific for our religious instruction.
That it was the purpose of the Creator to give to man an endless career, if he should prove himself worthy of such a high privilege, or, if he could be fitted for it, we have no doubt. But that an indestructible life was conferred -upon him at the outset, we have no evidence whatever, but every possible evidence to the contrary. We are expressly told that the perpetuation of his life depended on perpetual obedience to his Maker. As the highest, and the last made, and the most richly endowed of all earthly creatures, he was constituted the sovereign,- not absolute and independent, but - tributary sovereign of this world, with a commission to subordinate all its forces, animal and material, to his control, and endowed with a moral sense by which he could discern the right from the wrong, and a free will by which he could choose his own course. In these respects he bore the Image of his Maker. But we are not to infer from this word " that he possessed all the Divine attributes. He had neither omnipotence, omniscience, nor omnipresence, nor the most peculiar and distinguishing of them all, an independent self-existence. An image of anything is not necessarily its equal; indeed, it must be inferior. We see the image of the sun in every rain-drop that sparkles beneath. its rays, yet how frail and transitory are such images.
In that beautiful garden where man was first placed, he had ever before him, in the Tree of which he was forbidden to eat, a visible token of God's authority over him; and also, in the Tree of Life, of which he might freely eat, so long and only so long, as he continued in obedience, an evidence of his dependence, on external means for the continuance and support of the life he now enjoyed.
Man's supreme excellence consisted mainly in the possibilities of the nature that was given him. He was placed between two worlds, the material, which, in its nature and constitution is transitory, and the spiritual, which alone has the elements of permanency. Having his origin here, and of the earth earthy, and subject, at any rate, in the beginning, to material and animal conditions, he might rise to that higher state above him, and live forever in the favor of his Maker and the fellowship of the holy beings that are confirmed in holiness and love;, or he might sink to that beneath him, and share in the transitory fortune of all earthly creatures and things. He must first be proved, for character is not a passive object of creation. It must be developed and established in any free agent by the exercise of his own free choice; and this can only be under temptation and trial. We have no reason to suppose that any of the higher orders of beings have been confirmed in their holiness and immortality, excepting under such trial as has proved them worthy of the boon.
Whether man, as first created, shall be matriculated into the spiritual sphere above him, or degraded to the mortal condition of the animal world beneath him, depends on the result of the trial to which he must be first subjected. This trial would seem to have been as simple and definite as any trial could be, and the issue equally clear and decisive, if we are to accept the testimony of Scripture concerning it.
The penalty of disobedience was as explicit as language could make it: " In the day that thou eats thereof, thou shalt surely die." No reason can be given why these words should not be taken to mean just what they express. Our first parents could not have misunderstood them, nor could have had any doubt of the literal execution of the penalty, nor indeed did they, as the record expressly tells us, till the Tempter suggested it. It was he who said, Ye shall not surely die. Ye shall be as gods," that is, immortal, "knowing good and evil," - the very words he has ever since been whispering in the ears of their deluded children to the present day, and against which we are now contending, that we may vindicate the truth and sincerity a id honor of our God. That He meant what He said, and said what He meant, is further evident from the words of the sentence, which He pronounced against them. For in the very day of their transgression they were stricken with death, forbidden further access to the Tree of Life, driven out of Paradise into an unfriendly world, and doomed to gain their bread by toil, amid thorns and thistles, in pain and sorrow, until, worn out in the conflict with its adverse forces, they should go down to the ground from which they had been taken: "For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died. Here it is to be noticed that this word much,-"to die," " death," - is used not only in the threatening, but in the record of its fulfillment. It is precisely the same word in both cases, and must have the same meaning. There is not the least intimation in all the record-excepting that which the Tempter gives that anything more, or anything less, than actual, literal death, with its necessary accompaniments, is the divine penalty of sin.
That death is generally preceded and attended by sickness, pain and sorrow, is true enough. They are the precursors of death, the means by which it is effected. They are not death itself; they are causative, symptomatic, prophetic of the approaching event. However severe they may be or however long protracted, there is no death till life itself is extinguished. To suppose that the Deity intended to inflict such pains as accompany death, and infinitely greater, endlessly protracted, without any death whatever; that He concealed His real purpose under a specious form of words, saying one thing and meaning something quite different, even the very opposite of what He said, is to charge Him with a degree of sophistry and deceit which Would be unpardonable in any human lawgiver, and with such heartless cruelty as no language can express. That such an interpretation could have been put on these explicit words, Thou shalt surely die," must be due, as the Bible tells us, to the cunning suggestions of Satan. No other power could have conceived of it, or have given it such currency as it has had in the world. It is part and parcel of the first lie of this great deceiver.
But, as if to forestall any such possible construction of man's doom, we are expressly told that after man had sinned, and rendered himself necessarily miserable, as long as life should continue, he was absolutely prevented from eating any longer of the Tree of Life, LEST HE SHOULD EAT AND LIVE FOREVER.
It is clearly demonstrable from science as well as from Scripture, as Professor Drummond shows, in his admirable work, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, that an endless life in sin is an impossibility. It is only in perfect union with God, the Source of all life, and in perfect correspondence with a perfect environment, that any creature can have Everlasting Life. Sin throws one out of harmony with God and with Nature. It produces irritation, irregularity, disease, pain, and consequent ruin. It is only a question of time, how long any organism, whether physical or spiritual, can endure the fatal and hopeless conflict.' It is with man's moral nature as with a piece of machinery. However perfectly constructed, if a breakage or fracture occur, the tendency is to increasing disorder, until the whole goes down in utter ruin. This is just what the apostle James curtly says: "Lust, when it has conceived, bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death; " or the Psalmist still more briefly: " Evil shall slay the wicked."
Had the Creator been only truthful and just, this death would have been the final end of man. But He is more; He is infinitely wise and good; His Eternal Purpose of love toward our race was not to be frustrated, but only advanced, by the malice of Satan. No sooner had man incurred this penalty than God began to make known to him His purpose to redeem him from this death, and to again offer him Immortality, under other and more secure conditions. The execution of the penalty was not annulled, but was only delayed, that he might be brought under the operation of these provisions of mercy. Though but vaguely announced, at first, this purpose was sufficiently evident to keep man from despair and utter demoralization, and to inspire such hope as to prompt him to effort to regain the favor of his offended Sovereign, and the boon he had forfeited. But it becomes more and more clear, as we come down the track of ages, till it culminates in the full revelation of Life and Immortality as brought to light in the Gospel. But even at first it was not so vague as man's philosophy has made it appear. It was made conspicuously evident in the institution of animal sacrifices, by which the sinner was taught to acknowledge the forfeiture of his own life, and to seek the forgiving mercy of God through a substitute. The very first fact recorded, after the sentence is pronounced, even before Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden, is that "God clothed them in skins" - the skins, no doubt, of the animals they were instructed to offer in sacrifice; for they had not received permission to eat animal flesh.
This is further evident from the fact, recorded in the context immediately following, that Abel's sacrifice was acceptable to God, and that Cain's offering, which was not a sacrifice, was rejected. Here we see the real ground of this distinction; for aught that appears to the contrary, the offering of Cain was as pure, and as costly as that of Abel. In this act he reverently acknowledged the sovereignty of God, and Him the homage of a creature to his Maker. But he did not acknowledge the forfeiture of his own life by sin; he offered no typical substitute for his own forfeited life; he adhered, as alas, so many would-be worshipers continue to do, to the original lie of the Tempter, and claimed that he was still immortal in his own right by creation. And God rejected him. But Abel poured out the Life of an innocent victim, and in this act acknowledged his own desert of death, and his hope of salvation through a Divine Savior, which God had promised to provide. Here, too, we see the meaning of the words which God addressed to Cain, which to many are so mysterious: " If thou does well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou does not well, sin lieth That is to say, the penalty [crouched] at the door of sin, which is death, is waiting to seize you. It is not annulled, but only suspended, that you may avail yourself of the new way of life, as your brother is doing. But if you reject it, there is no way of escape for you.
I ask your special attention to this rite of animal sacrifices in its bearing on this question of the death penalty. It was not only the first religious rite which God appointed for man, but the chiefs of all the religious observances, that He required of His ancient people. It was not only a way, but the way, and the only way of acceptable approach unto Him. All their religious ceremonies centered in this. It has been objected to the religion of the Hebrews that it was a bloody religion, and in this respect was like the religions of the heathen world. To those who fail to recognize the significance of this rite, it seems not only unmeaning and wasteful, but cruel. In fact, it has no reasonable justification or significance, but as God's standing testimony to the fact of man's forfeiture of his own life by sin, and as a prophetic type of that corning sacrifice of the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world.
From its early institution it went out into all the world, and has ever had an important place in all the religions of mankind. It is not a human device; its origin is divine. Though God has suffered men to depart very far from the truth, and to lose the knowledge of the true God, He has not suffered them to lose this one grand testimony to the fact that man has forfeited, not merely the Divine favor, but life itself, through sin. This is one of the ways in which God hath not left Himself without a witness," even amid the darkness of heathenism.
It is not to be supposed that these ignorant heathen could fully understand the Gospel mystery hidden in this rite, nor did the ancient Hebrews, nor even Abel, nor could they until in the fulness of time the great Sacrifice on Calvary was offered. But there was enough in it to lay the foundation of a faith that would be acceptable. While through the long night that preceded the rising of the Sun of Righteousness, there were, no doubt, many under the ceremonial law to offer, like Abel, an acceptable sacrifice through faith, may we not hope that some, also, amid the world, have been able, deeper darkness of the pagan world, have been able through the same faith, to lay hold of the greater Sacrifice that taketh away the sin of the world?
The scheme of recovering grace, made known in the Gospel, by which man is to be rescued from the power and penalty of sin, and made a partaker of eternal life, is usually called "The Plan of Redemption." But we are not to suppose, that, because it was revealed to man only after he had failed to secure this life through perfect obedience, it was an afterthought in the Divine Mind, a kind of supplementary device, to remedy-so far as possible, though but imperfectly at best-an unforeseen disaster. We have every reason to believe, that He who sees the end from the beginning, conceived it in infinite wisdom, as the best, if not the only way of putting him in possession of the boon of Eternal Life, which it was in his heart to give him, so soon as he could be qualified to enjoy it without the danger of forfeiture; that it was in the very nature of the case for man to be put trough this lower stage of trial, with all its sad experiences, before he could rise to that which is higher and enduring. From our point of view it reflects infinite glory upon the wisdom, justice, goodness, truth, and grace of God. Were it not for the blinding and confusing influence of the error we are opposing, it could never have received any other interpretation.
This word REDEMPTION' carries no mystery with it, in the common affairs of this life; nor should it be, as it has been made, ambiguous as a religious term. It means the regaining or buying back anything of value, that has been forfeited, by the payment of a satisfactory equivalent.
Now the question arises, What is it that was forfeited by sin? If it be our spiritual life only, then we have not been redeemed by Christ. For it was only His natural life -not His spiritual life-that He laid down for us, as He expressly declares, "I lay down my psuche natural life that I might take it again. I have power to lay it - my natural life - down and I have power to take it again," His spiritual life-the pneuma, the zöa aiônios, -He never did lay down; nor could He. For it is an ever living principle in Him. It was by the power of this spiritual life that -" put to death in the flesh, but quickened in the spirit "
He triumphed over death and rose again from the tomb.
If we have forfeited only our eternal well-being, and incurred the penalty of endless misery, then our Lord could never have paid the penalty for even one sinner, much less for the whole human race. For though He suffered the agony of a painful death, He never did suffer endless agony, and yet we are soberly told that our Redeemer suffered an amount of misery equal to the sum of the combined endless miseries of the whole human race. As if to diminish somewhat from the incredible burden of this suffering. it is said by others, that it amounted, in its sum total, only to the aggregate endless miseries due to the elect. If God's justice could have been vindicated by such a commercial exchange, we can see nothing more than simple justice in it, even toward the elect, whom He first doomed to eternal misery for no fault of their own, and then redeemed by the equal suffering of a substitute. But what shall we say of the non elect? Does not justice, to say nothing of mercy, demand that they too should have been redeemed from this inherited doom of endless misery?
But it does not concern us to consider further the various devices to which this dogma of the natural and necessary immortality of sinners has driven theologians in their efforts to reconcile it with the justice and goodness of God, and the moral sense of His creatures. No true Theodicy ever has been, or can be, constructed on such a false basis.
But let it once be admitted, as the Scriptures plainly teach, that by sin Adam's natural life was forfeited, and that of all his posterity, - for the stream cannot rise above its source, - and that as a consequence we are all born to an inheritance of death, or in other words, we all begin life as mortals; and that it is from this state of mortality, or death, not from dying, - for the law must have its due course, - but from the dominion and power of this death, that Christ died to redeem us, and the whole scheme of redemption becomes perfectly clear and luminous. As the Eternal Son of God, who could not die in His spiritual nature, and as the Son of man, bearing our natural image and nature, without sin, and against whom the law had no claims, He laid down His pure life a sacrifice for us, and then, in His own Divine Life He rose again, and claimed as the fruit of His ransom the life of all His brethren in the flesh.
That Christ died, actually died as a man, and died to redeem us from death, is a truth so conspicuously taught throughout the Scriptures that it would seem impossible to misunderstand it. It is only through the blinding influence of this false dogma that this truth has been obscured and perverted. We are told, He died for us; "He laid down His life for us; He tasted death for every man "; " He gave his life a ransom for many; in Him we have redemption through His blood "; " We are redeemed by the precious blood of Christ"; " He made His soul (life) an offering for sin "; "He poured out His soul (life) an offering unto death.
To quote all the passages in point would be to quote a large part of the Scriptures, both of the Old and the New Testaments.
That Christ suffered, and suffered intense agony, in the act of dying. is not to be disputed. But these sufferings were the necessary concomitants of the cruel death He died. So we suffer through a whole life of sin, and the agonies of the closing struggle are often terrible; and these agonies Inv well be taken into the account in considering the penalty of sin. But the penalty itself issues, and is completed, only in death. Had Christ suffered tenfold greater agony on the cross, had He hung there to the end of time without dying, this would not have redeemed us from the death which is the penalty of the law. He must actually die, yea, and rise again, in order to redeem us from death. What else but death is meant, or can be meant, by the offering of animal sacrifices, which God Himself appointed to typify the great sacrifice of the Lamb of God on Calvary? If the virtue of our redemption is to be found simply or mainly in the agony He endured, then innocent animals, in order to constitute any true type of this greater sacrifice of the Son of God, should have been tormented, and tormented as much and as long as possible. But they were simply put to death, and that, too, with no unnecessary pain. But the virtue of these sacrifices consisted in the pouring out of their life-blood - for it is in the blood that animal life inheres - and there was no true sacrifice until life itself was taken away.
But the object of Redemption is not simply to restore men to life. This is only provisional with reference to a higher end. This serves only to bring men before the bar of God in their individual capacities and characters. For if all men are subject to death, irrespective of their personal deserts, how else can the penalty of their own individual sins, which is death also, be visited upon them excepting by a death which comes after their resurrection and the judgment? So far as our death through Adam, and our resurrection from this death through Christ; are concerned, we are passive and irresponsible; but not so with respect to our conduct while passing through this life, and the characters we here form. How shall we be saved from the power of our own individual sin, and from the penalty which is death, the death beyond, the second death from which there is no resurrection? How shall we be cleansed from all our impurities, and be made meet for the Life Everlasting, which He offers us as a gift of grace?
It is the special object of the Gospel to make known to us the conditions and requirements of this new life. Here He is set before us, not merely as the Savior of all men (from this first death, but) especially of theta that believe, as a second Adam, the Progenitor of a new race, to whom He imparts a new life, His own peculiar life, which in its nature is spiritual, pure, and deathless.
But not in the Gospel alone, but from the time of Abel down to the offering of the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, the indispensable conditions of repentance and faith have been set forth and illustrated in the sacrificial rite. Let us again briefly consider it. The true worshiper selects a lamb, without spot or blemish, the best of all his flock. He leads it to the altar; he places his hands on the head of the victim, leaning on it with all his force, and there confesses his sins; and while the life-blood of the sacrifice is flowing out, he implores the Divine mercy in his own behalf. By this act he lays his own sins on the head of this innocent substitute, and confesses his own desert of death, and beseeches God to forgive all his sins, and to accept the life of the sacrifice in the place of his own forfeited life.
It is in this way that the believer under the Gospel las y his sins on the spotless Lamb of God, and through His death hopes to find redemption, forgiveness, and Life Everlasting. He goes down into death with his substitute, as it were, and there leaves behind. and loses forever his old life, with all its sins. In the expressive language of Scripture, They are covered up," "Cast behind God's back," "Forgotten,"
Remembered no more, " Blotted out," " Washed away.
and when he rises, it is to a new life, which is pure and blessed forever. This is most clearly and graphically set forth in the rite of baptism, when administered according to its original design. " Know ye not that as many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ, were baptized into His death. Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead, by the glory of the Father, even so we should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness They are buried in the grave of oblivion, of His resurrection.
But it is not so with unbelieving worshipers; for, from the days of Cain till now, there have been unbelieving worshipers. Indeed, all men everywhere, with very few exceptions, profess to worship their Maker, but they do not all acknowledge their desert of death. They do not lay their sins on Jesus. They do not repent and believe in Him. They do not seek the New Life which He only can give. They rise, it is true, by virtue of His redemption, which is as universal as their death by Adam, but they rise with their old life in all its natural corruption, with all their sins resting upon them, to be judged for the deeds done in the body, to be condemned by God's righteous law, and to perish in the second death, from which there is no recovery. For how can they enter into. the Life that is eternal, for which they have no fitness? Alas! " How shall they escape, if they neglect so great salvation?"
In considering the doctrine of the New Life there are three points to be noticed: Its Nature; Its Source; and its Genesis.
1st. ITS NATURE: It is a New Life, and not the old life amended, improved, purified, and carried over into a new state of being. This is the great error of our theological opponents, and of all believers in the natural immortality of man. They say that man has but one life, and this he receives in his natural birth. It has indeed been misdirected, degraded, polluted by sin. It only needs to be set right, elevated, purified, and then man is fitted for a happy immortality. Death is not the cessation or end of this life, it is merely a change, a transition from one stage to another. In short, it is simply a process of evolution into a higher state of being.
There is no death; what seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life Elysian, Whose portal we call death.
But we understand the Scriptures to teach very explicitly that our Adamic life is transitory in its very nature; that it ends in death, and that, if we live again, it is not from any vis vitce of our own, but by the supernatural power of God in raising us up, and if, after this, we live forever, it is because a new, superior, spiritual Life has been imparted to us by regeneration from above, and a new birth; that the old life, and the new are as distinct from each other as any two sorts of life in the natural world, as, for instance, vegetable and animal life. The difference is not one of development, but of generation. This radical fact I have endeavored to set forth with much emphasis in all my writings on this question, for I consider it one of supreme importance. I am happy to see that Professor Drummond, in his recent work, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, has emphasized the same point, and endeavored to establish it by scientific reasoning. But this truth would seem to be too clearly enunciated in the Scriptures to need any other proof, or to be misunderstood by any one who is willing to accept their testimony. It is there called a "New Life." The entrance upon it is by a " new birth.
The subjects of it are new creatures."
They are "begotten from above." They are "born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." They are represented as having new tastes, new desires, new affections, new aims, and a new destiny. The characteristics of this New Life are entirely different from those of the old life. The one concerns itself with natural, earthly, transitory things, the other with spiritual and eternal things. The one is described in the Scriptures as psuchikos, psychical or natural, and the other as pneumatikos, pneumatical or spiritual. Not merely different epithets, implying different qualities, are attributed to them in the original Scriptures, but they are distinguished by different titles as possessing different natures, as being different things.
It is unfortunate that we have but the one word Life in our language unless we use the word soul, which has become equally ambiguous and misleading -by which to speak of them, and that we can differentiate them, if at all, only by such epithets as natural and spiritual. But in the Scriptures the one is invariably called psucha (Hebrew nephesh), a word that is applicable to all sorts of animal life, whether of man or of beast, and which is always represented as transitory; and the other is always designated by the word Zoe, (Hebrew chaff,) a term which indeed expresses the principle or essence of life in everything; but with the definite article the, and also with the adjective signifying eternal or everlasting, joined with it, as he Zoe, he Zoe aionios, " The Life," " The Life Everlasting" it designates the Life of the Deity Himself, "who only has immortality," and consequently the Life which He gives to His children in the New Birth.
I wish to call especial attention to this usage of Scripture - and this is the more necessary, because it is apparent only to those who read them in the original, for it has not been brought out in our versions as it should be - that neither this word nephesh, occurring seven hundred and fifty-three times in the Old Testament, nor its analogue psucha occurring one hundred and five times in the New, and capriciously translated "life" or "soul," is ever employed to denote anything higher in man than this physical, natural, transitory life which we have described; and no adjective signifying deathless, eternal, everlasting is ever in one single instance coupled with it in the Word of God, as is so common in the religious literature of the day. The popular phrases "immortal soul," "never-dying soul," "the deathless nature of man," etc., are lilt only never found in the Scriptures, but are contrary to their letter and spirit from beginning to end.
Still further, whenever this New Life is spoken of in the Scriptures, this other term zöa is always invariably-employed. It is employed one hundred and fifty times in the New Testament. Indeed, it is scarcely ever employed in any other sense. It seems to have been adopted, and consecrated to this special use, and with the definite article " the" to give it emphasis., which is too often omitted in our versions, and with the adjective everlasting superadded, it is the Scripture term to designate that other Life, the New Life, which man receives only by the regenerating power of the Divine Spirit. The teaching of Scripture is so clear, explicit, and uniform on this doctrine of the New Life that nothing but the exigencies of this false dogma of the natural immortality of man could have availed to break down the radical distinction between it and the old psychical, perishable life of man, and to fritter away its meaning in those mythical, ethical, spiritualative figures that carry no ideas to the common mind.
2d. Its Source
If, as the Scriptures teach, this be actually another life, then it follows, of course, that it cannot be self-generated. There is no such thing in nature as spontaneous generation. This is now admitted by all fair-minded scientists, though with great reluctance by some of them. Life must be communicated from without. The same is true in the spiritual world. This I have insisted on at length in my Theological Trilemma, and I see that Professor Drummond insists on this principle as a universal law in both the spiritual and natural world. No creature can take to itself even the lowest kind of life by any inherent power of its own. It is the prerogative of Him who is the Source and Sustainer of all life, to confer it. The barrier between one life and another is utterly impassable. No evolution or development can carry one across it. Much less can mortal man generate within himself this higher Spiritual Life, this Divine Life, which is the peculiar attribute of Him who lives forever. He may indeed put himself into a receptive condition. This is just what he is invited to do. He may seek it, and so receive it as the gift of free grace, or he may refuse it when offered, and so fail of the boon, and perish in his own corruption. But it must be penetrated within the human soul, if at all, by the Divine Spirit. Hence the subjects of this New Life are always spoken of as "begotten by God " This constitutes them " His children," and Himself.
He is their " Heavenly Father.
All men are the children of Adam by a natural generation, but only those who are begotten by Him and born again are His children in this peculiar sense. This constitutes us also brethren of our Lord Jesus Christ, who was also begotten by God that He might be the first-born among many brethren." Though, as to the flesh, He was born of a woman, He was begotten by God. .Hence we are said to be fellow-heirs with Him of the promises. " If children of God, then heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ," 'theirs according to the hope of Eternal Life." " Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed on us that we should be called the sons of God. Therefore the world knows us not because it knew Him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him m He is." That is to say, at the first this radical distinction is not perceptible. The world does not recognize it. It is not possible to perceive the distinction between any two sorts of life in the germ. All germs appear alike at the outset, but the time is coming when this distinction shall be made manifest. When He shall appear then shall we be like Him, and be made partakers of the glory that shall be revealed in Him.
3d. ITs GENESIS:
The question now arises, when does this New Life begin? I see no occasion for any real difference of opinion on this point, among those who believe in the actuality of this Life. Whatever apparent difference there may have been, has arisen, I think, from the ambiguity of the terms we employ. If by its beginning is meant the time of its full realization, we can have no hesitation in saying it is at the time of the glorious. appearance of our Lord and Savior, of which we have just spoken. " The Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, and the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first, and we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord.
But if we refer to that period of time when we are regenerated, or begotten, when the germ of this New Life is first ingenerated within our souls, I think it equally clear that it is that point of time in this life when we yield ourselves to the will of God, and embrace Him by faith as our Savior, and the joyful hope of Eternal Life is first conceived within us. Indeed I cannot believe it possible for this New Life to have its genesis in a soul that is entirely dead. It must be before the capacity for the reception of this new principle has utterly died out. In the genesis of any new life there must be the co-operation of two living agents, the one active and the other receptive.
It should here be observed that this word gennaö, in its active and passive senses, means either to beget or to conceive, to bring forth or to be born. It is so variously translated in our Scriptures, and not always with that discrimination which the true sense requires. In some passages where it is rendered born again," if it had been rendered begotten again, or begotten from above, as it might just as well have been, the true sense on this point would have been more accurately brought out, and this perplexity avoided. The period between the begetting or the conception, and the birth, as in nature so in grace, may be regarded as the period of gestation; but if the living germ of this incipient life be duly cherished, it will organize to itself a new spiritual body, like to that of our Lord, and awaiting His call in the Resurrection day, the day 'of its real birth, Shall burst its bands in sweet surprise, And in the Savior's image rise.
We turn now, with reluctance and sadness, to consider our last point, the Second Death, the final doom of the unsaved. Would that we could believe there would be no such class. But the Scriptures, honestly interpreted, forbid us to entertain any stich hope. That the first death is the common lot of all the children of Adam, and that from this death we have all been redeemed, we have already seen. " It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment. Once to die -if, in the judgment that follows, any one is condemned to perish in a Second Death, it will be because he is found unfit for the Life which is everlasting. The provisions that God has made for the salvation of all men are ample and free, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have Everlasting Life." But what if men will not believe in Him? What if they will not seek His forgiving grace? What if they spurn the offer of salvation that is urged upon their acceptance, and trample, under their feet the precious blood of the Son of God that was shed for them? What if they are determined to have their own way in sin, and shut their eyes to the light of Nature, which, though it dimly shines, yet shines for all, and their ears to the whispers of that inward monitor that God has given to every man, so that even those who dwell in comparative darkness are without excuse, as the Scriptures tell us? What if they will not seek after Him, if haply they might find Him? What if they have no desire for things that are pure, spiritual, and heavenly, but choose and pursue with all their hearts things that are temporal, earthly, sensual, devilish, and go down to death as they have lived, and preferred to live? In what image shall they rise, but in their own corrupt image? And how shall they stand in the Judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be brought to light, and every deed, whether it be good or evil? What other portion for them is there, but the inheritance of corruption and death which they have chosen? How can the Judge say unto them, " Well done, good and faithful servants, enter into the joy of your Lord.
How can He who would gladly have saved them while they were salvable, now put them among His children, and give them an inheritance among them that are sanctified "? The very capacity for the higher life is already withered and dead. They have no treasure laid up in heaven; no desire for its pure joys. There is no place for them there; there can he none; nor anywhere else throughout His coming Kingdom. which shall be universal when it shall be fully established and purified, according to His purpose and His promise.
For He shall send forth His angels and they shall gather out of the kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, He shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there and shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of the Father. "He will thoroughly purge His floor, and gather His wheat into His garner. But He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire."
Then shall That there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of those who have shut their eyes to the sunlight of truth, and their ears to His voice of entreaty, and scorned all His overtures of mercy, when they shall see the many others that are entering in, and themselves thrust oat, we may well believe.
Their doom cannot be otherwise than terrible in the extreme. As for those who have sinned against lesser light, they shall be beaten with comparatively few stripes, according to their several deserts, as He Himself tells us. But here we forbear to speculate. We are content to believe and say, with faithful Abraham, " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"
But the idea of gathering together all these outcasts- however many or few-into one great Bedlam of torment, where in agony and despair they shall mingle their groans and curses with raging fiends forever and ever and ever, could only have been conceived in a barbarous ago, and by those who, under the stress of this false dogma of the indestructible nature of man, were unable to see what else could be done with poor immortal sinners! So they have contrived to read this 'horrible doctrine into certain highly figurative passages of Scripture, when the whole warp and woof of its teaching is against it. And now comes the reaction. And men, under the stress of this same false dogma, in these days of freer thought and softer hearts would fain honor the goodness and mercy of God at the expense of His truth and justice, are guessing that after all there is some back door into heaven through which, by and by, in some inexplicable way, these same immortal sinners will be gathered in, and made happy forever! Under either extreme the object of the great Deceiver is answered. God is dishonored, and the Gospel brought into contempt, and made of none effect.
But from our standpoint we find neither the incredible doctrine of endless torment, nor the fallacious teaching of universal restoration in the Scriptures. We have no need of such extraordinary devices to justify the ways of God to man. To us the Scriptures seem to present, as plainly as language can do it, these two alternatives to the dying men of this world, LIFE or DEATH. Not the life we are now living, nor the death to which we are all hastening, but another life beyond the present, a New Life, a Higher Life, a Spiritual Life, the Life, of the Eternal Son of God, which is everlasting, and which is only received in regeneration by a new birth and a resurrection from the dead; and another death, a Second Death, which is the issue of a just Judgment for the deeds done in the body, a death which must make an end of all who fail of the great Salvation.
These are the two alternatives that are presented in the Word of God everywhere, from beginning to end. These were the alternatives which Moses set before the children of Israel in his farewell address in these pregnant words, as he was about to go the way of all the earth, "I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life that both thou and thy seed may live." He could have referred to nothing but the life and the death beyond. What other death could Ezekiel have referred to, when, as of the Lord he cried in the ears of His rebellious fault-finding people, " As I live, saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn ye; turn ye from your evil ways, for why, will ye die?" Surely he was not mocking them. He could not have meant merely a national death, for he addresses them as individuals, "O wicked man, thou shalt surely die"; and he declares that every man will be held responsible for his own personal sins; he could not have meant natural death, for no none could hope to escape that; he could not have meant what theologians call " spiritual death," for in this sense they were already dead; he could have meant nothing else but that Second Death which follows the first death, and the resurrection and the final judgment, the issues of which are life and death; truths of which they were not wholly ignorant, though but partially revealed to them. The prophet Daniel proclaims in terms almost as explicit as those of the Gospel, "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall, awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt," (or abhorrence, as it is in the margin).
These same alternatives and contrasts are to be found in the other Prophets, in the Psalms, and in the book of Proverbs in numerous passages which my limits forbid me to quote.
We learn also that in these ancient times there were those, as there are now, under the clearer light of the Gospel, to deny the actuality of any such second death, or to explain it away as a figure of speech, so as to nullify its warning efficacy, to whom the prophet Ezekiel said, and indeed now says to their successors, " With lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad, and strengthened the hand of the wicked, that he should not turn from his wicked way, by PROMISING HIM LIFE. (Ezek. 13. 22.)
But when we come to the New Testament Scriptures we find them full and overflowing throughout with these two alternatives. I wish I could quote more largely than it is now possible for me to do; but if you will examine them for yourselves on this point you cannot fail to be impressed with their fullness. This was the burden of all our Savior's parables and other discourses; Eternal Life, that Life which He alone could give, and which He would freely give to all who would receive Him as their Savior; and that there was no other possible way of escape from death and destruction but through Him. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
But if ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins, and whither I go ye cannot come." " For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have Everlasting Life." " Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul, but fear him who is able to destroy' (make a complete end of) both soul and body in hell, or rather Gehenna, as it is in the original, and should have been rendered in our version; Gehenna, - that place outside the walls of the city into which all the vile refuse anti putrefying carcasses were cast to be the food of worms, and of the fires that were constantly burning to consume them, and to purify the atmosphere,-a fit type of the utter destruction of all sinners in the Second Death.
This was the teaching of the apostle Paul, and of all the other Apostles, and of the Apostolic Fathers for the first century and a half of the Christian era, until the Platonic philosophers came into the Church to corrupt its faith, and to teach another Gospel.
These alternatives are brought into sharp contrast in all their writings. This is conspicuously prominent in the writings of Paul: "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is Eternal Life through Jesus Christ our Lord." "He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap Life Everlasting." "If ye live after the flesh ye shall die, but if through the spirit ye do mortify the deeds of the body ye shall live." He never makes any such contrast between future happiness and future misery, as the Platonized theologians of an after age set up. It is always Life and Death; Eternal Life, and -He does not say Eternal Death, but- Death. He never joins the epithet aiönios, eternal, with it, as he does with Life, neither does our Lord, nor do any of the sacred writers, for this death is of itself a finality. It is not a progressive state of being as life is, and as our popular theology teaches, but it is the end of being the extinction, and the cessation of all life and being. Therefore the contrast of the Scriptures always is Eternal Life and Death.
But it is reserved for the last hook of Divine Revelation to set forth this death distinctly as the SECOND DEATH. " Be thou faithful unto death - the first death - and I will give thee a crown of life. He that overcomes shall not be hurt of the second death." "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection; on such the second death hath no power." "The fearful, and unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake that burned with fire and brimstone, which is the Second Death." "And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and heaven fled away; and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened, and another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. And the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and hades delivered up the dead which were in them; and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the Second Death. And whosoever was not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the Lake of Fire.
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away. And there was no more sea. And I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, And I heard a great voice out of heaven, saying, Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and He shall dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself -shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away."
Many interesting questions, more or less intimately connected with our topic, questions relating to the Intermediate state, the Second Advent and the Resurrection, especially of the wicked, and the bodies with which they come, the Time of the general Judgment, the Manner, Means, and Process of the Second Death, the comparative Number of the saved and the lost - have suggested themselves during this discussion, may have expected me to notice. But none hem are vital to the main question, and we which of t have no time to discuss them here. Indeed, upon some of them my views are not so well defined as your own, nor would I dogmatize or attempt to be wise above what is written in regard to any of them, nor do my restricted limits allow me to offer such concluding remarks upon the main question as I had hoped to do.
My task is finished; my time has more than expired, and I close by saying very briefly and summarily, that the scheme of Theology which we have been considering commends itself to the hearts and intellects of a large and increasing number of intelligent Christian men in all our Churches, and throughout the Christian world, as logical and in harmony with the teaching of Scripture, and consistent at once with the truth, wisdom, goodness, and grace of God.
It reflects infinite glory upon Jesus Christ our Lord, admits His claims, and acknowledges Him to be, not merely a Savior from sin and misery, but from death itself, and the only Source and Giver of Eternal Life to all who/will receive it at His hands. It solves the problem of evil, so far as it can be solved, by showing that it is not an integral and perpetual part of the Divine economy, but is only incidental and transitory at that, and having served its end, and brought eternal honor and glory to fun who is able to make even the wrath of man and of devils to praise Him, it will pass away forever. It takes away om infidels and skeptics of every sort every plausible objection they have been accustomed to bring against the Bible and its Author, and from all sinners every reasonable ground of excuse for not accepting the great salvation that is offered them in the Gospel. It rolls away from the face of our heavenly Father the dark clouds, in which a false philosophy and a false Theodicy have enshrouded Him. It clarifies those dark and so-called inexplicable doctrines of our theological system with which this false dogma has mingled its incredible mysteries. It emboldens the ministers of Christ to offer to their hearers a Gospel that at once commends itself to their reasons, their moral sense, and their hearts. It enables the missionaries of the cross, wherever they go, to carry a glorious message of love and mercy to perishing men in heathen lands, and to make known to them a Deity who is infinitely more worthy of their confidence and love than the cruel and hideous deities their fears have taught them to worship.
In short, it is the doctrine that was preached by Christ Himself, and His apostles, and His faithful disciples for the first three or four generations of the Christian era - " the faith once delivered to the saints," and we are fully persuaded that the early triumphs of this Gospel will not be repeated until the Church returns to this faith from which she has so sadly departed, and holds forth again the glorious Gospel of Life, Eternal Life, through Jesus Christ our Lord, and only through Him, and in no doubtful terms proclaims as she is bidden to do:
This is the record, that God has given to us Eternal Life; and this Life is in His Son. He that hath the Son has the Life and he that hath not the Son hath not the Life.
The fact and the nature of the resurrection of the dead a discourse.
If a man die, Shall he live again? -Job 14.14.
Jon, who makes this inquiry, lived more than a thousand years before Socrates and Plato. He knew nothing of the speculations of these philosophers concerning the deathless nature of man.
Taking for granted that man does actually die when he seems to die, he inquires, " Shall he live again?"
We will not now stop to inquire what he himself thought; whether he had any idea, however vague, of the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead so clearly revealed in the Gospel; but in the light of this Gospel ourselves, let us proceed at once to consider the subject suggested by this inquiry, which I have been appointed to discuss on this occasion, under this twofold division:
THE FACT, AND THE NATURE OF THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD.
1. THE FACT, or rather the Doctrine: This is so clearly revealed in the Scriptures, and so universally admitted, in form at least, by all believers in Divine Revelation, that it would seem hardly necessary to offer any argument in support of this branch of our subject. But we find such a variety of views, some of which are quite inconsistent with the doctrine itself and in actual opposition to it, that I am constrained to devote a little time, at the outset, to a brief examination of these views.
Perhaps there is no revealed doctrine of the Bible that has suffered more at the hands of sophists and theological speculators than this doctrine of the Resurrection of the dead. Under the influence of philosophy, especially of the Platonic school, which has dominated the world for more than two thousand years, and the Christian Church for more than half that period, and which denies the actuality of human death, this doctrine has taken on a great variety of forms among those who would bring their philosophy into apparent harmony of God's Word, and when one form has proved to be untenable, others have been suggested; and still others, until there has come to be a chaos of conflicting views, most of which are quite inconsistent with the teaching of Scripture on this question.
All I shall attempt, will be to notice as briefly as possible, some of the more prominent and popular notions that have been entertained and are still entertained on this subject; and this only, that I may set forth more distinctly by the contrast, what we understand to be the true Scripture doctrine of the Resurrection.
The Resurrection was a current doctrine of the Jews in the time of Christ, but so presented as to provoke a degree of skepticism, which in the case of the Sadducees, went the length of denying the Resurrection utterly. Some of the Rabbis taught a purer doctrine, holding that in the resurrection the just would neither eat, drink nor marry. But the majority, both of the Rabbis and of the people, held a doctrine extremely gross. The dead were to be raised not only in their former bodies, but even with their bodily appetites and passions.
While the extreme grossness of these notions disappeared in the thinking of the early Christians, the Jews' general conception of the Resurrection passed over after a time into Church teaching, as the writings of many of the Fathers show. Witness such a passage as this in the writings of Augustine:
Everybody, however dispersed here, shall be restored perfect in the Resurrection. Everybody shall be complete in quantity and quality. As many hairs as have been shaved off, or nails cut, shall not return in such enormous quantities as to deform their original places, but neither shall they perish; they shall return into the body, into that substance from which they grew.'" (Whiton's Gospel of the Resurrection.)
The doctrine of the Papal Church, according to Perry's Manual, an authorized and standard work, is as follows:
Death is the separation of the soul from the body. " The souls of those who leave this world in a state of perfect innocence go straight to heaven; the souls of those who die in the guilt of mortal sin go straight to hell and are lost eternally," and all those who have any taint of venial sin upon them - which includes the great majority, go to Purgatory where they remain in suffering till they have expiated their guilt, or are released by penances and the offerings of their friends, after which they join the righteous in heaven where they remain till the world is destroyed.
Before the General Resurrection all mankind must die, even Enoch and Elias will return to earth and die. "After the world has been destroyed by fire from heaven; and there will not be a single person living on the face of the earth, the General Resurrection will take place." "God will send His angel and call the dead to life. each soul will be reunited to the same body which it had in life, and all will rise in the perfect state of man, but there will be difference between the good and the bad; the just shall rise in bodies glorious, brilliant, impossible; the wicked, in bodies deformed, hideous, loathsome and fitted for sufferings." " They shall all stand together before the tribunal of Jesus Christ to be judged." " The righteous shall be welcomed into the everlasting life of blessedness in heaven; the wicked shall be cast into hell or be tormented in fire with the devil and his angels forever and ever" - " They shall LIVE and be punished forever in the flames of hell."
The Apostles' Creed which was developed during the second century, reads:
I believe . . .
in the Resurrection of the dead (the original reading was, sarkos anastasin, resurrection of the flesh,) and the Life Everlasting.
The Athanasian Creed (of the seventh century), reads:
All men shall rise again with their bodies.
The orthodox Confession of the Greek Church,1683, reads:
There will be a resuscitation of human bodies alike of the righteous and the wicked.
The Scotch Confession of 1560:
There shall be given to every man and woman resurrection of the flesh and that in the self-same flesh that every man now bears, etc.
The Belgic Confession of 1561, and of the Reformed (Dutch) Church of America:
For all the dead shall be raised out of the earth and their souls joined and united with their proper bodies in which they formerly lived.
The Creed of the German Reformed church of America, according to the Heidelberg Catechism, says:
That not only my soul, after this life, shall be immediately taken up to Christ, the Head, but also, that this, my body, raised by the power of Christ, shall again be united with my soul, and made like unto the glorious body of Christ.
The Westminster Confession of 1647,-with the Savoy Declaration of 1658, which is identical on this point, - which is the creed of the Presbyterian Churches generally, and which was adopted by the Congregational Churches of England, and by those of New England in 1680, is as follows:
The bodies of men after death return to dust and see corruption; but their souls (which neither die nor sleep), having an immortal substance, immediately return to God who gave them. The souls of the righteous being made perfect in holiness are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies; and the souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day.
Besides these two places for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledges none.
At the last day, such as are found alive shall not die but be changed; and all the dead shall be raised up with the selfsame bodies and none other, although with different qualities, which shall be again united to their souls forever."
The bodies of the unjust shall, by the power of Christ, be raised to dishonor; the bodies of the just, by His Spirit, unto honor, and be made conformable to His own glorious body.
In the Declaration of the Congregational Union of England and Wales, 1833, it is said That the bodies of the dead will be raised again.
The Free Will Baptist Confession of 1834 and 1868 declares that:
The soul does not die with the body; but immediately after death enters into a conscious state of happiness or misery, according to the moral character here possessed. " The Lord Jesus who ascended on high and sits at the right hand of God will come again to close the Gospel dispensation, glorify His saints and judge the world." " The Scriptures teach the Resurrection of the bodies of all men at the last day, each in his own order; they that have done good will come forth to the Resurrection of Life, and they that have done evil to the Resurrection of Damnation."
The Declaration of the National Council of Congregational Churches of 1865, simply expresses a belief, In the Resurrection of the body and in the final judgment, the issues of which are Eternal Life and Everlasting Punishment; And that of the Committee of the Council of 1881, In the Resurrection of the dead, and in a final judgment, the issues of which are Everlasting Punishment and Everlasting Life.
Thus it will be seen that our fathers in the Reformation adopted substantially the creed of the Papal Church with respect to Death, Resurrection, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. After eliminating some of its grosser errors, especially that of Purgatory, they took over into the various branches of the Protestant Church, the dogmas of the corrupt mother Church, and, with some slight modifications and omissions, they remain imbedded in these various creeds to the present time - or did, till within a very recent period. They agree, substantially, in describing death as the separation of soul and body, and in emphasizing the doctrines of the return of the soul to the same body and of the Resurrection of both together at the last day. The extreme literalness with which the doctrine was formerly held, is seen in the published sermons of Davies and other Divines of one or two centuries ago. It is well represented in the well-known poem of Dr. Young:
Now monuments prove faithful to their trust,
And render back their long committed dust;
Now charnels rattle; scattered limbs and all
The various bones, obsequious to the call,
Self-moved advance; the neck, perhaps, to meet
The distant head; the distant head, the feet.
Dreadful to view! see through the dusky sky
Fragments of bodies in confusion fly,
Deserted members, and complete the frame.
Through distant regions journeying, there to claim
The severed head and trunk shall join once more,
Though realms now rise between and oceans roar;
The trumpet sound each vagrant mote shall hear,
Or fixed in earth, or if afloat in air,
Obey the signal wafted in the wind,
And not one sleeping atom lag behind.
So swarming bees, that on a summer's day,
In airy rings and wild meanders, play,
Charmed with the brazen sound their wanderings end,
And gently circling, on a bough, descend.
There is now coming, however, a strong reaction from the materialistic grossness of these views, not only in this, but in all the eschatological doctrines of modern Church Creeds. This is seen not so much in the change of phraseology as in their spiritualistic interpretation is also more and more generally conceded by intelligent and thoughtful scholars that, whatever be the real nature of the human soul, some kind of an organization is necessary to the exercise of its functions; that it cannot maintain its consciousness and activity in a state of perfect disembodiment. Hence, many of those who still hold to the Platonic dogma of the deathless nature of the soul, and that what is called death is only the separation of the soul from the body, while they continue to believe in the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of the body at the last day, are resorting to the hypothesis of a double change; first into that of a kind of temporary body which may serve its purposes during the interim: as when one undresses himself for the night, he puts on a simple robe which he hopes to exchange for a full dress in the morning; or as when one's house has been burned, he resorts to some provisional shelter till a more suitable edifice can be prepared for his permanent occupancy.
With this theory of an intermediate state of consciousness, the Romish doctrine of Purgatory though not held in its grosser form, it is still held in its spirit by many; and the number is quite large, and, as I think, rapidly increasing, of those who hold to some kind of a postmortem probation, especially for those who have not had, what is called "a fair chance in this life. believing as they do, in the deathless nature of the soul, they cannot see - nor can anyone - how God's justice can be vindicated in condemning poor immortal sinners" to so horrible a doom as that of endless misery, without first giving them every possible opportunity to escape. And others go still further, and hold that this opportunity is forever open to them; that the Resurrection of the dead is a remedial provision for securing the salvation of those who have failed to lay hold on Eternal Life in this world, and that if only sufficient time and opportunity be afforded them many, perhaps all, will sooner or later avail themselves of it.
This is one of the devices to which those who believe in the indestructible nature of man, and that, consequently, death cannot be death but must mean eternal torment, resort, to relieve their theology of the terrible incubus which this dogma imposes upon it.
But this theory of three different bodies for the soul of man; one for this life, another for the intermediate state, and still another in the Resurrection, seems to have been so evidently devised to meet a philosophical objection, and has so little to recommend it to intelligent men, that a new school is now rapidly rising into prominence, which holds that this ghostly state which the soul is supposed to assume at death, is its true resurrection, and beyond this there is to be no further resurrection of the dead; that this change is one of the natural and orderly steps in the development of our being; that our natural constitution is duplex, with an invisible but real spiritual body within this grosser fleshly body; that this ghostly body "is one of the original elements of our nature given at the creation of our race, and coming to us like the other elements by natural descent from our first parents.
Parousia, p. 286); that at death we simply cast off this outer corruptible body as an old worn-out garment never to be resumed, or as a snake casts off its skin, and rise into the greater freedom and activity of an advanced state of being, and furthermore, that everyone rises into just that state of exaltation for which he is prepared, with unlimited possibilities of advancement before him.
This is what is called the New Theology of the present day; but in fact it is almost identical with the mythology of the Greeks and Romans before the coming of Christ, and indeed of the pagan world at the present time, only it is now called the Resurrection of the dead, to give it a Christian name. But it is in no true sense of the word a Resurrection from the dead, nor did the people of Athens to whom Paul preached so understand it, for there is no real death according to this view. When Paul preached to them the Christian doctrine, they said: " He seemed to be a setter forth of Strange gods; because he preached unto them Jesus and the Resurrection; and when they heard of the Resurrection of the dead, some mocked, and others said we will hear thee again of this matter."
One of my late newspapers informs me that a Nebraska doctor has succeeded in producing an instrument, a kind of pneuma-scope of such extraordinary power as to reveal a human soul in its departure from the body!
It was directed —as it is said — " to the body of a young man who had just expired with consumption, and it plainly showed to the observer the spiritual body hovering for a few moments over the dead body, and connected with it by a kind of umbilical cord, which presently parted, when the soul arose presenting an indescribably beautiful and glorious appearance."
This reminds me of the story of an astronomer who once discovered to his astonishment, or thought he had discovered, a living monster in the moon; but when he came to examine his instrument he found a little insect crawling over the face of the lens.
But this theory of a ghostly resurrection, or rather, of no resurrection at all, but of a ghostly ascension at death, is becoming exceedingly popular. Several volumes have recently appeared advocating it. They are commended by our religious papers to their readers, as throwing new light on this mysterious and perplexing doctrine of the Scriptures. The doctrines of the Second Advent, and the General Judgment are treated in the same spiritualistic and fanciful way. They are not future — but past or passing events.
The promised Second Coming of our Lord—the Parousia as it is called; for which His disciples have been wont to wait and watch and pray, as bringing the consummation of their highest hopes, has long since passed. He has already come, and is coming more and more every day. The Day of Judgment is a present and continuous process. Our Lord is now sitting on His Throne of Judgment, and every man is judged while he lives, and when he casts off this outward shell, he rises at once in his own true, spiritual body to his own appropriate place in the World of Spirits.
The miraculous translation of Elijah is represented as differing in little, if in anything, from that of the sudden death of any saint. In commenting on this event, which was the International Sunday-school lesson for September 6, 1885, the Sunday-School Times says:
The miraculous translation of Elijah only sets before us in visible appearance, what takes place when every true child of God departs.
The New York Independent says:
Elijah's translation slightly differs from that of every Christian.
The Christian Union says:
Every child of God goes to heaven just as much alive as Elijah did. The body is not you; you live in it, and you keep on living without it.
The New York Observer says:
The dead do not slumber in the grave, God's own go straight to the heavenly place, Elijah went up thither, not to sleep, but to live, and serve, and rejoice; so do dying saints now pass at once to glory in Paradise.
The Pacific says:
A sudden departure from this world is often considered a misfortune, as a stroke of lightning a token of Divine displeasure; but if we are ready, as Elijah was, we may accept it as a token of Divine love, and the manner of our removal is quick and painless.
In eulogizing General Grant, recently deceased, the clergy, in not a few instances, have sent him directly up to heaven. From the extravagant language of some of them we might well suppose he entered in, with somewhat of the same éclat that attended the ascension of the Lord of Glory as described by the Psalmist, when the echo rang throughout the Celestial World, " Lift up you heads O ye gates, even lift them up ye everlasting doors" and — this conquering hero shall come in!
While attending the monster camp-meeting at Ocean Grove this past summer, where hundreds of the Methodist clergy and thousands of the laity were gathered, I heard the leader one morning announce to the assembled throng the sudden death of one of his associates in this wise:— " Our brother —, last night, found the door of heaven a little ajar and slipped in. He was with us on this platform last evening; but he is now singing praises with the angels around the Throne of God "!!
This is the way in which this pagan dogma of the natural immortality of the human soul is sapping the very foundations of the Gospel of Christ; and nothing better is given us in its place by these so-called Christian teachers, than the poetic dreams and mythological fancies of the old heathen world!
Take for example the following stanzas on the death of a little girl:
She is not dead, — the child of our affection, But gone into that school Where she no longer needs our poor protection And Christ himself doth rule.
In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion, By guardian angels led, Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, She lives, whom we call dead.
Day after day we think what she is doing In those bright realms of air; Year after year her tender steps pursuing, Behold her grown more fair.
Thus do we walk with her, and keep unbroken The bond which nature gives, Thinking that our remonstrance, though unspoken, May reach her where she lives.
Sweet poetry, you will say — Yes, but it is no more according to Scripture than the fancies of the Arabian Nights' _Entertainments.
No wonder that the Bible doctrine of the Resurrection should be denied where such theories of the state of the dead prevail; for as Tyndale said: " If their souls be in heaven, tell me why they be not in as good case as the angels be, and then what cause is there of the Resurrection?"
No wonder that Spiritualism with its infidel brood of errors prevails so extensively where such anti-Scriptural fancies are substituted for the Gospel of Christ.
It has seemed important that I should notice, as I have done in this cursory manner, some of the various phases of belief that have prevailed, and that now prevail with respect to this doctrine under consideration, in order to prepare the way for a better understanding of the true Scripture doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead, and that, by contrasting the fancies of men with the teaching of our Lord, the beauty and simplicity of the truth may be made more apparent. There are some other phases of belief on this subject, which I cannot now stop to notice. To some of these I may allude before I close.
2. I now proceed to set forth as briefly as I can under several particulars, what we understand to be the Scripture doctrine of the Nature of the Resurrection.
1. It is Resurrection of the DEAD and not of the living. If there be no actual death there can be no actual Resurrection of the dead. Enoch and Elijah were not raised from the dead; they were translated without dying. These were not cases of sudden death, as when one dies by a stroke of lightning, as these false teachers tell us. Their exit from earth was altogether supernatural. Indeed the Scripture expressly says that, "Enoch was translated that he should not see death," and so was Elijah, and so will be all who shall be alive when Christ shall come. But the dead shall be raised and live again.
Since writing the foregoing sentences I have listened to a discourse by Rev. Dr. Sexton, of London, to a crowded and enthusiastic audience on this text: "If a man die shall he live again," But the whole force of his argument was directed not to the inquiry of the test: tf a wan die shall he live AGAIN? but to the proof of the heathen philosophy that a man does not die at all; that the body which is thrown aside when he gets through with it, is not the real man nor any essential part of him, but only his outward shell, that the man himself keeps on living as before, and will keep on living forever. With such a philosophy, it is idle to talk of living again. Job, who made this inquiry, evidently thought that the man himself actually dies, as the context abundantly shows. The Bible everywhere most positively affirms that death, actual DEATH is the penalty of sin; not the death of the body, as it is called, but of the sinning man himself, the entire man. "The soul that sinned it shall die"; "The wages of sin is death "; "It is appointed unto man once to die "; and so in a hundred of other passages. The only text in the whole Bible that asserts a contrary doctrine is found in the words of the serpent to Eve, " Ye shall not surely die," in flat contradiction of what Jehovah had just said. It is wonderful that these Christian philosophers, as they call themselves, who have this Divine Revelation in their hands, as Plato had not, do not see that they are as flatly contra, dieting the Word of God as the Great Deceiver himself, and actually serving him under the guise of Christian teaching.
On the other hand, we believe that Jehovah spoke the truth, and that it was Satan that lied; and that man does actually die on account of sin, and also that he lives again, not by any inherent power of vitality in him, but because he has been redeemed from death by the Son of God, and that if he shall be united to Christ the Savior, and shall receive from Him the Etern:11 Life which He now freely offers to all who will accept it as a gift from God, he will live forever. But if not, he must perish in the Second Death from which there is no Resurrection.
Hence this First Death is termed in the Scripture a Bleep, because it is not final. It is the purpose of God to raise the dead to life again at the last day. This is the very point of Christ's reply to the skeptical Sadducees, who came to Him with the supposed case of a woman who had had seven successive husbands, hoping to confound Him with the inquiry, "In the Resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven?" Jesus answered and said unto them: " Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. They that shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world and the Resurrection of the dead [mark the phraseology of the original of which I will soon speak more particularly; it is not simply the Resurrection of the dead, as in other places, but the Resurrection that is out from among the dead, a special Resurrection;] neither marry, nor are given in marriage, neither can they die anymore; for they are equal unto the angels, and are the children of God, being the children of the Resurrection. Now that the dead are raised [not, are now alive, but are to be raised,] even Moses showed at the bush, when he called the Lord, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. For He is not a God of the dead, the [hopelessly] dead, but of the living, for all live unto Him"—to Him who regards the future Resurrection of MR people, as though it were now present, as Paul says (Rom. 4. 17), "God, who quickened the dead and calleth those things which be not as though they were."
We have no time, nor is it necessary, now to examine all the many texts of Scripture bearing on this point. Some of them are of difficult explanation, and can hardly be made to harmonize under any view, and have been rendered more difficult by the efforts that have been made to turn them to the support of preconceived notions. But taken all together, they harmonize better under this view than any other, namely: that death, the first death, is a state, not of annihilation nor of nonentity, but of profound unconsciousness, in which there is no vital action nor sense of the lapse of time nor of passing events; it would indeed have been utter and final death, had we not all been redeemed from its dominion and power by the Death and Resurrection of Christ; this work of Redemption in the Second Adam is as broad and universal as our forfeiture in the first: Hence in view of God's purpose to raise us up again at the last day, it is called in the Scriptures a SLEEP. In this sense as Christ told the Sadducees, "We all live unto Him." And we may well say to those who like them are skeptical o? this point, as He did, " Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the POWER of God."
2. It is the Resurrection of ALL the dead. There are those, though we think their number is small, who, while believing with us on other points, disbelieve in the Resurrection of the wicked. They think that the wicked perish utterly and forever in the first death, and that the righteous only are raised up to a future life. We could readily agree with them, did the Scriptures, which are our only rule of faith, warrant any such belief. Indeed, some very perplexing questions in regard to the wicked, on which the Scriptures throw little or no light, would be avoided by such a view. But their testimony is too strong and explicit to the fact of the Resurrection of all the dead, both of the righteous and the wicked, to be disregarded or explained away to serve our convenience.
Our Lord says:
Marvel not at this; for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice and come forth; they that have done good unto the Resurrection of Life, and they that have done evil unto the Resurrection of Damnation.
Paul says:
For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that everyone may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad.
And again:
He hath appointed a day in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom He hath ordained, whereof He has given assurance unto all men, in that He has raised Him from the dead.
John says in the Apocalypse:
And I saw the dead small and great, stand before God, and the books were opened; and another book was opened which is the Book of Life, and the dead were judged out of those things that were written in the books according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hades delivered up the dead which were in them; and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the Second Death, and whosoever, was not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.
It is needless to quote other texts, of which there are not a few, bearing on this point. But while we are most positively assured by these texts that there is to be a Resurrection both of the just and the unjust, we are taught by other texts that there is to be a difference both in the time and manner of the Resurrection of these two classes. Two forms of expression are used in the original Scripture to emphasize this difference; the one is called, as we have already shown, the anastasis ton nekron, the Resurrection of the dead; and the other, the anastasis tes ek nekron, or exanastasis ton nekron, the Resurrection out from among the dead, to designate a special Resurrection. This is the Resurrection to which Paul wished to attain. (Phil. 3. 11.) It is also called the "First Resurrection," to denote its priority in time, and then we are told of the Resurrection of the rest of the dead.
But beyond the fact, we get but little light from the Word of God with respect to the nature and circumstance of this Second Resurrection. Nearly all the details that are given us, refer almost exclusively to the Resurrection of the righteous; and to avoid misapprehension, let me here say, that in what follows, our attention will be directed more especially to this branch of the question.
3. It is not a natural, but a supernatural event, a stupendous miracle, wrought by the Almighty power of God, and only because Christ has redeemed us from the dominion and power of death. Had it not been for this, we must have remained forever in the grasp of the enemy; enemy I say, for death is our enemy, however we may attempt to disguise his true character under soft and specious names. Those who deny the punitive character of death, may speak of this grim monster, as the kind friend that opens the door for us into a higher state of being, takes off our shackles, and sets us free; for this suits their philosophy; and poets may sing of death as — "the voice that Jesus sends To call us to his arms,"
but the Scriptures always speak of death as our enemy. Thank God, he is the last enemy. He is even now a conquered enemy, and must yield up his prey at the bidding of Him who went down into his dark caverns, and wrested the scepter from his grasp, and is pledged, not only to give life again to all his victims, but even life forevermore, to all who will accept the boon at His hands.
That life again from the dead is a gift not of nature, but of grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord, is the uniform testimony of Scripture from beginning to end.
The Psalmist sings:
Like sheep they are laid in the grave; death shall feed on them, and the upright shall have dominion over them in the morning, and their beauty shall consume in the grave from their dwelling. But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave.
The Prophet Hosea says:
I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. O Death, I will be thy plague; O Grave, I will be thy destruction.
Jesus says:
I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth on Me, though ho were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever lives (or is alive at my coming) and believeth in Me, shall never die "13ecause I live ye shall live also." " Whoso eats my flesh and drinks my blood hath Eternal Life, and I will raise him up at the last day."
We are also told: "He died for us"; "He laid down His life for us"; He tasted death for every man "; "He gave His life a ransom for many." Paul's notable argument, 1 Cor. 15., is directed wholly to this point; that because Christ died and rose again, our resurrection is assured to us; if He had not risen, we should have remained forever under the dominion of death, and have perished utterly and forever. He concludes his plan of praise and exultation with, "Thanks be unto God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Nature, indeed, affords us some faint hints of this doctrine in the revival of Spring, and in the change that some animals undergo in the development of their life, as when the grub is transformed into the butterfly; but there is no death in any of these processes. The tree that actually dies in the Winter, does not live again in the Spring, it remains dead forever. The pupa that is wrapped up in the chrysalis is not dead, though dormant; for if its life be actually destroyed, as is often the case, it never comes forth into life again as a winged insect. But "man cometh forth as a flower and is cut down. Man dies and wasted away; yea man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" His body is scattered to the four winds of heaven. He passes beyond the apprehension of any of our senses; he goes into apparent nothingness; and yet he shall live again, and again rise from the dust in bodily form, infinitely more beautiful and glorious than before his death. Here is no natural process of development. It is a stupendous miracle, by the power of God, that power by which Jesus Christ our Savior was also raised from the dead. It required the exercise of Almighty power to raise the Son of God from the dead; how much more then, in our case? For says the Apostle:
That ye may know the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the heavens.
4. Amid all these changes through which we pass, in going down into death and dissolution, and rising again in the Resurrection, our personal identity is preserved. It is the same person whose decaying body was buried in the ground, to be eaten by worms, or lost in the wilderness, to become the food of the wild beasts, or savage men, or thrown into the sea, to be devoured by the monsters of the deep, or burned to ashes and scattered to the winds, that is raised again, and not another person, made in his likeness. In what way and by what means the identity of the individual is to be preserved, I do not undertake even to guess. It is the fad and not the philosophy of the process that now concerns us. I take but little interest in the various hypotheses that have been suggested to explain the mystery, excepting as curious specimens of ingenious speculation. On this subject the wisest man knows no more than the fool. It is a doctrine to be received only by faith and not by reason It is a mystery, and ever must remain a mystery. But this does not trouble me, for we are surrounded by mysteries on every side. Life itself is a mystery, even in its simplest manifestation, which no one is wise enough to explain; how much more in its higher development. So is growth; so is reproduction; so are all the changes in nature. So is the operation of all its latent forces. Matter, of which we take cognizance by our senses, in its ultimate elements, is inexplicable; much more, spirit, which is beyond the reach of any of our senses. But we do know that it is spirit that dominates matter, and not matter that dominates spirit; that it is the psychical or vital principle in man that organizes his psychical or material body, and not the material body that originates the vital principle. So, also, it is the spirit quickened and energized by the power of God, which organizes, for itself, the spiritual body, which we take on in the Resurrection Day, and not the spiritual body that begets the spirit.
Here is a solid block of ice. It has all the properties of a solid body. I subject it to a certain degree of heat, and it becomes a liquid. It will flow in any direction to find its level. Again I subject it to a higher degree of heat and it is changed into steam, and, losing its power of cohesion, it rises in minute par tides into the air, superior to the attraction of gravity. I now subject it to a still higher degree of heat, and it becomes an invisible vapor. A tremendous power of expansion is developed, which is almost irresistible. We find by analysis that this substance, whether as vapor, or steam, or water, or ice, is composed of two gases, neither of which is like water, hydrogen and oxygen; the former is exceedingly inflammable, the latter is the chief agent in promoting combustion, but when combined they are used to extinguish fire. We combine them, and by reversing the process restore them to a state of super-heated steam or vapor, or water, or to the original block of ice.
We are all acquainted with these facts as facts, and we know the process by which these changes are effected, but all beyond this is a mystery. Even the facts would be incredible to one who had never seen them. The King of Siam is said to have told our missionaries that they were lying to him when they informed him that water in their country often becomes so solid that one can walk on it.
The story is told of a chemist who had a faithful servant, whom he rewarded with a silver cup. The servant prized it highly. But one day, during his absence, it fell into a chemical mixture, in the laboratory and was entirely dissolved. Not a trace of it could be seen in the clear liquid into which it had fallen. It had disappeared as utterly as though in had been annihilated. He mourned his loss as irreparable. But his master put another element into the basin, and behold! the silver was all precipitated to the bottom; not one particle was lost. This was gathered up and sent to a silver-smith, and was again made into another silver cup more beautiful than the first — nay, not another cup; it was the same silver cup, his master had given him; but O, how changed! The transformation was nothing less than miraculous in the eyes of the servant. The process was familiar to his master, but even he could not have told how it was done. But there are changes even in the natural world infinitely more mysterious than this, which no man is able to explain; how much more in the spiritual world. To anyone who says, half doubting, like Nicodemus: " How can these things be?" our Lord replies, " If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you heavenly things?" Or, to those who, like the Sadducees, deny the possibility of any such rising, out of apparent nothingness, because they cannot understand it, He says again: "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the POWER of God."
5. But some of the more salient characteristics of this spiritual Resurrection body are made known to us in the Scriptures.
(1) It is not a ghostly shadow, or will o' the wisp, or ignis-fatuus, as some conceive of it; but a veritable, substantial body, perfectly suited to its new nature and environment. This is not true of our gross, psychical, corruptible body, which is brought into subjection and dominated by the lusts and passions of the animal soul. The spiritual body not only acts in perfect harmony with its own spiritual nature but, as we have reason to believe, is superior to its natural surroundings in the natural world. We know that our Lord, during His stay of forty days on earth, after His Resurrection, could go and come, could appear and disappear at His pleasure; that He was now in one place, and now in another far distant, without making, as when in the days of His flesh, the toilsome journey between them. He exhibited to His disciples His wounds, and partook of food with them, to show them that He had still a substantial personality, the very same body, though it was now changed, which they had laid in the tomb; for He did not leave it there; but He does not appear to have been dependent on this food for the nourishment of His spiritual body. If our Resurrection bodies are to be like His, as we suppose, then such possibilities will also be ours. We know, indeed, that there are those who think that Christ rose in His natural fleshly body, and did not assume His spiritual body till He ascended forty days afterward, and who hold that we also will rise in our natural bodies, and that these are to be exchanged for spiritual bodies at some subsequent period. But we think that these views are unwarranted, and indeed contrary to the teaching of Scripture. For we are expressly told, that It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body; it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory.
(2) What may be the possibilities and the limitations of our sphere of activity; with what rapidity and ease we may move from one point to another; how far we may go as the messengers of our Lord, or for our own pleasure, we know not, and forbear to speculate. But we are told that " we shall be as the angels of God in heaven." We know that they are invested with great power, and can fly swiftly wherever they are sent. We know also that our spiritual bodies will be exceedingly glorious, "for they shall be like unto His glorious body."
We have exhibitions of beauty and glory even in the natural world, defiled as it has been by sin, that are calculated to give us the most exalted ideas of the beauty and glory of that which is to come, when perfect holiness shall reign supreme.
In the vision of the Transfiguration on the Mount; and in the glorious manifestation of Christ to Saul, on the way to Damascus, when he was blinded by the dazzling brightness of the light, that was above the brightness of the sun; and again, when he was caught up to the third heaven; and still further, in His appearance to John in the Isle of Patmos, when " His head and hairs were as white as snow, and His eyes were as a flame of fire, and His feet like unto brass, as if they burned in a furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters, and His countenance as the sun shining in his strength, and John, who had once communed so familiarly with Him when in the flesh, now fell at His feet as dead," we have some intimations of the glory of our King, and of our own, when we shall be like Him, and see Him as He is.
It was the custom of oriental princes to send robes to their invited guests, that they might come worthily attired into the presence of their lords. How surpassingly glorious then must be our appearance when clad in the robes which the King of kings shall give us, when He welcomes us into His presence and permits us to commune with Him, and walk together the golden streets of the New Jerusalem I Is there no meaning in the description of a heavenly city, with streets and houses, and a river of life, and fruit-bearing trees, and white robes, and palms of victory, and harps, and vials of odors, and all manner of precious stones, and the bread and the new wine of the kingdom, of which the Lord will partake with His people? For disembodied spirits, indeed, having no element to connect them with a material universe, all these can have no appreciable meaning. But to those who have been made like to Christ in His Resurrection Body, they may all be as real as that Body itself. They give us glimpses of a world having substance and color and warmth; a world that we can think of with pleasure, and businesses that we can anticipate, instead of formless shadows, and mirages, as unsubstantial as the fancies of a dream. (Parousia, p. 368.)
(3) Once more, the spiritual body is incorruptible, that is, immortal, like the spirit that animates ana controls it. The natural body, though made in the Divine image, and exquisitely formed, shares in the fortunes of the sinning soul, to which it is united, and both together must go down to death and corruption. "It is sown in corruption "; but "it is raised in incorruption." As the organ and servant of the pneuma, divested of all the gross passions and impurities of the flesh, and made like unto Christ's glorified body, and in perfect correspondence with a perfect environment, it is fitted for the eternal occupancy of a sinless, deathless spirit in that world where nothing that defiled shall ever come.
It should be clearly understood that this new spiritual life is not the same old psychical life reformed and restored. It is altogether another Life, a Life quite distinct from its old Adamic life. That has passed away forever. This is a new Life, begotten not like the former by natural generation, but by God Himself, in a regeneration. It is no longer called in the Scriptures the nephesh, or the psuche, which is always represented as perishable, but the zee aionios, the Life Everlasting. It is the Life of the Deity Himself, and must be an endless life.
6. Finally, when does this new life begin? If this inquiry relates to the time when we are begotten by God, the reply must be: Here in this probationary state. For the begetting of any life requires the concurrence or co-operation of two living agents; the one active, and the other receptive. Therefore I cannot believe in the doctrine of a post mortem, regeneration, a regeneration in a state of death, which is becoming so popular with theological sophists of the Platonic school. I am persuaded that it is in this life and in this only, and before the soul loses its consciousness in death, that it must come under the vitalizing influence of the Divine Spirit, and this new Life is begotten, if ever, within it. Although we are now called the children of God, it is rather by anticipation of the time when we shall fully enter upon that life in the spiritual world. We are here, now only in embryo, as it were, " waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body." It is only when Christ Himself shall appear to awake those who are sleeping in the dust of the earth, and to change those who shall be alive on the earth, that we are actually born into His Heavenly Kingdom and begin, in very deed, the Life that shall never end.
For when He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. Yea, " When the Chief Shepherd shall appear, we shall receive a crown of glory that faded not away."
But when that great and glorious day shall come, for which His Church has been so long waiting and praying, the Lord has not told us. But He has told us to watch, "for in such an hour as we think not, the Son of Man cometh." There are those, alas, who look forward to it with apprehension and dread, and there are others, who put it so far away, that it gives them little thought or concern. But it is characteristic of His true people, to look for it with longing hearts, as the day that will bring the consummation of all their highest hopes. To those who diligently study His Word and note the signs of the times, it seems evident that this day is near, yea, very near at hand. It is so to every one of us, whether we so regard it or not. Whether we remain and are alive at His coming, as is quite possible with some of us, or whether we must first fall before the power of the great last enemy, it is equally near to each one of us. It cannot be further away from any one than the day of his death. For sleeping in utter unconsciousness, and taking no note of time however long or short that time may be in reality, it will seem but a moment when we shall be awakened by the joyful sound of the trump of God, and shall see our Lord coming in power and glory, and hear Him say: "Awake, arise, my beloved, and come away."
I would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that you sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him. For this we say unto you by the Word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words. 1 Thess. 4. 13-18.
Again, at the close of the memorable description of the Resurrection in 1 Cor. 15., it is said:
Behold I will tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting, O grave, where is thy victory. The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God which giveth us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.
This then, beloved, is our true attitude according to the twofold injunction of the Apostle. On the one hand we are not to sorrow concerning them that are asleep, as others who have no hope; but in these afflictions that come upon us who remain, in the loss of dear friends, who go before us, though it be hard to give them up even for a little while; and when amid tears and mourning we lay them away in their dark, cold beds, we may comfort ourselves and one another with these words: not, as the poet tells us, that they have gone before us to glory, but, that they are safe, and at rest in the keeping of Him who has redeemed them from the power of the enemy and has the keys of Death and of Hades, and will soon bring them forth in triumph, and give them back to us in infinite beauty and loveliness, never again to be taken away.
Then on the other hand, amid all the heavy burdens we now have to bear, the trials, temptations and conflicts of this earthly pilgrimage, let us remember that the way is short and growing shorter and shorter, by every step we take. " For now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Let us therefore be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that there is a crown of righteousness laid tip for us, which the Lord the Righteous Judge shall give to us, and not to us only, but to all them also that love His appearing."
And may the very God of peace sanctify you wholly, and I pray God that your whole spirit soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. "Then God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away." " Surely I come quickly, saith the Lord. Amen, even so come, Lord Jesus."
There has always been a great diversity of views among the Biblical scholars and theologians with respect to what is called, " the intermediate state." This arises partly from the obscure and apparently conflicting utterances of Scripture on this subject, and partly from the philosophies which men bring with them to the study of the Scriptures. One is very apt to find what he is looking for and wishes to find in the Word of God. With a strong prepossession of mind in favor of any view, it is much easier for him to read that view into the text, than to draw out of it a view which is contrary to his prepossession. In this way, apparent support has been found for every heresy that has prevailed. In this way the Scriptures have been made to teach the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul, by the advocates of Plato's philosophy; while to others, they decidedly teach just the contrary doctrine. To the disciples of this school, death, instead of interrupting the activity of the soul, only releases it from its bondage and gives it greater freedom and power, and the intermediate state is a state of intense activity and life. The natural reaction from this philosophy, is to the other extreme, called materialism, and especially in view of the awful conclusion to which the doctrine of the indestructible nature of the soul leads in the case of the unsaved, the body and soul are conceived of as one and the same organism, and live and die together. These two schools of philosophy which are now contending with each other—so far as they make their appeal to the Bible — severally think they find their views sanctioned by its teachings, both as regards the intermediate state and the state beyond. It would not be strange if the truth should be found — if ever found to lie between them, and to hold something that is common to both. For rarely does any error spring up that does not contain some elements of truth, and that is not in antagonism to the errors in some opposite truth.
There is nothing more important — and perhaps nothing more difficult or unusual—than to bring a mind unbiased by prejudice to the study of the Scriptures. It is only as one is able to hold his own opinions and preferences in reserve, that he can come to any reliable opinion as to what they do teach on any given question. Their plainest teachings will otherwise be more or less warped to accommodate them to his purpose, and their more obscure hints will be construed in his favor, or altogether misconstrued; and so he will be as one "ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth."
Here is the secret of the great variety of conflicting views that have prevailed, and still prevail, with respect to the state of the dead.
1. The Papal church holds and has held from the time the primitive faith, " once delivered to the saints," became corrupted by a heathen philosophy and the conceit of her schoolmen and the ingenuity of cunning ecclesiastics, to the compulsory immortality of the soul, and to that abominable system of oppression and terror to which it has so naturally given rise.
All souls at death are supposed to be divided into three grand classes. (1) The children of the church, who die in a state of perfect holiness, with no taint of sin upon them, and no fault to be atoned for, if there are any such, go immediately to heaven, where they remain until they receive their new bodies at the resurrection. (2) The unbaptized, the ex-communicated, heretics, and all who have no claim on the good offices of the church, go at once to hell, there to wait their sure and final condemnation in the general judgment. (3) All others go to purgatory — a place of purification by fire—there to remain, till by their own sufferings and the offerings of pitying friends, their sins are atoned for, and they are qualified to enter heaven.
It is easy to see what a temptation is here offered to a grasping and unscrupulous priesthood, to increase the revenues and the power of the church, by playing upon the sympathies and fears of the people; and we know how they have used their opportunity, and how practically, purgatory came to be considered as the state into which all or nearly all who died under her jurisdiction, must first enter, and from which they could be released only by complying with such terms as they were pleased to prescribe. We cannot now stop to speak of the limbus patrum, limbus infantum, and other various departments, into which the purgatorial state was supposed to be divided.
2. The abominable practices that grew out of this scheme were among the chief causes of the Reformation. Our Protestant fathers struck out of their creed, at once, this doctrine of purgatory, but still clinging to the philosophy upon which it was founded, they divided the dead into two classes, instead of three, and supposed that the one class went immediately to heaven, and the other to hell, there to remain till the general judgment, which would but publicly confirm the final sentence of unending blessedness or misery which has practically begun to take effect at the moment of death.
In this way, the intermediate state, as a state or condition of existence between death and the resurrection in contradistinction from heaven and hell as separate places of abode for the righteous, was lost sight of; and the resurrection of the dead, became simply an incident, instead of the great epoch, as it is, in the history of the soul.
True, the souls of the deceased are supposed to come back to earth for their bodies at the resurrection—the same identical bodies, as some believe in the case of the wicked, and perhaps in the case of the righteous also—to be then changed into spiritual bodies. But the joys of the righteous and the miseries of the wicked are supposed to be the same in kind and degree as before, unless possibly more intense, after their embodiment. The sufferings of the wicked have been very generally considered, until recently, to be caused very largely by material fire. It is indeed difficult to understand just how this element could act upon disembodied spirits, and those who have held this view do not appear to have had any definite ideas on this point. In fact, the whole subject of the intermediate state and of the resurrection, is held in a very loose and confused way by the great mass of Protestant as well as Catholic Christians. It needs very much to be defined and re-stated according to the teaching of Scripture. But this never can be Scripturally done till men come to accept a better philosophy than that which heathenism has given them, concerning the nature of the soul.
The civilized and intelligent sentiment of the age has come, now very generally, to regard the sufferings of the unsaved, both before and after the judgment, as rather psuchical and subjective, than physical and objective, as heretofore, and self-imposed, as though the justice of God, in eternally inflicting them, could, in this way, be better vindicated or excused.
3. There is among Protestants of all denominations a somewhat large and increasing number of Christians, both in Europe and in this country, but more especially perhaps in Europe, who, while rejecting the grosser purgatorial notions of the Papal church, still believe the interval between death and the resurrection to be in some sense a state of probation and hope. Without adopting the views of those who believe in the final restoration of all sinners, that is, of those who are called Restorationists, they think that those who have lived and died without any intelligent knowledge of the way of salvation through Christ, may have, will have, the offer of the Gospel, and that many, and, possibly, a very large proportion of them will yet embrace it, and be saved. In support of this opinion, they refer to certain passages of Scripture which seem to imply or intimate, if they do not assert this. 1 Pet. 3: 18-20 is supposed to teach that Christ, between His death and resurrection, went into hacks and preached to the spirits of the antediluvians, who were imprisoned there; and in the next chapter (4: 6) it is said, "For this cause was the Gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit." In Rev. 21: 25, it is said the gates of New Jerusalem shall not be shut at all, and in the next chapter (22: 2), the leaves of the Tree of Life shall be "for the healing of the nations." (Matt. 5: 26) Christ likens unforgiving sinners to imprisoned criminals who shall not be released "till they have paid the uttermost farthing." He also (Matt. 12:30) speaks of one sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost, that "shall not be forgiven, neither in this world, neither in the world to come." These and other similar passages are thought to imply that the door of heaven may not be quite hopelessly shut upon all at death. It is thought that the justice, goodness, and mercy of God could hardly be vindicated on the supposition that salvation is made available or even possible to only a portion, and thus far, to only a small portion of this fallen race. This indeed would be true were every man constituted necessarily and absolutely immortal in his creation. Here, I think, is the source of the increasingly prevalent tendency to Universalism or Restorationism, or, to what is called "The Larger Hope," which is everywhere seen at the present day. It is an attempt to clear the character of God of the terrible aspersion which a false philosophy concerning the nature of the human soul casts upon it. Holding on to the traditional dogma that immortality is an endowment of nature, and not a gift of grace, compulsory upon all, and not contingent upon moral fitness to enjoy it, it follows, As a necessary inference, that all the unsaved, whether many or few, must be eternally miserable. If one could bring himself to feel that such a sentence of endless misery might be just, in the case of those who had willfully rejected the offer of salvation, how could he do it in the case of those who were born into sin, and have never heard of a Savior from its terrible consequences? No wonder that intelligent Christian scholars should attempt to find a solution of this terrible problem in the hope of a second probation for those who die in ignorance, or even in the doctrine of the final restoration of all men to holiness and heaven. Nor am I surprised that some, who have now discovered that their whole perplexity arose from falsely assuming that immortality was compulsory, rather than optional and conditional as the Scriptures declare, should still linger in this half-way house towards Universalism where they first began to find light and relief for their burdened souls, and should still cling to their larger hope, after the occasion for it has, in a great measure, been removed.
But when one comes to understand that we are not placed and continued here on earth for a little space merely to be rewarded or punished, as the case may be; in a life beyond, but rather as candidates for promotion to a higher sphere and a life more glorious and enduring, if we shall attain to it, it will seem neither unjust nor surprising that many should be called and few chosen. We shall have no occasion to invent any extraordinary hypothesis, to justify to our moral sense God's dealings with man. For, 1. This accords with the analogy of nature, and with God's providence, as we everywhere observe it. There seems to be an over-production, a waste, as it were, in every department of nature. God's resources are infinite. Few, comparatively, of the germs, the seeds, the eggs, the inchoate beginnings of life and organization, or of buds and blossoms, ever come to maturity, and fulfill the promise of their early beginning. The fittest only survive, and the great majority of them all drop out by the way, and are forgotten. But in the plentiful harvest that ensues, they are not missed. We might expect mankind to follow the same law; so it is apparently, and who shall have reason to complain if it is so, in fact? No injustice is done to any animal, that it was not made a creature of a higher order; nor to any man, that he was not set in a higher sphere, nor if he shall not be elevated to it — certainly not, if he shall be found unfit to enjoy it, or fulfill its conditions — if he shall have no aspirations or desires for anything that is higher and better, and shall even fail to improve what he already has. "To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he seems to have." God claims to be a sovereign in the bestowment of His gifts, and to exercise the right of setting one on high, and of putting down another—of creating or not creating—the same the potter exercises in making one vessel unto honor and another to dishonor (Rom. 9). The fault men have hitherto found with God in the exercise of His sovereignty, has been in the supposition that Ile gives to every man a compulsory immortality, and then foredooms, as it were, a portion of the race to a state of inevitable and endless misery. But no one can reasonably question His right to create a race of mortal men, or the right to lift as many or as few as He may please, or all, or none, or only those who may destroy and seek for it, and be found fit for it, to a higher station of honor and glory in His own heavenly kingdom, if He shall do this without doing any injustice to the rest.
2. It cannot but be admitted by those who hope for another probation beyond this life, that the Scripture passages upon which they found it are vague and uncertain. It is rather an inference, and that too suggested apparently by their own desires, than by anything positive in the texts themselves. The whole drift and bearing of Scripture testimony, exhortation, and warning, are in the opposite direction. The sacred writers evidently designed to make the impression, and do make the impression upon all who read their Bibles with no theory of their own to warp their judgment, that it is only in this life that men can be renewed and fitted for the life to come. It would rob the Gospel message of much of its power over sinners, and tend greatly to dampen the zeal of Christians for the evangelization of the world, wero it to be understood that the probation of this life is not final and conclusive, or even that those who had ignorantly and unintentionally rejected the Gospel would be favored with another probation. For it is mainly by neglect and postponement, and not on account of any fixed and willful purpose, that most sinners, to whom the Gospel is offered, fail to embrace it. This would encourage their neglect, and, in the case of those to whom it has never yet been offered, the missionary would be tempted to think that the offer might be more hopefully made in the future state, and so relax his efforts. But the Scripture says, " For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law." "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned" (condemned).
3. But regeneration— a new birth, is necessary to salvation. This implies the ingeneration of a new life within us, and the subjection of the body and soul to the rule of the spirit. How do we know that this is possible after the soul has been separated from the body? Is it not a work that must be done, if done at all, in this first stage of our being? Our characters are here inchoate. They are formed under such temptations and trials as come to us through the bodily senses. How do we know that they can be formed in any other way, or that they are not necessarily complete at death, and he that is holy must not be holy still, and he that is filthy, filthy still, by the very law of our nature? We are here able to choose between the good and the evil that are set before us, and to reverse our choice. We act under a great variety of motivities and influences. To which we shall eventually incline, is at first uncertain, for we are masters of our own wills, but our characters become more and more rigid and unyielding as we go on under this discipline. The form of the molten metal may be changed as it runs into the mold, but after a while it becomes set and definitely determined. The whole design and tendency of this probation would appear to be, to bring us into a habit, a fixed purpose of choice, a spontaneity of action that shall no longer be fluctuating and dependent on the strength of objective and temporary motives. Have we not reason to think that the spirits of the world beyond are characterized by a subjectivity of will, a spontaneity of action, which puts them beyond any liability to change. Is not this the highest expression of holy love, and that to which our earthly training is intended to train us — that it is spontaneous and free? — as Christ said of himself, "The prince of this world cometh and has nothing in me." He was beyond the reach of any influences that could be brought to bear on Him to overcome His holy nature. To the same bight of permanent holiness of character, the discipline of this life is bringing His people. The some may be said of the wicked, "Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived," and at last their hearts become "fully set in them to do evil." It is well for us to entertain large views of the goodness and mercy of God. But we know so little of the conditions of spiritual existence, that we should be cautious in affirming, or even guessing what may or may not be possible in the case of disembodied spirits— if such there be — For, 4. It is by no means certain that any creature of God however high, exists or can consciously and actively exist, without an embodiment of some kind. Much less, that man can maintain such a life with no bodily organization whatever, and still more especially, that the wicked, who have no spiritual life, can so live between death and the resurrection. It is the opinion of many good and learned men whom we might mention, that we are all in an unconscious state while waiting for our resurrection bodies, and of others, that this is evidently the condition of the wicked, while in a disembodied state. But we do not care to rest our belief on the opinions of men, however good or learned they may be, but rather on the testimony of the divine Word which is equally available to us all, and if this affords us no light on the question, our individual opinions are of little worth, and of no authoritative value for others. As I shall have occasion to consider this question in another place, I pass on to remark — very briefly — that, 4. Various other forms and modifications of the traditional doctrine of the intermediate state, which cannot now be particularly noticed, have their advocates.
Swedenborg taught, and his followers believe, that there is a spiritual body encased within the material body of every man, which is drawn out at death; with these spiritual bodies, all souls go, at first into an intermediate state or place to be assorted and made ready for their final condition. But this assorting process requires usually but a short time — never more than thirty years—and then. everyone goes to his own proper sphere. But as they believe in no other resurrection or judgment than this process implies, they hold to no such intermediate state as we are now considering. There are others whose views are somewhat akin to this, who do away with this state altogether, by supposing that all who die, take on at once their spiritual bodies, and go at once to their final estate of blessedness or misery. Also, the so-called spiritualists generally—if they have any definite ideas of the state beyond this life —might perhaps, be included in this category. But we need not stop to notice these and other visionary notions and fancies that have been held, all of which have their root in the old heathen dogma or in the assumption — for it is nothing more — that the soul is an -indestructible entity, and necessarily immortal.
1. In broad contrast with the whole school of philosophy with all its varying forms of belief, and as a natural protest against the absurdities and vagaries into which it has led its devotees, we have the doctrine of materialism, which dent's to the soul any existence whatever, as distinct from the body; which holds all life, and thought, and mind and will, to be the result of physical organization; and that when the body dies, the soul, of which all these exercises are predicated, dies with it, and becomes extinct—and if there be any future resurrection and life hereafter, in which some of this school believe, holding still to the testimony of the Scriptures in spite of their philosophy —the soul can only resume its identity and life, by the recreation of another bodily organization, modeled after the pattern of that which was laid down at death.
This theory of the soul claims to rest on the deductions and demonstrations of Science. Considered only in the light of science, it is plausible and seductive. There are not a few arguments in its favor. It indeed has its difficulties even as a scientific hypothesis. But considered only in the light of nature, and apart from the teachings of any higher revelation, it would have for us strong attractions. But this is not our only source of knowledge; we have light from above, a Divine revelation, given us expressly to teach us truths that are not discoverable by our physical senses, and are beyond the demonstrations of science. Nature is not the whole system of the universe. There is a realm that is above nature, a spiritual realm of invisible powers, of living intelligences as far superior to the material world which addresses itself to our senses, as the mind is to the body.
The visible world, wonderful and vast as it is—almost boundless in extent and infinite in its variety —is not the whole of God's universe. It is but the outside, the framework of that which it includes. It is for the display of God's glory and power, and for the use of the intelligences He has created. The Deity, who is the source of all, and in all, and above all, is expressed, is revealed, by this material world, but He is not encaged within it, nor measured by it. "These are but parts of His ways." They manifest something of His wisdom and power, but it is only in the higher realm of His spiritual dominions that He is really known, and honored and loved. " In our heavenly Father's house there are many mansions." We know a little something of this material house, and its conveniences and beauties, but we do not yet see its spiritual occupants. What principalities and powers and orders of spiritual subjects there may be above us, is yet revealed to us but in part.
It is the part of science to tell us what it can of this material realm, and, of Divine revelation, what we now need to know of this spiritual realm, which is beyond the apprehension of our physical senses. We are the connecting link between the two. We belong partly to both. In our physical nature we belong to the natural world. We are subject to its laws and processes, and apparently to its destiny. Scientifically considered, man is an animal of the highest order. He belongs to the genus homo.
But this is not all. He has a higher nature—a spiritual nature, or the vestiges of a spiritual nature. He has an independent will, a mind that is capable A knowing God and communing with Him. "There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty gives him understanding." "He was made a little For, for a little time] lower than the angels." This is what Revelation tells us. But we should need no revelation to assure us of all this, had not the spiritual faculty in us been deadened by sin. But as it is, we have something within us that responds to these teachings. There are yearnings for something higher and better and more substantial than is found in material things. "The things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are unseen are eternal." Both realms seem to claim us. It remains to be seen which shall eventually possess us. It seems to be left with us to make the choice—whether spurning the overtures of heaven, we shall drop to the level of this world, and share in its transitory destiny, or take. hold, by faith, of the hand that is extended to us to lift us up to a higher plane, so that though death shall claim us for a time, as it must, the spiritual shall rise to the eternal life beyond.
Every thoughtful man is conscious of possessing a will which is superior to the laws of his physical nature, and independent of them, which enables him to subject the forces of nature to his control, and make them subservient to him, by which he is able to rule his appetites and passions, and bring his whole body into subjection.
It is this that renders him morally responsible, as mere animals are not. This higher nature within him is the foundation of all religion and religious obligation. It is to this that the Word of God addresses itself. Even a heathen philosophy teaches as much as this, but it can go no further. We need a divine revelation to teach us our relations to the spiritual world above us, and the conditions of our spiritual existence.
6. What, then, instructed by nature on the one hand, and by revelation on the other, do we know, or can we know, of this higher principle, commonly called the soul, when dissevered from the body?
1. We do not know that the human soul is capable of maintaining an independent, conscious, active life apart from some physical organization through which it may exercise its functions. It is now invested with a body, and seems to depend upon it not only for the power to manifest, itself, but even to act at all. It follows the fortunes of the body through life, exhibiting feebleness and power according as the body is weak or strong. Accidents to the brain, through which it especially operates, often interrupt entirely its action, and it remains in a state of utter insensibility until the physical obstruction is removed. The scientific conclusion is, that if the obstruction were never to be removed this state of insensibility would continue forever. The invisible forces of nature, such as steam, electricity, galvanism, caloric, attraction, etc., which we have learned, in part, to subject to our use and which we employ in propelling machinery, and in other services, need the limitations of the machine, or of the material agent through which they exert their force, in order to its exercise. Apart from them they seem to be powerless. May it not be so with the vital and psychical force —for they are doubtless both one and the same —that animates our bodies? May it not be true that its action is suspended at death and only resumed when a new body shall be given it at the resurrection? If this be so, the reason is apparent why the doctrine of the resurrection occupies so prominent a place in the scheme of our redemption. Were it not for the resurrection of Christ, who in His own person conquered death and redeemed us from the power of the grave, have we not reason to believe that our individual human existence would have terminated at death? But now in consequence of the death and resurrection of Christ, we have the assurance that though we die we shall rise again. "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." But this does not give us the assurance that we shall live again until the resurrection. Indeed, the contrary would be the natural inference, and this is certainly very strongly implied in the Scriptures.
2. Death is spoken of in the Scriptures as a sleep. Acts 7: 59-60, Stephen committed his spirit to the keeping of Christ, and "fell asleep." 1 Cor. 15: 6, of the five hundred original followers of Christ, Paul says, " Some have fallen asleep." And again, 2 Pet. 3: 4, Peter says, "For since the fathers fell asleep," etc. Indeed, the apostle Paul in his argument for the resurrection, in 1 Cor. 15, seems to assume that the dead in Christ are not only asleep, but had it not been for the resurrection of Christ they would all have utterly perished or gone to nothing. "Then they also which are fallen sleep in Christ are perished." 1 Thess. 4:13, 14, "But I would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him."
The same phraseology is common to the Old Testament Scriptures also. It is said that "David slept with his fathers and was buried." So of Solomon, and so of the other kings. It is true that the Jews entertained notions of ghosts, and invisible spirits, with which it was possible, under certain conditions, to communicate. These notions they held in common with the whole heathen world, and were prone, like their neighbors, to attempt communication with them, and to practice the arts of magic and necromancy. But all this was strictly forbidden to them by the law of God, on pain of death. There was, no doubt, an element of truth in these notions, as, perhaps, in all superstitions. It is quite reasonable to suppose that there are different orders and kinds of spirits in the invisible world, and it may be true, also, that there are evil spirits seeking to embody themselves, and so manifest themselves to us, and to communicate with us, and that they are able to do so if we will supply to them the necessary conditions, and yet it does not follow that these are human spirits. Nor do I think the Scriptures give us any warrant to suppose that such intercourse with the spirits of deceased men is possible, unless by a miracle wrought by divine power. They are represented as existing in a state of unconscious repose.
Were we to suppose that the witch of Endor actually raised up Samuel for the gratification of Saul, even here he is represented as complaining of being disturbed or awakened as from a sleep. But this whole scene is too evidently a piece of jugglery and imposture to require any serious explanation.
The appearance of Moses and Elias in the transfiguration with Christ was altogether miraculous. It was certainly possible for our Lord to awaken them to life before the general resurrection—if indeed they were among the dead—but even this scene is called by our Lord Himself a vision (orama), which means an illusory appearance.
Job says (14: 12), " So man lieth down and rises not. Till the heavens be no more they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep." The Psalmist says (Pea. 146: 4), " His breath goes forth, he returned to the earth; in that very day his thoughts perish." Solomon says (Eccl. 9: 5), "The dead know not anything," and again (Eccl. 9: 10), " There is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave whither thou goes." In commenting on this passage, Luther remarks, " Another proof that the dead are insensible. Solomon thinks, therefore, that the dead are altogether asleep, and think of nothing; they lie, not reckoning days or years, but, when awakened, will seem to themselves to have slept scarcely a moment." Other passages of Scripture in this line might be cited, but these must suffice. We might also cite the names of many excellent commentators and theologians who have held this view; but we would not rest our faith on the opinions of other men, for they know nothing more than the Scriptures teach us all on this question.
It ought to be said, however, that there is another class of texts which are thought by some to point to a different conclusion, or rather which those who believe that the conscious life of the soul is not interrupted by the death of the body, construe as sustaining their belief. Of these the most important, and apparently the most decisive, is the parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:), as it is commonly interpreted. It would detain us too long to go into a minute examination of this parable, and to show the falsity of many of the numerous theories that have been built upon it. It is evidently a parable, and not a description of an actual event. The characters are not real persons. When we look at the context, and notice the occasion of this parable, and the real object for which it was spoken, we cannot think that our Lord intended here to teach anything about the hadean world where the scene is laid, but to forewarn the Pharisees who, it is said, were " covetous," and derided His teaching with respect to the impossibility of serving God and mammon — of the abject poverty to which they would be reduced, and of the exaltation of those whom they now despised. He assumes for this purpose their ideas of the state after death, without indorsing them, and which are elsewhere exposed as erroneous, to give life and coloring to His picture. We are certainly not to infer that the righteous go literally into Abraham's bosom at death, nor that the disembodied spirits have literal bodies in the intermediate state called hades. But if this was meant to be the foreshadowing of the reversed conditions of these proud Jews and the Gentiles they so much despised, as many think, it has been most remarkably fulfilled in all their subsequent history to the present time, both with respect to their miserable condition and the impassable gulf between them and the Gentile world.
3. But whatever the Scriptures may be thought to encourage us to believe concerning the righteous and the wicked in the intermediate state they do not allow us to regard it as their ultimate state. It is provisional and temporary. It is abnormal. It is not the state of rewards and punishments of which they speak. It is a state rather than a place. It is not the ouranos which we call heaven, nor the Gehenna which we translate hell. It is unfortunate that the words sheol in the Old Testament, and hades in the New, which refer to a state or condition which is common to both the righteous and the wicked, should also have been translated "hell." They express an idea which is quite different from that expressed ','y Gehenna. They do not in the original, convey the idea of punishment as the word Gehenna does, unless it be the penalty of death which falls upon all the children of Adam alike, It is a state through which we all must pass. It is Gehenna and not Sheol or hades that is the hell into which the wicked are cast to be destroyed. It is this that is set in contrast with ouranos, heaven, which many think the final abode of the righteous. If the distinction between the intermediate state which is common to all, and the place where the wicked are punished with everlasting destruction, which is so evident in the Hebrew and Greek, had been observed in our translation, much confusion and misunderstanding would have been avoided.
The notion is very commonly entertained that the righteous when they die go at once to heaven. Our religious literature abounds with such teaching. It is heard from the pulpit and is the staple of funeral dis- courses. But it has no warrant in the Scriptures. The awards of the righteous and the wicked are not at death, but at the resurrection and the general judgment. Hades had nothing but a dreary and uninviting aspect even for the people of God. It was to them a place of darkness, of silence, of detention, and it was only the prospect beyond that cheered them. Their hopes centered in the resurrection. It was not death nor the hadean state that Paul (2 Cor. 5:1-4) was tempted to desire, but the state beyond. He did not desire to be unclothed, but to be clothed upon with the house which is from heaven. It was when? Christ, not death, should come that he expected to be rewarded. This hope we find expressed everywhere in his epistles and in the epistles of Peter and John and in the writings of the early Christians. " Waiting for the redemption of our body; " "who will raise us up by His own power;" "knowing that lie which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise us up also by Jesus and shall present us with you." "If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead;" "But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him.... wherefore comfort one another with these words;" "And to you who are troubled, a rest with us when the Lord shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels;" " Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord the righteous judge shall give me at that day; and not to me only but unto all them also that love his appearing; " " Looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ." So Christ tells His disciples that they "shall be recompensed at the resurrection of the just;" "great is your reward in heaven"—not in Jades, but in heaven. The idea so prevalent among Protestant Christians that saints, at death, enter immediately upon the blessedness of heaven has operated to throw this great cardinal doctrine of the Gospel into the shade. Tyndale well says, "If the souls of the righteous be in heaven, tell me why they be not in as good case as the angels. And then what cause is there of the resurrection?" So thoroughly were the Thessalonian Christians impressed — oppressed may I not say —with this thought, that those who died before the coming of Christ must wait for Him in the hadean state, that Paul felt constrained to comfort them with this assurance, (2 Thess. 4:15-17,) " We which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent [go before] them which are asleep. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord."
4. Mr. White (in his Life in Christ, p. 310) suggests, that " The discrepancy in men's judgments on this question has arisen from the supposition that it behooves us to make out a uniform scheme as to the disposal of souls since the beginning of the world; as if the condition of souls departed at any one time or place must be taken as the rule for understanding all that is said of souls at other times and places. It is possible (the truth to be ascertained only by induction of evidence) that God, who deals so variously with mankind on this side the veil as to the degrees of their consciousness, knowledge, and enjoyment, may deal with them in the intermediate state, if, as we believe, there is such a state, on a principle of similar diversity."
Mr. Constable, Dr. Ives, and those of another school of thought, hold that the soul is entirely dissipated at death. When God withdraws His Spirit, all life ceases, and all thought with it, only to be restored in the resurrection. To live forever as a man is the privilege of the regenerate; all others die a second time in the pains of the second death. Dr. Delitzsch thinks that the entire extinction of man at death would be according to the analogy of death in all other animated creatures, and that such was the purport of the curse, but that the survival of the soul is of the nature of a miraculous or abnormal provision, arising out of the economy of redemption, with a view to a future resurrection. Rev. H. S. Warleigh, a vigorous English writer, in his Demonstration of the Extinction of Evil Persons and Evil Things, and numerous other works, while agreeing with Mr. Heard in his views of the tripartite nature of man, and that we have eternal life by virtue of the spirit and not of the soul, holds with Mr. Constable and those of his school to the unconscious state of the wicked dead. But he thinks that in the case of the regenerate, the spirit with all the attributes of an individual mind survives in Paradise—the abode of the blessed in the hadean world — till the resurrection, when it rejoins soul and body at the Lord's coming. This view may serve to explain the words of our Lord to the dying thief (Luke 23: 43), " Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise "— not in heaven, but in the state of the blessed in hades.
There are certainly stronger reasons for believing in the conscious state of the righteous than of the wicked. I believe with Dr. Thom, Dr. Mark Hopkins, Rev. J. B. Heard, and others, in the threefold nature of man — certainly the regenerate man. God designed man to have a body, soul, and spirit (soma, psuche, pneuma), each to be held in harmony with the others, the soul to dominate the body, and the spirit, the soul; the spirit to be the life of the soul, as the soul is the life of the body. The body and soul he possesses in common with the lower animals; they differ not in their nature, but only in the degree of their excellence from the body and soul of the brute. But to man only is the spirit given. It is of the nature of the Deity. It is the life of God in the soul of man. This is what Adam failed to retain, if it was actually given to him at first — or if given only in the germ or first rudiments — what he failed to develop and confirm. This is what is given or quickened again into life in the new birth. Hence, unrenewed men are called in the Scriptures psuchikoi (soulical, but translated) natural or sensual, not having the pneuma, spirit; and renewed men are said to be pneumatikoi, spiritual, and to be led by the pneuma, spirit. This distinction is much more obvious in the Greek than in our version. It is in the possession of the spirit, and not in the possession of a soul, that man is especially distinguished from other animals. It is in this that he has the guarantee of eternal life. It is the peculiar gift of God. The word nephesh in Hebrew and psuche in Greek, both ordinarily translated " soul " is applied indiscriminately to man and brutes alike in the Scriptures; but this is rarely brought out in our translation, because when it is predicated of brutes our translators have employed some lower word, such as beasts, creatures, etc. And unfortunately for the correct understanding of the Word of God on this question, this word soul has in modern times taken on a higher sense and dropped its lower sense, as now commonly used, and is employed with reference to man alone, and is made to include the idea of both soul and spirit. Indeed, these two words are now popularly used interchangeably and supposed to mean about the same thing. But in the Scriptures, both in the Old and New Testaments, the ideas expressed by the word soul (nephesh, Heb., and psuche, Gr.,) and the word spirit (mach or neshamah, Heb., and pneuma, Gr.,) are quite distinct.
THE REVISED VERSION.
Many of the acknowledged faults and infelicities of the common version of the Scriptures will, no doubt, be corrected in the revised edition, which is soon to be given to the public. In this all parties should rejoice. But it is hardly to be expected that it will bring any special aid or comfort to any of the various partisans of the different theological views which divide the Christian world; for this simple reason, if for no other; that it is not the translation that gives rise to these differences. They lie deeper than this, and back of all translations.
Our theological discussions turn, not so much upon the translation of certain Greek and Hebrew terms, as upon the sense in which they are to be taken, in whatever way they may be translated.
It is, indeed, in the power of words to do something toward shaping and controlling the opinions of men on philosophical and theological questions; but they are not all-controlling in this regard, for thought cannot be confined in this way. It overleaps all verbal barriers, and is able to infuse itself into any set of terms, and insidiously to change their meaning, and to subsidize them to almost any use that may be desired.
The history of doctrines abundantly shows this. Many of the most familiar terms of the Bible have lost their primitive meaning, under the influence of theological sentiment, and have come to be taken as meaning something quite different from what they originally meant. They have come to have in the Bible, what is called a "religious sense," which is quite different from their primitive, and often from their natural and secular meaning.
Our translators did well to transfer the Greek word baptize to our version, only giving it an English termination, without translating it; and it is to be presumed that the revisers will do the same. This ought to be satisfactory. But whatever the original meaning of the word; whether to purify or to immerse, it has come to designate a religious rite, irrespective of the mode in which it is performed. This is so little satisfactory to some of the more earnest advocates of immersion, that, ignoring their own peculiar name, "Baptists," they would have the word now translated immerse, to indicate more emphatically their idea of the mode of administering it. But had it been so translated, in the outset, it would not long have held its specific meaning, in the face of another mode, nor would it be able to control the mode were it now to be so rendered.
Those missionaries, of whom it is said, that in giving a translation of the Scriptures in a heathen tongue, in their zeal to impress upon their converts their particular mode, translated the word "baptizo," in their imperfect knowledge of this new language, into a word that meant " to drown," so that the text read, " He that believeth and is drowned shall be saved," were, no doubt, soon able by their " religious use " of this word, to bring it into accord with their practice, without taking the trouble to change it.
The English word hell is, or rather was, a proper rendering of the Hebrew Sheol, and the Greek hades; for they all seem to have had one signification, namely: an unseen or concealed place. But our theological notions have invested this word hell with a special and peculiar meaning; and what is more, the ideas that properly attach to the New Testament word Gehenna — a word of an entirely different signification, and a proper noun at that, which our translators have unhappily rendered also " hell" — have been thrown back into this word wherever it occurs, and the result has been, an utter confusion of mind in regard to what the Bilge really teaches in regard to "hell." No doubt, this confusion has been, in part, created by the loose and vacillating way in which they have translated the words sheol and hades — sometimes rendering them " hell," and sometimes "grave," and sometimes "pit," and especially by rendering this other word Gehenna, of an entirely different import, by the word "hell" also. But what if these three words, shed, hades, and Gehenna, were simply transferred to our version without being translated, as they no doubt should be, this would indeed prepare the way for a better understanding of what the Bible teaches, but it would not hinder the partisans of varying theological views from reading their own peculiar views into them. In our common version, the three words nephesh, psuche, and zoi, have been treated in very much the same way. The two former, which are evidently synonymous, have been sometimes rendered "soul," and sometimes "life," and also by various other English words; and the latter, which designates more especially that peculiar higher life which is given in the new birth, and of which (aionios) eternal is so often and exclusively predicted, is also rendered life; thus an apparent distinction has been made, by rendering the same word variously " soul " and " life" where there is none in the original, and where there is a manifest distinction, in the original between the psuche life and the zoa life, by the use of different words, none has been made in the translation. The result is, an utter confusion of mind in regard to the teaching of the Scriptures as to " the soul " and " the life everlasting." But the real difficulty lies deeper than this. The word "soul," which once very properly represented the Hebrew and Greek, nephesh, psuche, and which, in the Scriptures, designates a principle that is common to all living animals, whether brute or men, has now, under the influence of philosophy and theology, come to designate something that is peculiar to man, a principle that is infinitely higher and more enduring than it once designated, or than is possessed by brute animals. And now no translation of these words will serve to restorg the word " soul" to its primitive meaning, nor to give them the broad common sense of the original.
The word death is, no doubt, the proper equivalent of the Hebrew maveth and the Greek Thanatos. We all know what death means outside of the Scriptures, and apart from religious discussion. It means the end of all sensitive, active, functional life. But in a religious sense, under the influence of doctrinal belief it has come to mean a morbid, sinful state of being, which is no interruption to sensation and functional activity. This belief lies back of the translation, and no rendering of these original terms will affect it. For the question is — not how these terms should be translated, but what ideas we shall attach to them after they are translated.
So also with the words apollumi, apoleia, olethros, very justly translated, to be destroyed, to be lost, destruction, etc., or with the word kolasis, punishment; there is no fault to be found with the translation of these words, nor with many others that might be cited. The dispute is about the ideas that are to be put into them. Does " destruction " in the Scriptures mean the destruction of the well-being of the individual of whom it is predicated, or of the individual himself? Does " punishment of everlasting destruction " mean the penal infliction of unending misery, or is it the capital punishment of actual death —the cutting off from the enjoyment of an everlasting life We have not here undertaken to argue any of these questions. We have stated them only to show that the controversy now waging around these questions is not a controversy of words, but of ideas and of doctrines. The grand difficulty which disputants feel in carrying on their discussions, is in the fact that they are obliged to use words which fluctuate in their meaning, and which may be made to convey almost any sense which may be put into them.
But our translators and revisers have nothing— or should have nothing—to do with these various doe- trines. It is not for them to show any favor even to their own opinions; but simply to give as fair and literal, and consistent and uniform a rendering of the original Hebrew and Greek terms into the equivalent terms of our language as they possibly can, and to transfer without translating any dubious or peculiar terms, for which our language furnishes no equivalents. It is greatly to be hoped that they will be found to have done this.
Philadelphia, April, 1881.
We must find our answer to this question mainly in the words which He spoke, as recorded by the four Evangelists. It is true, He taught by example as well as by precept; but His life may be considered rather as illustrating and enforcing His utterances, than as setting forth new and additional precepts.
In a certain sense the whole Inspired Volume may be taken as the teachings of our Lord especially the writings of His more immediate followers who received their instruction directly from Him, and have given His doctrines more in detail, for our instruction, in the New Testament. But the words which He thought it important to utter in public with His own lips, come to us with a peculiar emphasis and power which none of the writings of the prophets or apostles can be permitted to contravene or to weaken; and with which they must be interpreted to harmonize.
The grand central thought that runs through all the teachings of Christ, and toward which all His words of instruction, of invitation, of comfort, of encouragement, of rebuke, and of warning point us, is this:
THE KINGDOM OF GOD, Or THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN ON EARTH, into which all mankind who shall be fitted for it are to be gathered, and from which all who are unfit are to be excluded. The great purpose of His mission to this world, was to lay the foundations of this kingdom; to open the door into it; to make it possible for us to enter it; and to qualify us for it. The main object of His teaching is to make known to us: (I) The nature of this kingdom; (II) The way of entrance into it; (III) The essential characteristics of the heirs of this kingdom; and (IV) To urge its claims upon us.
This is the great salvation provided by the infinite love and mercy of God for dying, perishing men; the proclamation of it is TIIE GOSPEL-the good news —which He commissioned His followers to preach to all men throughout the world, with the promise that " he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be condemned."
I THE NATURE OF THIS KINGDOM.
1 It is a glorious kingdom. Of this he gave His three favored disciples a foretaste in the vision of transfiguration on the mount. It is a kingdom of love, joy, peace, from which every impure and disturbing element is to be excluded; in short, a perfect kingdom and consequently a kingdom that shall endure forever.
2 It is a spiritual kingdom. Not, however in that metaphorical, unreal sense in which many conceive of it; for it is as much more substantial and real than human kingdoms, as it is better than they are. Its King is an actual, living, ever-living King, in the form of a man; not now indeed with a fleshly decaying body, for flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, but in His resurrection body, glorified and none the less substantial because it is a spiritual body. Its subjects are human subjects, immortalized by their union to Him, having human bodies like unto His own glorious body. "They that are accounted worthy to attain to that world and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage; neither can they die anymore; for they are equal unto the angels, and are the sons of God, being sons of the resurrection." (R. V.)
Its administration is a real administration, in which those who shall be found worthy shall be called to participate, according to the good pleasure of the King.
3 It is the kingdom of heaven on earth; not in some far off, unknown part of this universe; but here on this earth restored, purified and made glorious by the presence of its rightful Lord. As this earth has been the theatre of Satan's malign power and has witnessed the deadly conflict between him and Christ, so it shall witness the victory and reign of our Lord; and all his ransomed hosts from among the ranks of sinning, ruined, dying man, recovered from the power of death, purified from sin, invested with the new life -- the immortal life of their risen Lord, — and in their spiritual bodies like unto His own glorious body, shall be permitted to share in His joy, and dwell in His love forever. This is what He says: ' The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom, but the tares are the children of the wicked one; the enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels. As therefore, the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall it he in the end of the world [age]. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire. Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father." This is the kingdom which our Lord has told us to pray for and to expect. It is the leading petition in the brief form of prayer He has given us: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven."
II THE WAY OF ENTRANCE INTO THIS KINGDOM.
1 It is through Christ Himself, as the Savior of men, and only through 3m, that any man can enter in and receive that eternal life which is the peculiar endowment of the heirs of his kingdom. No child of Adam is entitled to it by his natural birth. Death is the common lot of all through sin. It is only as one is redeemed from death, and made to live again, that he can become a child of this heavenly kingdom. To effect this was the object of His mission to earth. This is what He actually does accomplish for all who accept Him as their Savior; and all who do not, must perish. It is to this truth that He gives peculiar emphasis and prominence in all his teaching. "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No man corn-eth to the Father but by me." " I am the Door. By me if any man enter in he shall be saved." " I am the bread of life. Verily, verily, I say unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood ye have no life in you,"—no vie life. or spiritual life; the psuche life, or natural life, is common to all men, but it is transient, but the Zoe life, of which our Lord so often speaks, and to which He so often affixes the epithet aionios "eternal," is the only enduring and endless life. "Whoso eats my flesh and drinks my blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day." "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life —Zoe aionios — and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life." "I give unto them eternal life — Zoe ainios — and they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of my band."
It would be easy to cite a large number of similar passages, but these will suffice.
It would conduce to the better understanding of the Word of God on this point, if the two kinds of life spoken of — the spiritual and the natural — were designated by two distinct English words, as in the original Greek: psuche and Zoe; also, in the Latin version, anima and vita; for they are entirely and radically distinct from each other. The psuche life which is common to all living creatures, and which is often translated "soul," is everywhere spoken of as extinguishable and transient; but the zele life or spiritual life— which Christ gives to His followers, is His own peculiar life, and inextinguishable and eternal. Hence, it is commonly qualified by the epithet aionios, everlasting. But this epithet is never, never adjoined to the psuche life in the Scriptures. It was Christ's psuche life as the Son of man that He laid down for us. But He did not lay down His zi") life, for this is a divine, undying life. So He says to John the Revelator, "I am he that lives and was dead, [as to my psucha life,] and behold I am alive forevermore"; and to His disciples, "Because I live, ye shall live also and whosoever lives and believeth in Me shall never die," or more literally, shall not die forever.
REDEMPTION from death by an atoning Savior, who, as the Son of man, died with man and for man, and who as the Son of God, lives forever to give life to all His people, this is the distinguishing doctrine of the gospel of Christ. "Because I live, ye shall live also," this is the truth in the Christian system, which above all others, offends the pride and provokes the opposition of men; and too many, alas, of those who call themselves His followers, are unwilling to accept it as a literal statement of their obligation to Him. After one of Christ's discourses in which He had most emphatically proclaimed this doctrine, John says: " From that time many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him. Then Jesus said unto the twelve, Will ye also go away? Then Simon Peter answered Him, Lord to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life." The Pharisees claimed it as their legitimate and inalienable inheritance by birth, and they construed all the promises of the Old Testament in support of their claim. But Jesus said to them, " Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they that testify of Me" — of Me as the Messiah, the Savior, the only one through whom you can receive it. The same claim is made now almost everywhere. "It is man's indefeasible prerogative by nature or birth. At any rate it is due to him as a reward for morality, for good deeds or penances or the performance of the rites imposed by the Church." They are offended now, as at the time of Christ, when told that it is the natural inheritance of no man, however blameless his life, or numerous his services; that it cannot be inherited or bought, or earned, or merited; but that it is the special and peculiar gift of God through Jesus Christ, and must be received as such, if received at all.
2 It is only by a second birth, a new birth; and 3, by a resurrection from the dead, that mortal men can enter this kingdom. For the sake of brevity, and because of their necessary relation to each other, these two conditions may be considered together.
Our Lord did not propose by His death to save us from the necessity of dying; but he did propose to redeem us from the dominion and power of death which had otherwise been total and perpetual; to ingenerate within us through the Divine Spirit, a new life, to raise us up with spiritual bodies fitted for an immortal existence, and so to make us heirs of His Everlasting kingdom.
This new, or second life, which we receive, in what is called the " new birth," and by a resurrection fruit the dead, is not the old Adamic life restored after having been extinguished, nor is it that old life prolonged into another and higher stage of being as our popular philosophy teaches, but it is another life, a new life, a Zoe life, which Christ expressly declares He gives to His people. " I give unto them eternal life." (Zoe aioinios.) Let it not be supposed that this new life, because it is ingenerated by the Spirit of God, is therefore a kind of figurative life, and this resurrection from the dead is only a ghostly resurrection, as too many would have us believe. It is as real as the life of Christ Himself; indeed it is His own life in us, as the life of the vine is in the branches, for we are begotten by the same Holy Spirit; and this resurrection is as actual as His own, after which our resurrection bodies are to be patterned.
I am the resurrection and the life. "This is eternal life, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou bast sent." " Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given Me be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory." " This is the will of Him that sent Me, that everyone which sees the Son, and believeth on Him, may have everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the last day." " Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."
This word gennao, here translated "born," means also begotten. In this instance, and in many others, it would have been better rendered begotten. "Except a man be begotten again," or more literally, begotten from above, (genethe anothen). As the beginning of natural life actually dates from the period of begetting, though we are in embryo till birth, so is it with the beginning of our second or new life, we are begotten from above, while in the flesh, but we are not actually born into the kingdom of heaven till we are raised from the dead. "That which is born [or rather begotten] of the flesh is flesh, and that which is begotten of the Spirit is Spirit." This explains the ambiguity of expression by which those who have been begotten by God are called the children of the kingdom, even in this life, for the new life has already begun within them, though they are not actually born into that kingdom to which they belong, by the purpose and promise of God, till the resurrection. John the Baptist, no doubt, will be born into this kingdom when his Lord shall come to call him from the dead; but while he lived in the flesh, he was not actually in it; for Christ expressly says: "Among those that are born of woman there is not a greater prophet than John, but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he."
When Christ says, " Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot see the kingdom of God," He shows us the symbolic meaning of the rite of baptism which He has put at the doorway or entrance into His visible kingdom.
It is not by a kind of translation, nor by a ghostly ascension out of the body, according to the popular teaching of too many at the present day, by which the reality of a new birth and a resurrection from the dead are practically nullified; but by an actual death, and an actual resurrection from death by the almighty power of God, that we enter that heavenly kingdom. "As touching the resurrection of the dead," says Christ to all such false teachers, as He did to those of His time who did not believe it to be philosophically possible to actually die and then live again, " ye do err not knowing the Scriptures and the power of God."
Marvel not at this, for the hour is coming in which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of condemnation.
3 THE ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE HEIRS OF THIS KINGDOM.
Our Lord has very explicitly told us whom He will not recognize as His own at His coming. The catalogue of graces which He insists on in His various discourses would be long if drawn out in detail; they may all be summarized under the three following heads: Love, Faith, and Obedience. Indeed these three have but one common source, and are necessary to each other, for Faith is the fruit of Love, and the Obedience He requires is the obedience of love, and is impossible without it.
1 Love is the fulfilling of the whole law, and the sum of all He requires of us, as He Himself has declared. When a certain lawyer asked Him, saying: "Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? " He replied, " What is written in the law? How reads thou?" And the lawyer said, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself." And Jesus said unto him, "Thou hast answered right. This do, and thou shalt live." If one loves God supremely, he will be penitent for all his sins against Him; he will both trust and obey Him, and submit himself gladly to Him. Prayer will be a pleasure. He will also love and honor the Messiah of God, as he is required to do. " For the Father judges no man, but has committed all judgment unto the Son; that all men should honor the Son even as they honor the Father. He that honored not the Son, honored' not the Father which sent Him." "He that loveth father or mother more than Me, is not worthy of Me; he that loveth son or daughter more than Me, is not worthy of Me; and he that taketh not up his cross and followed after Me, is not worthy of Me."
If on the other hand, one really loves his neighbor as himself, be will need no law to forbid him doing him any intentional injury. He will not only refrain from trespassing against him in any way, but be will seek to do him all the good in his power. Christ's golden rule will be in his heart, and will influence all his conduct. " This is my commandment," says Christ, "that ye love one another as I have loved you." Yea, more, the followers of Christ are not only to love each other as brethren, but to love all men, even their enemies. "I say unto you, love your enemies, do good to them that hate you; bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven."
2 Faith, as well as love, is required of all who would be recognized by our Lord as his disciples. Faith not merely in God as our heavenly Father, but faith in His Son as the Savior of men. There is nothing in the discourses of Christ more emphatically and incessantly insisted on than this. By the very prominence He gives to it, as a necessary condition to the reception of even temporal favors at his hands, we cannot believe that it is a mere arbitrary requirement, but rather that it is somehow indispensable in the very nature of things to the appropriation and enjoyment of any of His special gifts, even for the body, much more for the richer blessings of His grace.
His disciples are properly characterized as "believers." The whole substance of the Gospel seems to be summed up in this wonderful text, "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. He that believeth on Him is not condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." This belief is not only required of those to whom He showed Himself while in the flesh, but of all to whom He is offered in the Gospel. "Because thou hast seen Me thou bast believed," He said to Thomas, "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."
This is the commission He gave to His disciples. "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be condemned."
3 Obedience. The obedience He requires, is the obedience of love and faith. To those who inquired, " What shall we do that we might work the works of God?" He replies, "This is the work of God, that ye believe in Him whom He has sent." " If ye love Me, keep My commandments." "He that has My commandments and kept them, he it is that loveth Me." "If ye keep My commandments ye shall abide in His love." "If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them."
The kind of obedience He requires is the simple, confiding, loving, imitative obedience of the child, " And Jesus called a little child unto Him and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."
A distinguishing feature of the religion of Christ as He taught it in its simplicity, is its freedom from prescriptive forms and ceremonies. He instituted only two external rites, both of them very simple in their nature, viz.: Baptism, to signalize our entrance into His kingdom, to be observed once for all; and the Eucharist, commonly called the Lord's Supper, as a perpetual memorial of his dying love, and of our relation to Him, to be constantly observed from time to time till he comes again.
There is nothing that He more earnestly rebuked and denounced than the sanctimonious formalism of the Pharisees, who made a great outward show of religion, and hypocritical pretenses of the religious devotees of his time, who were so punctilious in observing the traditional forms of a worship in which they had no heart. Their frequent ablutions, their scrupulous tithings, their religious habits, their set fasts, their postures, and forms of words, and long prayers, were an especial abomination to Him. Instead of securing His favor, they provoked His severest malediction. " Woe unto you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for ye are like whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Gehenna!!"
But while He uttered the most withering denunciations against hypocritical pretenders, and heartless worshipers, He had nothing but words of gentleness, and encouragement, and comfort for all sincere seekers, however weak their faith or imperfect their well-meant endeavors to do His will.
He applies to Himself the words of the prophet, "A bruised reed shall He not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment to victory.". And in the very beginning of his ministry at Nazareth, He took as the key-note of His mission, the words of Isaiah concerning him: " The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because he hath anointed Me to preach the Gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord — and all bear Him witness and wondered at the gracious words that proceeded out of His mouth." If these graces do not bud, and blossom, and begin to bear fruit in our lives while here on earth, we have no authority to call ourselves heirs of His heavenly kingdom; nor have we any ground for expecting to be recognized as such at His coming.
4 THE CONSIDERATIONS BY WHICH THE GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM IS URGED UPON US.
These are as varied as the necessities of our nature and our condition as dependent, sinful, perishing men. There would seem to be no true motive that is capable of influencing a human mind that is not brought to bear on us to induce us to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.
1 We are required to do this by One who has a right to command. No one can have failed to notice that our Lord, while speaking words of love, and condescending to warn, and exhort, and entreat us, " speaks also as one having authority, and not as the scribes." His utterances are not to be regarded as wise counsel or good advice merely as we regard the words of other teachers, which we accept or reject as we please. They have all the force of commands which cannot be disregarded without guilt. In fact, He assures us that the rejection of the overtures of the Gospel will greatly enhance the condemnation of those to whom it has been offered; it will constitute the chief item in their guilt in the day of judgment. "And this is the condemnation that light is come into the world, and men chose darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." " When He [the Spirit] is come He will reprove the world, because they believed not in Me." "Then began He to upbraid the cities wherein most of His mighty works were done, because they repented not. Woe unto thee Chorazin, woe unto thee Bethsaida, for if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you." " And that servant who new his Lord's will and made not ready, nor did according to His will, shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not, shall be beaten with few stripes. And to whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required, and to whom they commit much, of him shall they ask the more."
2 By the impossibility of attaining to eternal life in any other way. The teaching of Christ on this point is very explicit. " I am the door." " I am the way." " No man cometh unto God but by Me." " I am come that they might have life and that they might have it abundantly"—(not more abundantly, as erroneously rendered in the old version). The passages in which He asserts the absolute dependence of all men on Himself for salvation and eternal life are very numerous. Many of them have already been cited under the first head of our second division, and we need not repeat them, nor multiply other quotations.
But while He declares that there is no other way of salvation but such as He has provided, He also assures us that it is sufficient for the needs of all men, and free to every one who wills to be saved by Him. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." "Ask and ye shall receive. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you." His complaint was when on earth, and is now, "Ye will not come unto Me that ye might have life." Indeed He tells us that the unwillingness of sinful men is so great that " No man can come to Me except the Father which has sent Me draw him." And that God acts as a sovereign in the dispensation of this, the richest of all His favors, as He does in the bestowment of all other gifts. "Thou bast given Him power over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as thou bast given Him." " I pray not for the world, but for them which thou halt given Me, for they are Thine."
In what way, if in any, and to what extent, those to whom the Gospel is not made known in this life are to receive the benefits of the provisions He has made, we are not told. But He lays it as His last great command upon his disciples to go into all the world and preach this Gospel to every creature, with the assurance that those who believe and are baptized shall be saved, but also that those who disbelieve shall be condemned.
While He gives us no authority to set limits to the mercy of God toward those who have died in ignorance of the provisions Ile has made for the salvation of sinners, and while we are assured that no injustice will be done to any sinner, and that no sincere seeker after the truth, however meager his privileges and opportunities, if he honestly employ such as are here accorded to him, will be rejected, we cannot find any hint in any of His words; or any encouragement to believe that a second post-mortem probation will be accorded to any mortal after this life shall have ended.
If all men were born to an inevitable immortality, and to an inheritance of endless misery on account of the sin of our first parents, as our traditional theology from a paganized Papal church teaches, then indeed justice would demand that every man should have a fair opportunity either here or hereafter to escape from so terrible a doom. But if, on the other hand, death is the common lot of all men from Adam, as the Word of God everywhere declares, and that everyone is rewarded and punished according to his own personal deserts, as Christ plainly teaches, then neither justice nor mercy can demand of God that He should place all men on the same level as to their privileges and opportunities. Ile has not done so. Ile claims the right as a Sovereign to bestow this gift of eternal life, the highest of all His gifts, as He bestows all other gifts, upon whom He pleases and in the way He pleases and no one has any good ground for complaint. Is it not lawful for Me to do what I will with Mine own." "Is thine eye evil because I am good?" " I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heavens were shut three years and six months, when great famine was throughout the land; but unto none of these was Elias sent, but only unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Elijah the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian."
3 By the goodness of God, by his never-dying love, and by the assurance of His providing care for all who put their trust in Him and try to do His will. The parables of the lost piece of silver, and the prodigal son are to this effect. "Likewise I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repented." "Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls." "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are My friends if ye do whatsoever I command you." "I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." "If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it." "Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in Me. 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. I will come again and receive you unto Myself, that where I am there ye may be also." "These things have I spoken unto you that you might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." " Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Behold the birds of heaven! They sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are ye not of much more value than they? Your heavenly Father knows that ye have need of all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you."
4 By the transient and unsatisfying nature of all temporal things and their insignificance in comparison with the things of His everlasting kingdom. It were better to suffer the loss of everything on earth than to fail of the life to come. "Wherefore if thy hand or foot offend [or hinder] thee cut them off, and cast them from thee; if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. It is better for thee to enter into life (els ten zoen) with one eye than having two eyes to be cast into the Gehenna of fire" to be utterly consumed. "What shall it profit a man, though he gain the whole world, and lose his own (psuche) life, or what shall he give in exchange for his life?" For when that is gone there is nothing for him either to enjoy or suffer. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth consume, and where thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal." "Make to yourselves friends out of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when it shall fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations." " Verily, I say unto you, there is no man that has left home, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children for the kingdom of God's sake, who shall not receive manifold more in this present time and in the world [or rather "endless age," en to aioni] to come, life everlasting." "Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven."
Let no one make the mistake of supposing that the eternal life which our Lord gives to His people is the reward here and elsewhere spoken of. Eternal life is the free gift of His grace. It cannot be bought or earned or merited by anyone; but in addition to this every child of His kingdom is to be rewarded just in proportion to the measure of his faithfulness. So it is with the penalties that will be inflicted upon the unsaved. Death is the common lot of all men, whatever their moral character may have been, but in addition to all this, there are many stripes and few stripes to be inflicted according to the ill deserts of everyone. Alas, for those who have rejected His overtures of love and grace; "It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for them."
5 By the hazard of delay; by the liability to failure; by the bitter disappointments that await those who have entertained false hopes, and especially the fearful destruction that shall come upon all the rejectors of His Gospel. He urges upon all men to seek first the kingdom of God. Many of the passages already cited bear on this point. Also not a few of the parables, such as the parables of the rich fool; the ten virgins; the barren tree; the marriage of the king's son; the man who founded his house on the sand, etc. "Except your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." "There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth when ye shall see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out." "Except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish." " Whosoever shall fall upon this stone shall be broken; but on whosoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder." "Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul, but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna."
Though He does not answer any curious questions as to the comparative numbers of the saved and the lost; He does plainly teach us that there will be many, many sad failures and bitter disappointments at the last day. In reply to the inquiry, " Lord are there few that be saved?" He says, " Strive [agonize] to enter in at the strait gate; for many, I say unto you will seek to enter in and shall not be able." And again, " Enter ye in at the strait gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat. Because strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth to life, and few there be that find it."
When the Son of man shall come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit on the throne of His glory; and before Him shall be gathered all nations; and He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divided his sheep from the goats. . . . And these shall go away into everlasting punishment [the punishment of everlasting destruction], but the righteous into life eternal.
6 Finally, by the suddenness of His return to this earth, to put an end to the dispensation of grace, to raise the dead, to judge and destroy the wicked; and by the uncertainty as to the time of Ills coming. His teaching is very explicit as regards the fact and the object of His second coming; but He is silent as to the time. He comforts His disciples with the assurance that it is needful for Him to go away for a season, but that He will come again, and that He will send the Comforter to abide with them during the interval. "I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto Myself, that where I am there ye may be also." He likens Himself to a nobleman who went into a far country to receive a kingdom for himself, and on his return, having received the investiture, he will call his servants to a strict account for the manner in which they had executed their several trusts committed to them during his absence.
And as He sat upon the Mount of Olives, the disciples came unto Him privately saying, Tell us when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world? (age). But instead of giving them any definite answer, He only assured them that His coming would be with awful majesty and glory, that it would take the world by surprise, and that it became them to be in constant readiness. But he tells them, many false prophets shall rise and shall deceive many, and because iniquity shall abound the love of many shall wax cold, that this Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations, and then 8hall the end come. "As the lightning cometh forth from the east, and shineth even unto the west, so shall be the coming of the Son of man." " But of that day and of that hour knows no man, no not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." "Take heed, watch and pray, for ye know not when the time is. What I say unto you I say unto all, Watch ."
Again, just before his ascension His disciples asked Him, saying, "Lord wilt Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? And He said unto them, It is not for you to know the times and seasons which the Father hath put in His own power. . . . And when He had spoken these things, while they beheld He was taken up; and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as He went up, behold two men stood by them in white apparel who also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, who was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld Him going into heaven."
Dear Savior, we believe all thou hast said, and look for thy promised return with joyful expectation; and while, like faithful servants, we would wait and watch and labor and pray, as Thou hast bid us, we cling with longing hearts to the promise Thou Thyself hast given us, " Behold I come quickly," and daily respond with the beloved disciple, "Even so, come Lord Jesus."
For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain. But if I live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labor; yet what I shall choose, I wot not. For I am in a strait betwixt the two. having a desire to depart and to be with Christ; which is far better. Phil. 1: 21-23.
There are few passages of Scripture more frequently quoted — or rather, misquoted and misapplied — than this. It is the favorite text for funeral discourses, anti is inscribed upon innumerable tombstones, and repeated by religious teachers as the devout wish of Paul's heart, and the appropriate sentiment of every Christian heart, in view of death. "To die is gain" — "having an earnest desire to depart and to be with Christ which is far better." These are the words that are attributed to the apostle Paul; and when taken in the sense in which they were evidently uttered, they are every way creditable to his unselfish heart, and his supreme devotion to the service of Christ. But it may well be questioned whether the sentiment that has been put into them, in our version, and the sense in which they are generally taken, ever entered his mind, much less ever found any expression in any of his writings.
He is supposed to be considering the question, whether it would be better for himself, to continue his self-denying labors for Christ till he should be called to his reward in heaven, or to (lie now, and go at once to glory; and though perplexed in view of these two alternatives, he feels that it would be real gain to himself and far better, to die now and go immediately to his reward in heaven; and he actually most earnestly desired this.
It is true, our English version seems to sustain this view and, no doubt, the translators had this thought 213 in their own minds, and so they put it into the rendering of this passage. But I am persuaded that a more careful examination of the text in the original, and of the context will show, that the " gain ' he is here speaking of is not gain to himself, but to the cause of Christ, and the "departure" he is represented as desiring so earnestly, is not his own departure from life; but the departure —or rather the return, for this is what the word really signifies—of Christ. For this rendering is quite close to the original Greek, and in accord with the grammar of the language, and it harmonizes infinitely better with what he has just been saying, and with the character of the man, and indeed, with the letter and spirit of all his teachings, and with the teaching of the Scriptures generally.
This most affectionate and tender epistle to the Philippians was written while he was a prisoner at Rome. His life was in jeopardy, depending on the caprice of the Emperor. He knew not what would be the issue. But, instead of repining and complaining of his hard lot, he even exults and rejoices that his bonds bad been the occasion of making Christ more widely known throughout the palace, and elsewhere, and that the disciples of Christ, by his example, had been confirmed in their faith, and emboldened "to speak the word without fear."
Again, he rejoices that even the contentions that had sprung up among them, had contributed to the spread of the knowledge of the Gospel, and though his enemies had desired "to add affliction to his bonds" by their manner of preaching Christ, he still rejoiced and would rejoice that Christ was preached. Indeed he was so devoted to this one object of making Christ known to his fellowmen, that he had utterly lost sight of every other interest. He had entirely gone out of himself, and centered all his thoughts, hopes, desires and efforts in Christ. He was determined to know nothing else, nor did he, but Christ and Him crucified. He was full of joy in the assurance, that whatever might be his own lot, Christ would be honored, and in this he rejoiced. Hence he says, in the verse immediately preceding the passage under consideration: " According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but with all boldness, as always, so now also, Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life or by death." Mark the expression whether it be by life or by death. Then follows this utterance, which is but the repetition of the same sentiment in another form — Emoi gar to zen Christos, kai to apothanein kerdos: which literally translated is, " For me therefore to live, Christ, and to die, gain." This last word, kerdos which is here translated "gain" would better have been translated, benefit, advantage, profit. This is what it means; and then the idea would have been more clearly .expressed. But as it is, there is nothing in the text itself to show whether this gain or advantage or benefit is to accrue to himself, or to the cause of Christ; for the passage is very elliptical; but the context, and especially the preceding verse, most evidently shows that he is speaking of the benefit or gain, which his death by martyrdom would bring to the cause of Christ. For if his imprisonment and ill treatment had been made to contribute to this end, inasmuch as he had endured them with so much Christian fortitude and patience, how much more his heroic death as a martyr for Christ? Indeed this is his joyful assurance as he had just said —" Christ shall be magnified in my body whether it be by life or by death." Then he goes on to say: " For " or rather, " therefore" — for this little -word gar connects the two sentences —" therefore for me to live, and for me to die, in either case for Christ, would be gain or benefit." But even if it would be claimed that the grammatical construction requires that the word (kerdos) " gain " should attach itself to (emoi) Paul, rather than to Christ, still the idea is evidently the same in the mind of the apostle; the gain which he gets not for himself but for Christ, to whom he is entirely devoted—as when the servant said "Lord thy pound has gained ten pounds." It is impossible that Paul should drop down so suddenly from his supreme devotion to the cause in which he had so entirely lost sight of himself, as to speak of his own personal gain by dying, and to contrast this with what he might accomplish by continuing to live and labor for Christ. This would not be at all like this great apostle, indeed, it would be entirely out of harmony with what he had just been saying; nor can this selfish sentiment be found in the language he used, unless it be first injected into the passage by the reader; much less can we believe that after confessing that the advantages to the cause of Christ were so nearly balanced in his own mind, that he did not know which to choose. he actually did earnestly desire one of these same alternatives, because it would be gain, to him self Surely, he would not stultify himself by saying that he did not know which of two alternatives to choose, and then, in the next breath express his earnest preference for one of them? But this is just the inconsistency and folly that our common version of this verse charges upon him, thus: "For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better." The Greek word to ana-lusai here rendered " to depart " is composed of two words, and, again or back again, and hit') or lusai," to loosen," " to let go," "to cast off" as a ship the lines that hold her to the wharf—"to leave" either to go or to come; but with the prefix ana it means to leave any place for the purpose of returning or coming back. It may have the meaning of " depart," but the prefix ana gives it the sense of again, that is to depart again, or rather to come back or return. Let it he observed also, that the only other place in which this word analusai occurs in the Scriptures, is in Luke 12:36, and here our translators have rendered it " return ": " Let your loins be girded about and your lights be burning; and ye yourselves like unto men that wait for their Lord, when he will RETURN [ana-lusei] from the wedding."
There is no reason whatever why this word should not have had the same rendering — " return " in this passage, but that our translators had another idea in their own minds. They thought Paul believed, as they themselves did, that on dying a Christian goes immediately to Christ, and enters at once into heavenly glory, and that this was the gain Paul was thinking of; and hence, they make him say he has a " desire to depart and be with Christ which is far better." And so they not only make him contradict himself,—for he has just said he did not know which to choose, — but they put a forced meaning into this word ana-lusai, which actually means "return," and which they have so translated in the only other place where it occurs. This word is in the infinitive mood and it is used as a noun: (eis, to, analusai) and is the object of the preposition (eis) "for," and should be rendered " having a desire for The Return." This was the great object of desire and of expectation of all the early disciples, and of which Paul often speaks —His coming in glory and power to set up His kingdom on the earth, to complete the work which He had only inaugurated by Ilis first coming— His second Advent, to raise the saints who were sleeping in death, to change those who were living, to judge the world and purify it by the utter destruction of Satan and all his hosts, and to begin the everlasting reign of righteousness and peace, which had been so fully promised to them.
But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others, which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him. For this I say unto you, by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then, we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord. This is what Paul means in the passage we are considering by THE RETURN, and THE BEING - (einai, another word in the infinitive used as a noun,) with the Lord, which is far better. Far better than what? Far better than either of the alternatives, between which he did not know which to choose. This is evidently a third object. It is a side thought, introduced by way of parenthesis— a practice so common to the apostle —and then leaving it, he goes on with the main current of his letter, and tells them how confident he is that he will be spared to them "for the furtherance of their joy."
But if anyone should insist that analusai should be rendered departure — Be it so, but we must still believe that the departure of which Paul speaks is not a departure by death, but by rapture at the coming of Christ for which they were all waiting.
What if the apostles and primitive disciples were in error respecting the time of our Lord's return, and supposed it might occur in their day? It was not an injurious error. Indeed it served to keep them active and vigilant in their Master's service, and to cheer and comfort them in their trials. Would that the same expectation had been kept alive in every subsequent age—and especially, that this same expectation and hope were more operative at the present day —for surely, everything concurs to assure us that this long expected—long delayed consummation, must be near, very near at hand. But this mistake of these early disciples was not so great a mistake even with regard to its nearness, as may appear to us, who look back upon them from this age, and count the generations that have come and gone since their day. For the lapse of time is as nothing to those who are sleeping in their graves. To those who fall asleep in Jesus, the very next event of which they are conscious—if I correctly understand the teachings of Scripture—is the coming of the Lord, and we shall all see Him together. We are expressly told in the passage just cited, that those who are alive shall not have any advantage of those who are asleep —and conversely, those who are asleep shall not prevent those who are alive. We all shall be caught up together in the clouds to meet Him in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words."
We are not to comfort each other—with the assurance that our deceased friends go immediately into their promised inheritance, and beguile ourselves with the thought that those who have gone before us, are now rejoicing in the full possession of eternal glory, and that death is the gate by which we enter one after another into heavenly bliss, in the presence of our Lord,—or rather that death is the kind messenger that Jesus sends to call us to himself. I find no such teaching in the Scriptures, though our hymn-books are full of it. Death is everywhere represented as an enemy, the king of terrors, the great enemy. But it is indeed the last enemy that we have to encounter. Death has been conquered by Him in whom we trust. " The sting of death which is sin " is gone already, He can do us no real harm, nor when our Lord shall come to call us can he hold us any longer in his power. But it is only " when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, that we shall appear with Him in glory" — not before. "There is indeed, laid up for ns a crown of righteousness, which the Lord the righteous Judge shall give to us at that day, and not to us only, but unto all them also that love His appearing."
Safe in His keeping, we can well afford to wait in peaceful unconscious sleep, till the place He has gone to prepare for us, is ready for our occupancy. For He says, " Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in Me. 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. And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am there ye may be also."
In view of these passages, and of others I might quote, and of the reasons I have given, I cannot but think that this is the true understanding of the text under consideration. Indeed, when I see how this construction is required to make it harmonize with the language and sentiment of the context, as well as with the spirit and character of the apostle, I cannot put any other construction upon it. Let us again consider the circumstances of the case. Paul writes this epistle to comfort and encourage the hearts of his dear friends at Philippi, who had expressed such concern for him, and had sympathized so deeply with him in the trials that had come upon him, and in the danger to which he was now exposed. He tells them, that, so far from being cast down, he exults and rejoices that all these troubles had been made to contribute to the furtherance of the gospel, and the confirmation of the faith of the disciples at Rome: and he felt assured that whatever might be the issue to himself personally, Christ would be magnified in his " body, whether it be by life or by death," and that if bis life should be spared, it would be for Christ that he would live and labor; and that if he should be put to death, his martyrdom would still operate to bring gain or advantage to the same cause. So that he really did not know which to choose—nor did he choose—but there was one thing he did earnestly desire — the return of his Lord, which would be far better than either.
I know that those who hold to the very popular notion that dying saints do not wait in sleep for Christ to come and call them, as He promises, but that they go themselves at once, into His presence and to their reward in heaven, will object strenuously to the rendering I have given. For this text, as it is commonly rendered, seems to confirm their view. Indeed it is the one main support of their doctrine. It would be difficult for them to make out a plausible argument for their doctrine without it. It is quite natural that they should be loth to give it up.
But if they will for a moment consider how unworthy and inconsistent is the sentiment they attribute to the apostle Paul, how out of character it is with his whole manner of life, and how it conflicts with what he is saying and even makes him contradict and stultify himself, by declaring that he did not know which of two alternatives to choose, and then immediately expressing his earnest desire for one of them, I think they will be constrained to admit —however reluctant they may be to do it, that the rendering I offer them, is no doubt, the one that should be preferred and adopted.
Philadelphia, Pa., September, 1885.
Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead? If the dead rise not at an, why are they then baptized for the dead? 1 Cor. 15: 29.
This has usually been regarded as one of the most difficult passages in the New Testament. Adam Clarke says it is the most difficult. Barnes- says, "There is perhaps no passage in the New Testament in respect to which there has been a greater variety of interpretations than this." The more common view is that the apostle here refers to the practice of vicarious baptism,— that of a living person, in behalf of one who had died unbaptized. The English rendering would seem to favor this view. This may indeed be true; but there is no evidence that any such practice existed so early as the time when this epistle was written, though it did afterward obtain to some extent. It is however, more probable that this practice had its origin in a subsequent age, in a false construction of this very passage. Others with more reason,— correcting the text,— think it means " baptized for the dead one," or for their faith in the dead. one, referring to Christ. Others say it refers to the custom of washing the dead body previous to its burial, as a kind of preparation for the resurrection; others think the reference here is to the calamities, trials, and sufferings of which the apostle again speaks in the next verse, to which the early disciples were exposed on account of their faith in Christ,— in which sense the word baptized is sometimes used,—and others still, think the passage is elliptical, and should be understood as meaning — baptized for their faith in the resurrection of the dead, which was indeed the great object of their faith. This idea is no doubt included in the passage; but still, this is hardly sufficient to explain the reason why special reference should here be made to the rite of baptism, if it signifies nothing more than what is now commonly supposed, and if any mode of applying water to the subject answers the end of its administration. Why should any reference at all be made to the rite of Baptism? What relation has it to the subject under consideration — the Resurrection?
It seems to me that this allusion has a deeper significance than any that is usually attached to it, and that it has been bidden by false notions of the meaning and purport of this rite of baptism. The apostle’s meaning was no doubt clearly understood by those whom he was addressing; and I cannot but think it will be equally clear to any one, and the force and pertinency of his argument drawn from this rite will be seen, when he comes to apprehend as they did, the real object and meaning of this act of baptism, namely:— to symbolize and commemorate the very truth for which he is arguing.
After having been long denied and most earnestly disputed by the great majority of the Christian church —for reasons which I will soon notice—it has now come to be very generally conceded by competent scholars of all denominations — though still quite reluctantly by some of them—that the radical signification of the word baptism is immersion or submersion, and that such was the primitive form of administering this rite.
It is not needful to stop here to argue this point; for it is so generally admitted by Christian scholars of the present day as to render it quite unnecessary. It ought also to be equally evident, that no ceremonial could be instituted that would more truly symbolize and set forth the great facts of death, burial, and resurrection than this rite; and that such was its primary design would seem to be the express teaching of the Scriptures. Indeed, it is hardly possible to understand or explain such passages as the following in any other sense: — Know ye not that so many of you as were baptized into Jesus Christ, were baptized into His death? Therefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death; that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. Rom. 8: 3, 4.
Buried with Him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with Him, through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised Him from the dead. Col. 2: 12.
The like figure whereunto even baptism doth not save us — not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God—by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. 1 Pet. 2:21.
Now when one comes to recognize the real significancy and design of this ceremonial act, the meaning of the text becomes clear enough, and the force and point of the apostle's allusion become at once apparent. A quarter of a century had elapsed, almost an entire generation had passed away since the great event of which he is speaking had taken place. He is not only endeavoring to impress those to whom he writes with the transcendent importance of that resurrection, as the foundation of all their Christian hopes for a life to come, and that this was the very substance of the faith they had professed, but also to establish in their minds the fact itself upon which their hopes were founded, beyond any possibility of doubt. They were hoping for that Eternal life which Christ had promised to all who trust in Him, because He had died for their offenses and had risen again for their justification, and this was the only ground of their hope of rising again to live with Him in His Everlasting kingdom. This rite then, which Christ Himself had instituted, not only serves to establish and commemorate the fact of His death and resurrection, but it sets vividly before their eyes the real ground and reason for their hope and the manner of its realization — by going down into death and rising again to that new life which He is pledged to give them. Paul's argument is what may be called the reductio ad absurdum. It is as though he had said, Consider why this ordinance was instituted, what it commemorates, and what it symbolizes, and you need no other proof of the doctrine I am endeavoring to establish. Indeed, there is no other intelligible reason why such a peculiar religious practice should have? been established, but to commemorate the event of which it speaks so plainly in its very form. It is without significance or meaning unless it be associated with this event, nor can you give any intelligible reason why you submit to it—in making a profession of your faith — (either for yourselves or for others who have died without baptism — if indeed such were their practice at this time) but to signify the ground' of your hope for a resurrection from the dead and for the life everlasting.
It seems to me that the mischievous influences of that Grecian philosophy, that afterward came into the Christian church, in perverting the faith of the disciples; in throwing doubt upon some of the most precious doctrines of the Gospel; in changing the meaning and form of its ordinances, and obscuring the sense of some of its plainest passages, of which we have so many sad examples in these modern times, is here most painfully evident.
That philosophy teaches that death, actual death, is not the penalty of sin, that man does not, will not, cannot die.
There is no death; what seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian
Whose portals we call death.
Death it assures us is one of the natural steps in the progressive development of man into a higher stage of being which is to be eternal. Hence there is no such resurrection as the language of Scripture seems to imply, and as the immediate and earlier disciples most certainly expected. That which we call " the resurrection " — for the word which occupies so prominent a place in the Gospel, and is of so frequent occurrence, must have some meaning given to it —. "means simply and only the casting off this mortal body, and the natural rising of the spirit, freed front its earthly encumbrance, into its own true sphere in the life beyond." "The resurrection of Christ is, in no sense whatever, the procuring cause of our rising. It only illustrates the fact and manner of our resurrection."
No wonder then, that this grand central doctrine of the Gospel, of which the apostle Paul made so much, and on which the early disciples rested all their hopes for the life to come, Ins now fallen into such insignificance as a Christian doctrine, and is so rarely made the theme of discourse in our churches.
But what shall be done with this rite of baptism which was instituted to keep in memory and emphasize this cardinal doctrine, and which, by its form, so evidently teaches it? The rite itself — or rather some rite under the name of baptism—may not be omitted. for it is too plainly enjoined, to be set aside entirely, but its testimony to the truth may be hushed by changing its form and meaning. In their view it is no longer needed as a symbol of death on account of sin and a resurrection to a new life through Christ; it means only our need of purification, through the operation of the Holy Spirit on our hearts; and in order to do this, any method of applying water to the body will answer all the purposes of its institution.
And so this heathen philosophy-, which is so contrary to the Gospel, in its spirit and teaching— with respect to the nature and destiny of man and the fatal effect of sin, and the necessity for redemption from death and a resurrection from its power by a divine Savior in order to the eternal life for which he hopes—by effecting such a change in the import and form of this ordinance—and by putting a new meaning into such crucial words of Scripture, as life, cleat/?, destruction, redemption, when predicted of man—has contrived to force the Word of God to bear an unwilling testimony to doctrines that are opposed to its spirit, and the plain letter of its teaching. But in so doing, it has brought reproach upon the character of the Deity we worship, and represented our heavenly Father as very much like the vengeful, cruel, pitiless gods of the heathen. It has taken from the head of our Savior, His chief crown of glory, as the Source and Giver of our eternal life. It has degraded the most distinguishing, glorious, cheering doctrine of our faith into a myth with little meaning or power. It has thrown its dark shadow over the whole system of evangelical faith, and introduced infinite confusion into the Divine Word, and rendered many of its plainest and most important utterances seemingly contradictory, or at best mysterious, ambiguous, and inexplicable.
I verily believe that this pagan philosophy of an eternal life to come without a Savior, has done more to corrupt the faith of the Christian church, to perplex the minds of true disciples, to mystify the teachings of Scripture and to weaken the power of the glorious Gospel than all other influences combined.
Nor can one get any true and satisfactory view of Him whom he would love and worship as his heavenly Father, or see the glory that shines on the face of His Son our Savior, or feel " the power of His resurrection," as the early disciples felt it, or understand the teachings of His Word in all their fulness and beauty until he comes out from under its baleful shadow, and returns to "the faith once delivered to the saints."
When viewed in the light of the Gospel as preached by Christ Himself and His disciples, this distinguishing Gospel ordinance, which is the symbol of our faith, is full of beauty and meaning, and the text we have been considering which alludes to it, and a multitude of other passages which have been rendered obscure only by a false philosophy, become self-luminous and require no explanation to make them plainer.
Philadelphia, Pa., Feb. 1885.
Accepting, without controversy, the views commonly called orthodox, concerning the existence and personality of Satan and the host of evil spirits that are associated with him, and using this title generically for the sake of convenience, as is usually done, we naturally inquire what is to be the future destiny of Satan? Will he live forever, or will he be destroyed? That he has been already destroyed by sin, in his moral nature, and that there is no possible hope of his recovery, we are well assured. Is his ruined, wretched life to be perpetuated without end, or is there a further and more complete destruction awaiting him?
We are aware that to many this is a startling question. Their suspicion is at once excited against any one who raises it. They do not consider it to be an open question. With them it is as fixed, if not as fundamental, a doctrine of belief, that Satan is doomed to an interminable existence, as that Christ Himself will exist forever. They freely admit that there was a time when he did not exist, even as a holy angel; but now that he has come into being, though he has fallen irrecoverably from the purity and blessedness of his original estate, and forfeited everything worth living for, he has not forfeited life itself — he cannot forfeit it! As his restoration to holiness is hopeless, they think his exit from life equally hopeless. The time never will come, nor can come, in all the cycles of the future, when he shall cease to be the same miserable, ruined fiend he now is! In him evil had a beginning, but in him it shall never have an end; nor, whatever changes may occur, shall it cease to mar the beauty and completeness of the universe into which he introduced it! Sin has the power to destroy everything else it touches; but the life of the creature into whom it enters it cannot destroy! The blight and misery it brings have no tendency to extinguish the light of life in the soul of its miserable victim! It separates from God, the source of all life; it works disorganization and ruin, and when " finished bringeth forth death "; that is, the death of everything but life — in other words, eternal sin and misery!
They dare not, even in their thoughts, look forward to the time — however much they might desire it —when Satan and all his works shall be totally destroyed, and when all the evil that now exists shall be transmuted into good, or eradicated from the universe, and God shall be able again, as in the beginning, to pronounce everything very good. Such a consummation is too glorious to be hoped for, or thought of. Even God, who made Satan, has no power to unmake him; or, if He has, He will never exercise it! He can defeat him; He can bind him; He can imprison him; He can torment him forever. All this He will do; but He cannot, or will not, put an end to his miserable life! Christ proposed to himself (in coming to earth to set up His kingdom) no such achievement as the utter destruction of Satan and all his works, except in a figurative sense! He only proposed to overcome him, and wrest from his grasp as large a portion of his prey as possible, and then to cast him, with the remainder of his deluded victims — like so many wild beasts or raving maniacs— into the bottomless pit, and pour out upon them the vials of His wrath forever; while He gathers all whom He has redeemed and rescued into the bright realms of glory, where, with the angels who have kept their allegiance, they shall praise Him as their deliverer and king, forever and ever! And He shall " see of the travail of His soul, and be satisfied!" Such they believe to be the glorious consummation promised and provided for in the Gospel of Christ.
But what if we shall find in the Word of God the assurance of a victory yet more complete, and a consummation more glorious than this? Do we dishonor God, or discredit the work of Christ, or tarnish the luster of the Gospel, if we believe it? Is our fidelity to the truth to be suspected, because we believe it more literally and fully, and find even more to hope for and pray for in the promises of our glorious Redeemer, than many others who hold them with us in common?
As we read and understand the Word of God, the popular view concerning this conflict between Christ and Satan, and the final victory He shall achieve, comes infinitely short of the truth. The popular notion, that attributes to Satan an immortality like that of Christ " who only hath immortality"— that contemplates him as a dethroned monarch occupying, after his defeat, a certain realm partitioned off from God's otherwise universal dominions, still in rebellion, holding on to a portion of his ill-gotten spoils, and rioting and raging with the horde of his miserable subjects, so long as God and heaven endure—is, we humbly think, a sad perversion of the truth.
This doctrine has been long and extensively held. Our fathers believed and taught it. It is the doctrine of the Romish Church. It was the doctrine of the Dark Ages. But we cannot trace it back to Christ and His apostles, and to their teaching in the Scriptures. The Word of God tells us very explicitly that Jesus Christ has it in His power and in His purpose, not merely to defeat and subjugate Satan, but to destroy him and all his works, utterly and forever; that the evil which now exists as the fruit of his malice, whether real or apparent, is but transient. It had a beginning, and it shall have an end. It shall not remain forever, to mar the perfection and glory of the universe. It is not necessarily an integral and permanent part of it. When it shall have served its purpose, it will not be garnered like the good seed, but consumed like the chaff. God has already prepared an inextinguishable, all-consuming fire for the purpose not of simply tormenting Satan and all his hosts, though this will be incidental, but, of destroying them. And the day is coming that shall burn them up, and leave neither root nor branch.
The object for which Christ came was not simply to get Satan under lock and key — where he can be held forever, so that he can do no more mischief, only rage and curse and suffer eternally — but that He might exterminate him. And we believe, as fully as we believe in the divine promises, that the time is coming when the Lord shall have so perfectly accomplished His object, that there shall be found no place for the devil or any of his persistent followers, in any portion of God's universal dominions. There shall be not two folds, but "one fold and one Shepherd." "Every knee shall bow, of things in heaven and things in earth and things under the earth, and every tongue shall confess Him Lord, to the glory of God the Father." This lower world into which Satan and his associates in rebellion were cast from heaven, and which has been the theater of this conflict between Christ and His enemies, shall be " burned up," and with it, death and hell and all their guilty crew. In that new heaven and new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, that shall follow, " there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away."
The doctrine of the endless existence of Satan needs to be proved. It is not enough to say that it is very generally believed. This may entitle it to our respectful consideration; but this affords no solid ground even for our own belief — certainly, it gives us no warrant for imposing it upon others. The general prevalence of any belief in matters of doctrine may warrant the supposition that there is some evidence for it, but it is not the evidence itself. The opinion of no matter how many persons, is no better than the opinion of one person, if it rest on no other foundation than the fact that it is the popular belief. Ten thousand men, holding on to each other, can no more stand on nothing than one solitary individual. It is not then, how general is this belief that Satan will live forever? but what are the grounds for this belief? which is the subject of present inquiry.
In order to prove that Satan will live forever, one must establish either one of these two positions: (1) that neither God nor any other power exists, or can exist, that is able to destroy his life; or (2) that, though there may be such a power, it will never be exercised to destroy his life. These are the only two alternatives that are supposable by which this doctrine can be maintained.
If God gave to Satan, when He created him, an absolute, indefeasible, inextinguishable life, which maintains itself independent of God and every possible contingency —if, in short, God gave to him, as to Jesus Christ, to have life in Himself," then of course he will, like Christ, live forever, and for the same reason. But if this position cannot be established, then it will be necessary to show, at least, that either Reason or Scripture teaches us that God never will take from Satan the life which He originally gave him, nor withdraw His sustaining power and suffer him to expire, nor allow him to destroy himself, but will perpetuate that life so long as He Himself shall live.
Let us examine these two alternatives in their order:
1 Did God give to Satan, in his creation, an absolute, necessary immortality—an unconditional, inalienable, indestructible life, like His own?
Every theist must admit that self-existence is an attribute of Deity, and is incommunicable in its very nature; for existence that is communicable is not self-existence. It cannot, therefore, possibly be an attribute of any creature. God is the only Being, strictly speaking, in the universe; or rather, it is to the Being who is self-existent that we give the name of God. We cannot go higher than this. It is this attribute of self-existence more than any other that constitutes Him what He is. It is this that gives Him His preeminence. Everything else is from Him and dependent upon him. He is the source and fountain of life to all His creatures, "seeing He giveth to all, life and breath and all things." This is His name, JEHOVAH, which means self-existence. It is by this name, I Am that I Am, that He makes Himself known to His creatures. This is the attribute which He emphasizes and insists on more than any other. It includes all of His other attributes. He is the Living God; the Everlasting God; the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the Ending, which is, which was, and which is to come, the Almighty. All the life in the universe flows out from Him and centers in Him —not merely such life in its lower forms and manifestations as is continually coming and going at His bidding, which we call transient and ephemeral, but life in the very highest manifestations known to us. Our Adamic life, or the natural life of the soul, is His breath, breathed into us. Apart from God, we have no life at all. That higher life, the spiritual life, called also " eternal life," which He gives to His people only by a new birth, is from Him, and is ours only as we live in Him and are united to Him, as the branch is united to the vine. It is perpetuated, not because it is independent and self-perpetuating, but because He has guaranteed its perpetuity. Gabriel is as dependent on God for his life, and for its continuance, as the insect of a day. To suppose otherwise would be to invest him with the highest attribute of Deity, and to make him a god at once, independent of his maker.
If Satan possesses an absolute and necessary existence, then he is not only like God, but equal to God in the most essential attribute of his nature — that of self-existence— and we have two gods, one good and the other bad, both alike immortal in their natures; indeed, we have as many gods, both good and bad, as there are such beings. This brings us at once into the depths of Polytheism. This was the very doctrine which Satan himself taught to our first parents in their temptation: Ye shall not surely die — Ye shall be as gods—the doctrine which he has perpetuated with respect to himself and to his followers, in spite of God's Word to the contrary, to the present hour.
Ye shall not surely die; ye shall live forever; assert your independence; defy His power; He cannot execute upon you the death He has threatened; He doth know that you are immortal; we all have within us the power of an endless life. This is Plato's doctrine, which has overlaid and perverted the most evident teachings of God's Word on this subject. It is the very pivot on which his philosophy turns. " Man is a being, not a creature. There never was a time when he began to be, and, of course, there never will come a time when he shall cease to be." In this Plato was more logical and consistent than his followers. For self-existence implies an eternity of being both in the past and in the future. They both go together and hang upon each other. If we accept one, we must accept the other also; if we reject one, we must for the same reason reject the other also. And yet nothing is more common than to hear men talking of themselves and of all living creatures above them in the scale of life, whether good or bad, as immortal and indestructible by nature; as having been made so, in the act of their creation; or, in other words, as having been constituted beings, to distinguish the life that is in them from the lower forms of life in creation. The angels above them are beings; the devils also are beings. In this sense, brutes are not beings, for they hold their lives subject to the will of God. But man, and angels, and devils are beings, living by a certain vis vita, that was given to them in their creation, and will continue of necessity to live to all eternity. But how can one be a creature and a being, in the absolute sense of this word, at the same time? There is no irreverence in saying that the Divine Power could not create such a being. The terms are contradictory.
Sensible men have generally given up the idea of self-motion, or perpetual motion as it is called in physics. It is time that the cognate doctrine of life self-originated and self-perpetuated, in metaphysics, were abandoned also.
Spirits may be invested with power over matter as supernatural agents, by their Creator, and with power over inferior spirits; but they cannot have power either to originate their own lives, or to perpetuate them independently of their Creator. Every created life is a dependent life. It cannot possibly be anything else. If dependent, then conditional also; for the one implies the other.
Neither to Adam in his innocence, nor to Satan as a holy angel, did God give any other life than this; and surely by their fall they have not put themselves beyond the reach of his almighty power. If Satan, or any other fallen creature, shall actually live forever, it will not be because he has eternal life abiding in him, nor because he has acquired it by sinning; but because the Being who created him, and upon whom he depends for life and breath and all things, wills to keep him alive forever.
This is the alternative to which all who assert the endless existence of Satan must come, for there is no other ground upon which they can stand for a moment, than this: That it is the will and purpose of God, by his almighty power, to uphold, sustain, and perpetuate the devil's miserable life so long as Re himself shall live.
II Have we any good reason to believe that it is the will and purpose of God to keep Satan alive forever p 10 ll the knowledge we can have on the subject is what Reason and Revelation give us.
1 Reason, apart from Revelation, cannot positively answer this question. We believe that the good angels will live forever, not because they are absolutely and unconditionally immortal; for such an immortality, as we have shown, is the attribute of God alone, " who only has immortality"; nor because they are so highly exalted in the scale of existence; for as creatures they are infinitely beneath their Creator who only is self-existent and eternal; nor because they are spirits without bodies — if such be the case — or with spiritual bodies composed of matter infinitely attenuated. Neither do we believe in their endless existence precisely on the same grounds that we believe in the eternal life of the glorified saints, for to the saints eternal life is given by Christ, and guaranteed so positively, and with such frequency of reiteration throughout the Gospel, that no believer in that Gospel can doubt it. (Perhaps, however, the words of our Lord — Luke 20: 36, " Neither can they die any more, for they are equal to the angels" — ought to be understood as positively asserting the immortality of the angels.) But we believe it because we have no reason to doubt it — because no intimation is given to us that their cycle of existence is a limited one — because we can find no reason why God should withdraw from them his sustaining power, and cut them off from life, so long as they continue in the normal state of holiness in which they were created.
And yet we are to remember that God does give life and take it away. He does create and destroy the work of His own hands, without making known to us the reasons for His conduct. All the living forms and organisms throughout this lower sphere are more or less transient. They come into existence at his call, fulfil their round, and then pass away forever, to give place to others that are also to die and be dissolved into their original elements; and the life that animated them returns to the source from which it came. Not that they are annihilated as to their constituent elements, or ever will be — for concerning this we know absolutely nothing, and ought to say nothing — but as individual organisms, they are dissolved, lose their identity, and pass away forever. They are destroyed.
We cannot look above and fathom the infinite depths of God's eternal being, and say what He has been doing throughout the infinite eternity of the past, nor what He will do throughout that which is to come; what worlds of sentient. creatures He may have created and destroyed before the creation of this world in which we have our short round of life; nor what worlds He will create after this shall have been destroyed. Nor do we know the boundaries of the universe as it now exists; what worlds and systems of worlds beyond this little earth and the system of which it is a part; what ranks and orders of creatures; or how high or how low they may be in the scale of life, and what may be the conditions of their existence. But so far as we do know, He has appointed to every creature a certain round or cycle for it to fulfil. But to none of His creatures has He given an unconditional and indestructible existence, even in its appointed cycle. However ephemeral or transient its natural life may be, it must keep within its sphere. Its normal condition must be maintained, or it comes to an unnatural and premature end.
We have every reason to believe that this is a universal law of life for all God's creatures, from the lowest to the highest. What if the angelic cycle was designed to be an unending cycle Hike His own, never to be completed — though it could not be like His own in having no beginning—must not these high and holy creatures preserve their normal condition in order to live forever? Did God give to them, alone of all His creatures, an unconditional right and power to live as long as He lives? The supposition is absurd. He gave to man in His original creation the hope of an eternal career, but only in the way of obedience. So far from giving him any guaranty that his life would be perpetuated, He actually conditioned its perpetuity upon his maintaining his normal state of purity. If he fell from it, premature and certain death was to be the result.
The mysterious tree of life, by which man's life was guaranteed or perpetuated, was accessible to him only on this condition. The alternative was, Thou shalt surely die; not thy body—thou thyself shalt surely die; not figuratively, but actually. Not, thou shalt be miserable forever; but be blotted out of life. Misery is the necessary consequence of sinning; but it is only the precursor of that death to which it inevitably leads. Sin brings disorder and blight upon the soul, and when it is finished it bringeth forth death; not depravation, not wretchedness merely, but death. It is to the spiritual organism what mildew, or rot, or a cancer, or the leprosy —by which it is symbolized in the Scriptures —or any other disease unchecked, is to the physical organism. It brings it, sooner or later to certain destruction. The pain and anguish and despair that ensue, and precede this death are not the death itself, but its forerunners. It takes time for sin, like any other mortal disease, to complete its work of ruin; but when it is finished it bringeth forth death, and nothing less.
But in our case, there is still hope of an eternal life, for God has provided a ransom, and a remedy if applied in season. This eternal life, if we receive it at all, is not received from Adam—for in Adam all die—but from Christ "who only hath immortality." We are not born to immortality in our natural birth, but born to die. It is only by a new birth that we are born to life eternal. The one is transient; the other is imperishable, because it is the life of Christ in our souls. It is not the chief glory of Christ, that He brings holiness and happiness to an immortality already assured, but that He brings both eternal life and blessedness to the perishing soul.
Through what processes of trial and development the angels may have risen to their present exalted condition, or whether they were created, at first, the high and lofty creatures they now are, we know not. But we have no reason to suppose that they have been placed beyond the possible contingency—not of sinning, for some of them have fallen by sin, but—of reaping the legitimate fruits of sin in their death. Are they now too high and too spiritual in their natures to be subject to any such law? To which of the angels has God said at any time, as He said to Christ, Thy throne is for ever and ever? Is Satan so great a power in the universe, or so necessary to its integrity, or so exquisite a specimen of workmanship, that the Almighty cannot, or dare not destroy him? Shall he defy the Living God and trample upon His authority with the assurance that he can never forfeit his life? Lifting his hand to heaven shall he say like Jehovah himself, " I live forever?"
Has the Almighty Lawgiver enjoined it upon human governments to put their worst offenders to death — and is there no such thing as capital punishment under His higher government? Or is it true that Satan, as yet, has done nothing worthy of death? Or does the threatened penalty — "the soul that sinned it shall die" — mean imprisonment for life under torture? Is this what the sentence of death means under human tribunals? Is this the example He intended to give to human governments of the way in which to punish offenders?— an example which cruel tyrants in past ages have been too happy to plead, but which is everywhere discarded under the benign teachings of the Gospel? Has our glorious King and Lord no way to rid the universe of devils and demons? Can He only banish them to some dreary penal colony, where they shall suffer and rage forever? We think the Scriptures, rightly understood, give us higher views of the power, justice, and goodness of God.
2 But let us quit the domain of speculation, and inquire of God's word whether Satan will be permitted to live forever. That he is permitted to live after his fall, is evident. That he is permitted to exercise his malice upon the human race that had been created a little lower than the angels, and endowed with life conditioned upon their obedience, is equally evident. He would seem to have accomplished his purpose in dragging them down to ruin with himself. But God, who was able to cast him down from heaven, is able also to defeat his malice in this lower world, which he was permitted to enter, and to overrule his malice to the promotion of His own glory in the redemption of man, and in the more complete and utter destruction of Satan himself.
We have in the very opening of the Scriptures, in the scene where Satan is first introduced to our notice, a prophecy which would seem to be decisive of this whole question as to the doom that awaits him: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shall bruise his heel." (Gen. 3: 15.)
This prophecy, though mysterious and enigmatical when it was first uttered, is no longer so under the Gospel. It is universally, and, no doubt, truly understood to foretell the coming of Christ, as the seed of the woman, to bruise or rather to crush the head of the serpent, by which Satan is represented. Literally translated it is, "lie shall crush thee as to thy head." The heel is the least vital part of the body; it is farthest from the head. A wound in the heel may be severe; it may indeed lead on to death, if no remedy be applied; but it can be healed. But if the head be crushed, death is a sure consequence. A serpent may retain life and motion in his body and tail for a considerable time, even after his head has been crushed; it is popularly said, "till the sun goes down "; but the next morning will find him dead throughout the whole length of his body. Be that as it may, the injury is mortal. He cannot long survive it. Neither can Satan, "that old serpent," live forever after his head has been crushed. He may retain a certain degree of moribund life till the last sun has gone down upon the scene of conflict; but when the morning of eternal glory, so beautifully pictured in the Apocalypse, shall dawn upon the new Paradise, he will have passed away forever. There shall be no more Satan, nor sin, nor sorrow; "no more death," nor " pain," neither shall there be any need of the " light of the sun," for the whole rounded universe shall be bright with the glory of the fullness of "Him that filled all in all."
We understand the Scriptures to teach, most explicitly, that this is the very end for which Christ is born into the world as the seed of the woman, " to destroy the works of the devil"; and then, last of all, "to destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil "; and we believe that He will not fail of His purpose. Indeed, what other destruction can await the devil but the destruction of his life? The coming destruction that does not put an end to his life —miserably ruined creature that he is—is not destruction. To call it destruction, is to use words without meaning. He is already destroyed in all his moral nature—nothing of good remains to him to enjoy or hope for—nothing to fear, but the final execution of that dreaded penalty, long delayed but sure to fall "when the Lord shall consume him with the spirit of his mouth and destroy him with the brightness of his coming."
The demons, when confronted by Jesus in person, anticipating the doom that awaited them, cried out, " What have we to do with Thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? Are thou come hither to torment us before the time?" That is, to bring us to trial and punishment. And again, changing the expression but not the thought, " Art thou come to destroy us?" There will, no doubt, be torment in this destruction; they expect it; but torment alone is not destruction. The word torment is sometimes used as synonymous with punishment in the Scriptures, because it was customary to punish with torment, and the executioners of the law were also called tormentors. But when the penalty to be inflicted was death, however protracted the torments by which it was preceded, these tormentors or executioners did not stop short of the life of their victim.
Surely, " to be punished with everlasting destruction," cannot possibly mean nothing more than to be punished with everlasting torments. The process of destruction that is never completed, is not destruction. The act of dying that never issues in death, is not death. The devils suffer torment to a certain degree even now, in anticipation of the day of wrath to come. " They believe and tremble." "They are already in everlasting chains," that is, in chains which will hold them securely, as Peter and Jude both assure us, awaiting that dreadful day. Their range is limited to this earth and its immediate surroundings. They cannot go beyond the length of the chains that hold them surely "against the judgment of that great day," " when the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also, and the works that are therein shall be burned up." "Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness."
God has prepared an everlasting fire, an all-consuming, unquenchable fire, for the very purpose of destroying Satan and all his hosts;—not for the purpose of tormenting simply, as some would have it, much less, for the purpose of tormenting them eternally without destroying them. "For behold the day cometh that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch." (Mal. 4: 1.) It is the nature of fire to destroy, to devour, to consume. Indeed, scientifically speaking, fire is the effect of consumption. That fire is unquenchable which cannot be arrested or turned aside from its object, until that which it preys upon is completely consumed; then it dies out by the limitations of its very nature. It is not quenched. It is everlasting in the same sense in which many other things that are transient in their nature and have their issue in time, are said in the Scriptures to be everlasting and eternal; that is, they endure to the end of the age, eon, or cycle, under consideration. Every scholar knows that the words aion, aionas, eis ton aiona, etc., translated everlasting, eternal, forever, etc., do not express the idea of absolute endlessness;—certainly not, when applied to objects or processes that are naturally limited and transient. They are equally applicable to the affairs of this life and of the life to come. They are used in the Scriptures, and in the classics, as well as in common parlance at the present day, with a wide latitude of signification, and the extent of their application is not found in the words themselves, but in the nature of the thing spoken of. Even could it be shown that God's special agent of destruction is absolutely eternal like himself, we are far from showing that everything it is set to devour is eternal in the same sense. We have no authority for transferring these epithets from the former to the latter—much less for rendering these forcible expressions, by which the irresistible, all-consuming nature of the fire is indicated, in such a manner as to reverse their meaning and make them declare that the object upon which it feeds never will be consumed.
No one supposes that Isaiah, in chapter 66, meant to declare that the carcasses of the slain who had transgressed against God would never be consumed, when he said, "Their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched." He rather meant to declare how surely and completely these devouring agencies would do their dreadful and loathsome work. And so our Lord, who evidently quotes this passage, in setting forth in the most vivid manner the dreadful and certain destruction of Satan and his followers, meant to declare, not that they never would be destroyed or consumed, as many would have it, but that their destruction would be sure, awful, and complete.
The same prophet, foretelling the vengeance that would come upon the enemies of Zion and upon their land, says: "The streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch. It shall not be quenched night nor day: the smoke thereof shall go up forever." (Isa. 34: 9, 10.) But no one attaches the idea of absolute endlessness to this scene. No one supposes that this smoke shall continue to ascend after the earth itself shall be destroyed. Neither does any rational man suppose that the smoke of Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain, which " went up as the smoke of a furnace ' — which cities, Jude tells us, "are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire" — is yet ascending, and will continue to ascend to all eternity. The example of their suffering is all that is perpetuated without end. And yet, when these same figures of speech are used in the Apocalypse — a book which is confessedly altogether figurative —to set forth the doom of Satan as an individual, or as a personification of evil agencies, together with the beast and the false prophet, also personified symbols of the two great organized systems of error in the world, such expressions as "the smoke of their torment ascended up forever and ever," that is, ages upon ages, or throughout the ages, are taken literally to mean, not that they shall be fearfully destroyed, which is the evident intent of the writer, but just the opposite. The grave conclusion is reached that they shall never be destroyed, but continue to exist and be tormented when these ages upon ages have passed away, with all that makes up the present economy; and that the smoke of their torment shall be wafted across the bounds of time to obscure forever the glory of the world beyond. The fact is, all these scenes of conflict, of victory, and of destruction, have their theater and their issue upon this earth, and in this eon or cycle of time, and the words of the text here find their limitation. The forever that is mundane, is temporal and transient, and not the forever of the world beyond.
The inheritance of the Israelites; the servitude of their bondsmen; the priesthood of Aaron; the leprosy of Gehazi; the hills round about Jerusalem, etc., were all everlasting; they were to endure forever —that is, to the end of the dispensation or period spoken of. Such expressions are not intended to convey the idea of absolute endlessness, but of duration throughout the present dispensation, or at most to the end of the world. There is not the least particle of evidence to prove that the life of Satan or that of any of his victims will be perpetuated throughout the endless eons of the future. The theology that teaches it is not founded on the Word of God, but on the philosophy of Plato, and opposed to God's Word.
What scenes may be transpiring in all the many mansions of Our Father's house throughout the vast realms of the boundless universe that surrounds us on every side; what orders of creatures, like, or unlike ourselves, may occupy them; how He manifests His glory to them; and through what trials and temptations they may be led, to develop their virtue and to confirm them in holiness, we will not venture to guess. There may be one common, central heaven, where God has His peculiar throne, and into which He will gather His elect from the four quarters of His universal kingdom. Perhaps we might say that the Scriptures give us some hints that point to such a consummation. Be that as it may, there is no hint of one common, universal, antipodal hell, into which shall be garnered all the refuse of the universe for its eternal preservation in wretchedness and misery unending; but, on the contrary, the whole tenor, spirit, and letter of God's Word is opposed to this monstrous assumption. We have no reason, whatever, to suppose that the range of Satan and his evil angels extends beyond this earth, the theater for the display of his malice, and, also, for the grace and power of his Almighty conqueror, and to which his destiny is linked in its coming doom. The hell of which the Scriptures speak — whether the Sheol of the Old Testament, or the Hades or Gehenna of the New —has no extension beyond the limits of this earth and its immediate surroundings. It is altogether mundane, and is destined to be destroyed with the destruction of the earth; and when the new heavens and the new earth shall appear, it will have passed away forever, with all it contains. Not only Satan and all his hosts shall be cast into the all-devouring lake of fire, but Death and Hell shall be cast in after them, to be all consumed together. There shall be left " neither root nor branch," to disturb the peace or dim the glory of God's universal kingdom.
We discredit the power, and greatness, and glory of our Lord and Leader, and unduly exalt the power of Satan, his enemy, when we divide this universe, however unequally, between them, as between two contending chieftains, and give to each a perpetual and inalienable portion—to the one the kingdom of heaven, to the other the kingdom of hell!
The kingdom of Satan is a kingdom of darkness and death. It is essentially weak and transient, and destined to fade away before the kingdom of light and life that is to come. The One is as much superior to the other in its extension and durability, as it is in its perfection and glory. They are not to run parallel with each other to all eternity. The lifetime of Satan, however protracted it may be, throughout the ages of this world, bears no greater proportion to the lifetime of Him who hath immortality, who is and was and ever shall be, the Almighty, than time bears to eternity. He is, at best, but a fallen, miserable, dying creature, "whom the Lord shall consume with the Spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming."
That our crucified, risen, ascended Lord will come again to this earth, in great glory and power, is the common faith of all Christian believers. The number of Scripture texts bearing directly or indirectly on this point is very great. But the effort to arrange these numerous passages into any definite scheme, and to determine the precise time and manner of His coming, and the nature and order of events immediately connected with it, has given rise to a great variety of views.
I am free to confess that among all these views I have never yet seen any that I could accept in all its details as perfectly satisfactory, nor have I been able — though I have given this subject a great deal of study — to frame any scheme of events as connected with the second coming of our Lord, for myself, which I could hold with confidence, or propose to others as the true Scripture doctrine. I am inclined to think that it was never intended that we should have any such definite, formulated ideas of the precise time, order and character of these future events, as it is quite natural for us to desire, till they shall be made manifest by the events themselves.
But still, it ought to be evident to any diligent student of the Scriptures that a great many human conceits, crude and erroneous notions, such as are calculated to mislead those who accept them, and injuriously affect their Christian character, have been held and taught as the true doctrine of the second advent.
The expectation that evidently prevailed among many of the early Christians, of the immediate, personal coming of Christ, the lapse of eighteen centuries has shown not to have been well founded, however true their ideas may have been of the results of his coming.
The theory that has been more popular among Christians for the last two or three generations is—that under the influence of the ordinary means of grace and of missionary labor among the heathen, the world is gradually and surely to be reclaimed from the dominion of evil, and the reign of righteousness brought about—that it is continually growing better and better, and will continue to grow better till the millennium shall dawn, when the whole world shall enjoy a period of universal peace and love for at least one thousand years; at the end of which, after a brief outbreak of wickedness, Christ will appear in per sou to raise the dead, judge all men, and to take the righteous up into heaven where they shall enjoy everlasting blessedness, and to consign the wicked to hell where-they shall suffer unending misery.
This theory, which I received by tradition and by careful training in my early life, does not now, after earnest searching of God's word, seem to accord with its teaching—especially in many of its details. The extensive popularity it has enjoyed is due, partly to its simplicity and to the ease with which it is apprehended, and partly to the apparent support that has been given to it by an unwarranted construction of certain passages of Scripture. But there are many other passages with which it cannot be reconciled. Intelligent Christians are coming to see that it cannot be held without very essential modification.
But unfortunately a certain mystical, spiritualistic, ghostly theory of the nature of Christ's coming and kingdom, which, as it seems to me, does greater violence both to reason and to Scripture, is beginning to take its place. It has not a few earnest advocates and appears to be rapidly gaining adherents. It seems to take the real concrete meaning out of all those passages of Scripture relating to the coming and kingdom of Christ on earth, the resurrection of the dead, the awards of the day of judgment; and to substitute a certain, or rather uncertain, ethical, metaphorical, unreal sense. The last day has already come; our Lord is now here, and His reign on earth has begun; the resurrection, which is but the natural development of our life into the future state, is taking place with every one at death, the judgment is now in progress and will go on to the end of the world and the final consummation of all things. In regard to this theory, we can only now say in passing that we believe it to be eminently unscriptural, and fraught with mischief in a thousand ways to all who come under its in-fi nonce.
Not to notice other views which I believe to be erroneous, I must say with reference to the various views entertained by those usually termed Second Adventists, or more definitely Pre-millennarians, that while there is a substantial agreement in the main features of their scheme among them, they differ widely in regard to its details. I am not aware that anyone has been able to unite them all in any scheme of his own. I certainly have never seen any scheme that gained my full faith, nor have I been able to frame one for myself. I am glad that no one looks to me for light and instruction on the details of this question. I willingly leave the discussion of these various points to my brethren whose views in regard to them are more mature and well-defined, and address myself to the one special topic assigned me, upon which my views are more definite and positive— namely: Christ's coming as related to the sinner's doom.
First of all, in considering this topic, it ought to be clearly stated and kept in mind, that the chief object of the Divine economy over men is not to reward or punish them. That parent or tutor, to whom the nurture or instruction of others is committed, entertains a low and mistaken notion of the functions of his office, who supposes he is set over them expressly to govern them and reward and punish them as they shall deserve. The real end he should set before himself is infinitely higher than this. He is to develop their latent and inchoate faculties, and train them for higher and yet higher spheres of action and enjoyment, and the end he should set constantly before them is not the rewards they may gain or the penalties they may escape, at his hands. These are to be used only as incentives when necessary, to stimulate them to higher endeavors. They are to be regarded as quite subordinate and appropriate only to a lower and imperfect condition. At any rate, they should never be allowed to shut out of sight or divert the mind from the supreme end in view in their training. So is it under the paternal discipline of our Heavenly Father. The governmental aspect of the Divine economy under which we are placed in this world, with the rewards and penalties which sanction it, has been so continually and exclusively held before the mind, in our popular theology, that men very generally have come to look upon it in that aspect alone, and to think and feel that this is the ultimate end of God's government over us, and that man's chief object in life is to escape the penalties to which be was made liable by his birth, or has incurred himself, and gain the rewards that are offered him. Many even get no higher than to conceive of the punishment with which a man is threatened, and the way to avoid it. The great theological question with them is—punishment or no punishment hereafter. Hence the glorious Gospel of our blessed Lord and Savior is regarded only in the light of the alternative from which it offers to deliver them, and is made somehow in their minds under "orthodox " training, responsible for the doctrine of eternal misery; and even the doctrine of life eternal through Christ alone as we attempt to set it forth, is termed the doctrine of annihilation, as though the doom of the wicked were the chief thing to be considered.
But let us not so misunderstand the object of our creation nor the economy of government, discipline, and nurture under which we are placed, nor of the glorious Gospel he has given us. We are here as candidates for a higher destiny, a higher life, a higher sphere of action, and higher enjoyments than any that the world offers us. When man was created a little lower than the angels and crowned with glory and honor as the head of this lower world, and given dominion over the work s of God's hands on earth, and "over all sheep and oxen and the beasts of the field," God's benevolent purpose concerning him was not exhausted. His position — high as it was — was not the ultimate one for which he was designed; it was but a lower, subordinate stage from which he should rise to higher and yet higher posts of honor and glory. Though formed from the dust of the earth at first, he was made capable of something more than an earthly and physical life. It was God's purpose to lift him up into heavenly companionships, to transform him into a spiritual creature, to immortalize him by giving him His own peculiar life — as he should be made fit for this high destiny. " Howbeit, that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual."
But when man failed to maintain the high position, as a pure earthly creature, which was first given him, the Divine purpose was not frustrated. It was only confirmed and made more manifest. When listening to the persuasions of the tempter and turning away from his Maker, man cast in his lot with the animal world beneath him, and like them became a mortal, transitory creature, the infinite love of God and His eternal purpose shone forth only the more clearly in his redemption. "God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." "For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved." Christ himself assures us that " He came to seek and to save that which was lost" —" For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives but to save them."
This, then, was the object of his first advent to earth; to manifest the love of God toward us. and by his own death to redeem us from sin and death — not from suffering simply — but from death, absolute death, which is, and ever must be, the end of sin when it is finished; and by His resurrection to His own higher immortal life, to open the door for our resurrection to that same higher, spiritual, eternal life to which He has ascended; and by sending His Holy Spirit, to fit us for it, and assure us of it, if we shall only trust in Him.
The object of His second advent will be to gather in the harvest of His redeemed ones, to raise them from the sleep of death if they shall have passed away from earth, and to transform those that still remain into His own spiritual likeness, that we all in our spiritual and immortal bodies, like His own glorious body, may live and reign with Him for ever and ever.
There is love enough in the great heart of our Heavenly Father; there is merit enough in the blood of His Son our Savior; there is grace enough in the influences of the Divine Spirit, for the salvation of the whole human race. The invitation is ample, free and explicit —" Whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely." If any child of Adam shall fail of this great salvation, it shall not be through any defect in the love and mercy of God, or in the 'meagerness of the provision He has made, nor in the, impracticable nature of the conditions imposed — but in the perversity of man himself, in his lack of a desire for this life that is offered him and his refusal to be saved in the only way in which Divine love and grade can save him.
We would gladly believe that the overflowing love and infinite wisdom of God might yet find a way to rescue every lost child of Adam from the doom of death in which the whole human family are involved through sin. But we cannot so understand the Scriptures, nor do our observations of the lives and character of men, nor the analogies of nature, encourage us in entertaining so broad a hope. Hence we are constrained to consider this question of the final disposition of the unsaved.
There are many whose whole career through life is raised but a little if any above the brutes with which they consort. Indeed, there are those who are sunken deeper in sensuality than even the brutes. They live in a lower plane, with no aspirations after anything higher than the grossest sensual enjoyments, and the gratification of their selfish, brutal passions. Their desires, hopes, aims and efforts are all limited by time and sense, and confined to temporal and transitory things, and when they drop out of life, they are as little mourned or missed as the beasts that perish. It is true that to many of these the way of salvation through Christ has never been made known. But this fact renders them no better fitted for a life of holiness and of spiritual enjoyment hereafter, than those who had heard of a Savior and rejected Him, as many of them would, no doubt, yea, as many do under the Gospel.
I know there are those who would fain hope that there may be a second probation for some of these in an intermediate state, between death and the corning of Christ. But to me, neither science, nor sound reason, nor Scripture affords any good ground for such a hope. Indeed, we have yet to be assured that there is any such ghostly state of consciousness and freedom for human souls, apart from their bodies, as heathen philosophy has conceived of, and as the traditions of the papal church have imposed upon our Protestant theology. There are others who would hope that such a probation may be granted to some who die in their sins even after their resurrection, but I find nothing in the Scriptures to warrant such a hope.
The supreme importance which is given to the probation of this life; the tone of finality which is everywhere employed in the Word of God, when speaking of the issues of this life; forbid us to believe that there is any hope for those who have gone down to the dead unsaved. This is the chief reason why the heathen need the gospel — the grand motive for giving it to them now while there is hope—"if by any means we might save some." Without it they are perishing. By this word " perishing," as used in the Scriptures, is not meant that they are doomed to a state of eternal suffering hereafter, but to extinction and utter loss of all life.
No one would have thought of putting any other construction upon such plain scriptural terms as to die; to perish; to be destroyed; to be punished with everlasting destruction; were it not demanded by the false philosophy of Plato which has become our traditional theology, that the soul of man cannot die; cannot perish; cannot be destroyed. And then, when the enlightened Christian heart revolts against the shocking injustice of God in consigning these wretched mortals to an eternity of misery to whom no way of escape from their terrible doom has ever been made known, it naturally seeks for some way to relieve our Heavenly Father of the dreadful imputation this traditional dogma casts upon him, and finds relief in the hope of another probation in an intermediate state, or beyond it.
If men would be willing to accept, in the simplicity of their hearts, the plain teaching of the word of God as to the nature and destiny of man, there would be no need of the suggestion of this forlorn hope to justify the ways of God to man. If, instead of twisting it and perverting it to suit the requirements of a heathen philosophy, they would read it as it is, and believe what it says, the goodness, wisdom, and justice of God in His dealings with our fallen race would need no special pleas or extenuating apologies to commend Him to the love and confidence of all.
The children of Adam are represented in the Scriptures as mortal and transitory in their present condition, and this, through no fault of their own, however much it may have been the fault of their progenitor. Though in a state of absolute purity their life on earth might have been endlessly prolonged, it is now cut short, and cut short in mercy. For no sooner had man sinned than he was excluded from the tree of life lest he should eat and live forever, and so perpetuate his life in sin and misery! Apart from God, without that divine life in his soul which makes it possible or even desirable that he should live forever, he must die and die utterly. The race of men descended from Adam is a mortal, perishable, transitory race, as truly so as all the orders beneath them in the scale of being. Man in his present condition is born a mortal; and he dies as really as every other earthly living thing. He is an earthly creature, and unless he is lifted up by the grace of God into another state of being and endowed with a spiritual life he must pass away.
This condition privative into which every child of Adam is born, does not necessarily imply a desert of punishment, much less of the punishment of eternal misery. That all men may and do become sinners and ill-deserving according to the light they have, need not be questioned or denied. But all men must die whether they sin or not, and after death the judgment, according to the deeds done in the body.
How many of this mortal race are to be rescued by the grace of God from the death that comes upon all, and made heirs of an eternal life of blessedness; how many are to be cleansed from their own individual sins, aryl saved with an everlasting salvation; how many out of Christian lands, how many out of heathen lands, we will not undertake to guess.
When our Lord himself was asked this great question, "Are there few that be saved?" He replied, " Strive to enter in at the strait gate, for many, I say unto you shall seek to enter in arid shall not be able." There must, then, be a striving on the part of man, a seeking and a successful seeking, a concurrence of the human with the divine will in order to salvation.
Neither the Scripture promises nor our observation of the lives of men warrant us in believing that the life everlasting will be the final portion of all. That all men — both the good and the bad — will be raised from the dead and judged, believing as we do the testimony of God's Word, we cannot doubt; but those who have no moral fitness for another and a higher life cannot enter into it. The door will be, must be, shut against them. Their lamps will go out in darkness. It would be no mercy to them nor to the saved to perpetuate their miserable lives. " As many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law; and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law." Those who have lived and sinned in comparative ignorance, shall be beaten with few stripes, and they who have sinned against greater light and knowledge shall be beaten with many stripes. But whether the stripes be many or few, their disappointments, regrets, lamentations, whether great or small; whether prolonged or cut short; must end in their second death, from which there is no resurrection When our Lord shall come again, it will not be to proclaim a truce with His enemies and to make such terms with them as He can. It will not be to arrange for a partition of this world between Himself and Satan into two separate kingdoms, that each may henceforth enjoy his own peculiar rights, and reign in their separate spheres forever; nor will He consign them as irreclaimable subjects to a penal colony, nor to a prison house where He may torment them unceasingly and forever. But He will withdraw from them His sustaining power without which no creature however high or low could live for a moment, and let them drop out of being, or He will destroy them with such severity of judgment as justice and mercy shall require.
How long a time may elapse between the coming of Christ in judgment, and the utter extermination of all His enemies; through what scenes of misery they shall pass, and what shall be the precise method and manner of their destruction, we do not now propose to inquire. It is only with the final disposition that is to be made of them that we are now concerned. In regard to this there ought not to be any doubt in the mind of anyone who honestly accepts the testimony of the Scriptures. Indeed there would be none, had not men been taught to accept of Satan's lie, " Ye shall not surely die," instead of the sure Word of God, "The soul that sinned, it shall die." "The wages of sin is death." "Sin, when it is finished bringeth forth death." " His latter end shall be that he perish forever." " The day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble; and the day cometh that shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch." " Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction." " Whose end is destruction."
Many of our Lord's parables are given to teach this very truth, the utter destruction of the wicked, the complete extinguishment of all life in them —their utter extermination, What else can be meant by the parable of the Draw .Net, and the gathering of the good into vessels and the casting of the bad away when Christ shall come again; or of the Ten Pounds, in which He takes away from those who had mis-improved their privileges even that which He had given them, and slays them before His eyes; or of the Rich Fool whose soul was required of him; or of the Tares and the gathering of the wicked like tares into bundles to be burned at the end of the world; or of the Ten Virgins, and the giving out of the lights of the foolish virgins when the bridegroom comes?
But it is useless to multiply citations on this point. The Scriptures are full of such texts. To quote them all would be to quote a large part of the Bible. There is no doctrine upon which its teachings are more full, positive and definite than in respect to the destruction of the unsaved at the second coming of Christ. Every variety of figure, and form of expression is used, all pointing to the same end. It is said they " shall perish," shall " pass away," "fade away," "wither," "be consumed," "utterly consumed," "devoured by fire," " cut down," "ground to powder," "burned up," "plucked up by the roots," " broken to shivers," " dashed in pieces," " cut in sunder," " put away like dross," " cast away," "vanish away like smoke," or " like a dream," " perish like brutes," "shall not be," etc., etc. If there is any doubt on this question, the difficulty is not in the Word of God, but in the mind of the reader. If he comes to the Scripture with the philosophical assumption that man cannot die utterly, cannot perish so as not to be, he is under the necessity of putting some other construction on these passages. He must interpret them to mean something else. In this way the plain Word of God has been so mystified and perverted as to seem to teach the very opposite of what it says—that the unsaved shall not die utterly, shall not perish so as not to be, shall not be consumed, etc.; but shall continue to exist and suffer forever. It is quite useless to argue this question on scriptural grounds, or to cite passages in point with those who insist on bringing their own unscriptural philosophy to the interpretation of these passages, or rather the misinterpretation of them. Until they will consent to come to the study of this Word as those who desire to know what it really teaches, and not as those who would compel it to teach what they may wish, they must remain in spite of all its plain utterances, like those who are "ever learning, but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth."
LIFE' AND DEATH IN THE NEW TESTAMENT, In the Baptist Quarterly Review for December, 1884.
REV. JOHN GREENE, A.M.
Dear Sir: —I have read your able and scholarly article under the above title, in the last Baptist Quarterly Review, with earnest attention and interest, and not without some satisfaction; for, with the exception of two or three unkind words, which add nothing to its force, you treat those whose views you oppose, with unusual fairness and courtesy, and direct your arguments, as you should, rather against their doctrines than their persons; you even concede to them some important points with respect to the life which your confreres are seldom willing to do. While not agreeing with your conclusions, for re wins which I am about to state, I have but little fault to find with your definition of the four Greek words, viz., pszuche, bios, anastropha, and the which are translated " Life" in the New Testament. The ground which you cover in treating of them is quite familiar to me, as I have made them a special study for many years. It seems quite unnecessary, however, for your argument, that you should have considered any but the first and the last, for the other two have no bearing on the question under discussion.
While I agree with you in holding that the psuche life is the lower life in man, "that principle which differentiates animate from inanimate things, which man has in common with brute animals," I am especially pleased with your definition of zoa as a real, substantial life, the highest kind of life; for it has generally seemed important, if not necessary, to those who have endeavored to establish the doctrine for which you contend, namely, the deathless nature of the psuche life, to show that Zoe is an ethical word, and that when predicated of man in the Scriptures it does not denote a real, actual, substantial life, but only a condition or quality of the psuche life which is natural to all men — a term used merely to denote the happy and blessed condition of the righteous. It is on this very point, more than on any other, that the battle respecting conditional and unconditional immortality has been fought. At any rate, in contending for the doctrine of conditional immortality I have found it important to emphasize this point with special earnestness.
It seems to me that this word, which is one of the crucial words, if not the most emphatic word in the New Testament, which is the very substance of the promises of the Gospel through Christ to the children of God — to which the attribute aionios, eternal, everlasting, is so often attached, and to which the definite article the is so commonly prefixed — (he Zoe aionios), Tax Life Everlasting must designate something more than an attribute or a condition of life. I cannot but regard it, as you do, as the very highest sort of life, yea more, as the only real, substantial and inextinguishable kind of life, because it is the life of God Himself. Every other kind of life, of which there are many, is more or less frail, transitory, and destined sooner or later to come to an end. I then fully agree with you when you say that this Zoe life is used:
1. To denote the existence of God himself, the fountain of all life. 2. From this Divine Fountain we receive Eternal Life. That men have not this life by nature; they receive it by the creative power of the Spirit through faith in the Son, by means of the Word of God; it is never said to be corrupted, and appears to be conceived as completely inalienable. 3. The fullness of blessing from this life will not be realized until the restitution of all things, until the kingdom of God be fully come.
I would, however, take exception to the words which you use, inconsiderately, I think, further on, when you say, " It is used in a sense to denote a state of blessedness," as not quite accurate, or as coming far short of its meaning in the passages you cite. Indeed, it includes and ensures every conceivable blessing, but these blessings are only the accessories, the accompaniments of that new life, which is given to the regenerated children of God. It is not merely a blessed state or condition to which He calls them, but a blessed life that He gives them. It is not a new attribute of the life they already possess, which they receive when born again, or rather "begotten from above," as the term generate another, in John 3. 3, and elsewhere actually imports, but a life that is quite distinct from their Adamic, natural life and infinitely superior to it.
Two sorts of life, not merely two ways of living, but two kinds of life, are very distinctly spoken of in the Scriptures, and everywhere brought into contrast; the one is a natural life, a life which man has in common with the lower animals, a life that is corruptible, frail and transitory; the other is a supernatural life, a life which he has in common with God Himself, which is incorruptible, abiding and eternal; the one, he receives in the first birth from his human progenitors, the other must be received, if ever, from a Divine Progenitor. These two lives are designated by two distinct words both in the Hebrew and in the Greek. In the Hebrew they are nephesh and chaff, in the Greek they are, as we have seen, psuche and Zoe. Of course, as this new life is more fully and clearly revealed through Christ in the New Testament, the distinction between them is more emphatic, and the contrast more definitely drawn, than in the Old Testament. But no careful reader of the Hebrew Scriptures can have failed to notice the characteristic use of these two Hebrew words when, on the one hand, this present life is spoken of, and on the other, that " length of days forever and ever " which is the peculiar portion of the children of God, is spoken of. I might cite scores of passages from the Old Testament in point, but as our attention is exclusively directed to the New, in your article, I will only follow you there. It seems impossible that in your study of these two words in the Greek, the peculiar and almost exclusive use of these two terms psuche and Zoe, the one referring to the life that now is, and the other to that which is to come, should have escaped your notice. This word psuche occurs one hundred and five times in the New Testament, and its analogue nephesh occurs seven hundred and fifty-three times in the Old Testament. Though somewhat capriciously rendered, sometimes, " life," and sometimes " soul " and sometimes "creature" or " beast " or in other ways, by our translators, yet in no single instance is there any intimation of its deathless nature. Yea more, I can point you to a large number of passages in which its frail and dying and transitory nature is expressly declared. I confidently assert, after the most careful scrutiny that there is not one passage in either the Old or the New Testament that attributes immortality to the psuche (or to its analogue the nephesh), while on the other hand this Zoe which occurs one hundred and fifty times, is constantly designated, not only as the LIFE, but as THE LIFE ETERLASTING. The adjective aionios signifying eternal, everlasting, is coupled with it nearly, if not quite, half a hundred times.
It is true, that this word may be used, and indeed is used, though very rarely in the Scriptures, as you have well shown by the citation of several passages, to designate an earthly life; but it is also true that whenever the new life, the higher life, the life that is endless is spoken of, this word Zoe is always used, and the adjective aionios is very commonly joined with it, while the word psuche is never so used. It seems to have been " set apart from a common to a sacred use," or, as is truly said, "translated like Enoch from earth to heaven."
Now, while I accept of your interpretation of the word zci.6 as eminently Scriptural, I cannot without protest, allow you with no warrant from Scripture, and indeed, as I think, in opposition to the clearest and most positive teaching of all Scripture, to assume that the psuche is also indestructible and eternal; that the life which we receive in our natural birth is equally stable and enduring with that which is supernaturally given from above in the new birth. And yet, you build your whole argument for the endless existence of the sinner in misery, on this assumption. This is just the one fatal defect in all the arguments I have ever seen on your side of the question. Many of them seem to be strong and logical throughout, but they are founded in the sand or on a mere philosophical idea, which has nothing but a tradition to justify it. I know, indeed, how popular it is, and how generally accepted as an axiom. When one comes to trace it to its source, he finds it in the words of the Great Deceiver himself. "Ye shall not surely die, ye shall be as gods," in direct contradiction of the words of Jehovah, " Thou shalt surely die." It is not surprising that the heathen philosophers should take it up and try to prove it true; it is so flattering to the pride of man and so agreeable to his desires. It is not wonderful that man, without any revelation to enlighten him in regard to the true and only way to eternal life, should continue to hope for it after the boon had been forfeited by sin. But it is a cause for astonishment that the Church of Christ should take over into her creed this seductive, deceitful philosophy, and claim for the whole ruined race of Adam, that immortality which the Word of God everywhere expressly declares to be impossible, excepting by a new birth; and deny to Christ the Savior, the honor which He rightfully claims as its only true Source and Giver. But, what is yet more astonishing, our Christian theologians —while acknowledging, as they must, that there is no actual ground for their dogma in the teaching of Scripture, only by way of inference, and no proof of it in the philosophy they have adopted — are so set on holding it fast as one of the first principles of their faith, that they frankly say, " It needs no proof "! Let me quote to you a passage from McClintock and Strong's Encyclopedia, extracted from an article in the Bibliotheca Sacra, in which the writer naively argues that the want of proof only serves to strengthen the conclusion!!
It is said that much of the reasoning employed by pagan writers to prove the immortality of the soul is unsound. This is a fact, and yet by no means invalidates their right to believe in the conclusion which they deduced illogically. Believing a proposition firmly, we are satisfied with the mere pretense of argument for its support; and searching in the distance for proof which can only be found in immediate contact with us, we discover reasons for the belief, which long before we had discovered them, was yet fully established in our own minds; and yet we deem these reasons sufficient to uphold the doctrine, although, in point of fact, the doctrine does not make trial of their strength by resting upon them. If they were the props on which our belief was in reality founded, their weakness would be obvious at once; but as they have nothing to sustain, their insufficiency is the less apparent; our belief continues notwithstanding the frailness of the arguments which make a show of upholding it, and thus the very defects 4 the proof illustrate the strength of the conclusion, which remains firm in spite of them.
Of what avail is it to argue with those who reach their conclusions by such a process, who hold their belief not subject to their reason but to their will?
Now, in order to bring this unscriptural dogma into apparent harmony with the teachings of the Word of God, a new and unnatural interpretation must be put upon the crucial terms of Scripture bearing on this question. For example, the word Thanatos, death, one of the commonest and clearest words in our language or in the Greek, and which means just what it imports when predicated of any other living thing, must not be permitted to mean actual death when predicated of man in the Scriptures. And why? Simply and solely because the philosophical postulate, on which all these theologians build their theories, will not permit it. Some other meaning must be found for it, which is consistent with the theory that the sinner is actually immortal, and will live — or exist, as they prefer to phrase it, so as not to contradict too violently the language of Scripture — to sin and suffer eternally, after the penalty of death has been inflicted upon him. I need not stop to consider the various methods, for they are many, which have been devised, and the various terms that have been employed to justify this contradictory conclusion.
I am sorry to find you employing the same methods. You do not, it is true, define quite as categorically as some of these theologians do, what you understand by the word Thanatos, death, though you devote considerable space to its discussion. Your treatment of it seems to me quite vague and inconclusive. But you evidently consider it to be a state or condition of conscious being in which the sinner lives, or exists, if you prefer the term, to sin and suffer forever.
Now, after reading what you have said of zoa, and agreeing with you so fully in considering it as designating not an unreal, but a real, veritable, actual life, and in that higher religious sense in which it is more commonly employed in the New Testament, as designating that new life which is peculiar to the ever-living God, and which He imparts to His children in regeneration, and which is incorruptible and eternal, I must say that I am disappointed to find you endeavoring to put a strange and unreal meaning on its antithetical term Thanatos, death. And yet I do not see how you can do otherwise, when you start with the assumption that man is an immortal being. But you must he aware that those with whom you agree in your conclusion have usually, if not invariably, held that both Thanatos and zoa, when predicated of man in the Scriptures, are ethical terms denoting opposite states or conditions of life or existence; the one a state of conscious happiness, and the other a state of conscious suffering, and both equally enduring.
It seems to me that you have fatally weakened your position and yielded more than half your ground in conceding to us, all that we claim with respect to one of these crucial terms, and I cannot but hope that on further consideration you will see the logical necessity of conceding the same with respect to the other, which is its perfect antithesis. For the logical and Scriptural reasons for taking this word Thanatos in its true, literal and actual sense when predicated of man in the Scriptures, are quite as cogent as for the true and actual sense of the word zoa.
You say very truly, that while " we have in the New Testament four nouns denoting life, with distinctions of meaning clearly marked and significant, there is practically but one word meaning death, viz., Thanatos." The reason is obvious. There are many sorts of life. But death is a negative term denoting the cessation of life, of whatever kind of life is in question. It is the same in all its relations, and equally applicable to any sort of life. But it is not merely a "negative term," simply denying the presence of visible or tangible life," as you say. It is more. It conveys an implication of a previous life. We do not speak of the death of a stone, or of anything else to which life may not have been attributed. It denotes an event, the cessation of life rather than a state of existence. It need not be denied that it is sometimes used in a proleptical or anticipative sense, but when properly used it always points to that event either in the past or future.
But it is altogether too much for you to claim, that, because it is sometimes used in a sense somewhat figurative, as all words may be, it therefore never has its true and natural sense when predicated of the psuche, or the life of man, in the Scriptures; and yet, you and those of your school, are obliged to resort to this unwarranted course in order to sustain the postulate with which you start, and on which you build your whole argument, namely, that the psuche life in man is IMMORTAL. You cannot advance one step in your argument to prove that endless misery is the portion of those against whom the Word of God denounces death, destruction, perdition, etc., without first denying that these most emphatic words have their natural and legitimate signification when the soul of man is in question.
You cannot but admit that the words Thanatos, apothnesko, teleutao, apollumi, etc.. in the Greek, and maveth, moth, and their cognates in the Hebrew, are the clearest and most forcible terms that could have been used to express the doctrine for which we contend, were the sacred writers intending to express it, the very terms that are always employed to express it, when any other living organism or thing is spoken of. Indeed, I am confident in saying that if these words do not express it, then it is not in the power of words to express it, and the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul must stand, only because there are no terms in the language of man that can deny it!
This is the reason why the advocates of this doe-trine so persistently endeavor to force upon us the term "annihilation," and, in spite of our protests, insist on? calling us " annihilationist," when they must know that this is not the doctrine for which we con- tend. We know nothing of the annihilation of substance, which this term implies. We assert nothing of the destruction of the materials of which man or any other living creature or thing is composed. This term is no more appropriate in his case than in any other. What we claim is, the extinction of his life, the destruction of his organic, personal existence, as an individual whole. This, we contend, is what the Scriptures teach when they speak of his death and destruction; nothing more, nothing less.
Your endeavor to escape from your dilemma, by saying that the body dies, but the psuche or soul does not die, is only another way of begging the whole question in issue. What is it that constitutes the man? Surely not the body, at any rate, not the body alone, nor chiefly, for according to your theory the real conscious responsible man resides in the body, and uses it only as his instrument. It is the man himself that we are considering, and not the body. It was the man himself that sinned, the man to whom God said, " Thou shalt surely die," and to whom Satan said, "Ye shall not surely die." To which of these two contradictory declarations do you choose to adhere?
But it is not strictly true to say that even the body dies, unless by it you mean the whole man, for the body itself is brute matter. Though highly organized, it has no life in itself apart from the psuche or vitalizing principle that lives within it. When God "formed man of the dust of the ground," there was neither sensation, consciousness, nor life in that body, till He breathed into it the breath of life. Then, and then only, man became a nephesh chayyah, a " living soul," or living creature; for the same thing is predicated of all animals, whether brute or human. When this vitalizing principle is withdrawn, the body becomes what it was before, subject to the dissolving forces of nature. So says the Psalmist, " Thou takes away their breath, they die and return to the dust: thou sends forth thy Spirit, they are created." Ps. 104. 29, 30.
I accept as quite fair and accurate your statement of our belief, that " death means naturally, if not necessarily, the cessation of conscious existence, and the second death the total extinction of being." And I can fully indorse what you further say, that "there is probably a growing body of devout minds that hold this view as being in accord with Scripture, and as the only view consonant with right reason." If it were necessary, I could name to you many eminent Christian scholars in this and other countries, who hold this view, and I am sorry not to be able to include you among the number, and that you oblige me to criticize so severely your emphatic dissent from so reasonable a view, for you immediately add, "Let me first deny absolutely that death naturally implies the extinction of consciousness." I know very well that those with whom you agree attempt to establish an ethical distinction between life and conscious existence, but to me it appears fatuous and self-contradictory unless you first change entirely the meaning of the terms you employ. Of course existence is a broader term than life, for everything that is may be said to exist, whether it have life or not; and life is a broader term than consciousness, for every living thing does not have consciousness, so that consciousness necessarily implies or presupposes life, and life necessarily implies or presupposes existence. To me the idea of consciousness without life is quite incomprehensible, and when you talk of the conscious existence of sinners in a state of endless misery, after their life has been extinguished, and they are actually dead and destroyed, you are talking of what, to me, is utterly inconceivable and unthinkable.
The reason why we make a distinction between the first and second death, or perhaps as we might better say, the first and second instalments of this penalty of sin, is because the Scriptures make it. The first death is not the punishment of our own personal sins. This is inflicted only in the second death. As the result of our fallen condition, we come into life as mortals, and this without regard to our individual character and conduct, and had it not been for God's purposes of mercy through Christ to our fallen race, there would be no second death. The first death would have been the final end of all men. There could have been no afterlife for anyone. But Christ by His own death and resurrection has redeemed us from this Adamic death to which all God's children are subject. The redemption by the second Adam is as broad as the ruin by the first. And we are all raised from this first death, the righteous to enter upon that new and higher life, the za aionios, the eternal life which is given them from above; and the wicked, or those who have failed of this eternal life, to judgment and condemnation for their own individual sins, and to the second death, from which- there is no resurrection. In just what way man's personal identity is preserved, and what is his condition between the first death and the resurrection, we need not stop to inquire. There are various views on this question. It is not essential to the main question that we should stand for any one of them so long as our faith in the resurrection be not affected. To those who object to this grand central doctrine of the Gospel, a resurrection from death, because they cannot understand how this can be, we need only repeat the words of our Lord to the Sadducees, " Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the POWER of God."
It is true the phrase deuteron Thanatos, the second death, occurs only in the Apocalypse, where we find it four times, but this is evidently the death against which sinners are warned in all parts of the Bible, in the Old Testament as well as in the New. When Moses (Deut. 30. 15) tells the children of Israel from God that he sets before them life and death, and urges them to choose life (chai, not nephesh), that they may live; when Jeremiah (Jer. 21. 8) proclaims the divine message, " Behold I set before you the way of life (chai) and the way of death "; when Ezekiel exclaims (Ezek. 18.), " The soul that sinned it shall die," and again when he pleads with sinners, saying, ' " Why will ye die?" "I have no pleasure in the death of him that dies, saith the Lord, wherefore turn yourselves and live"; the second death is evidently intended, — though the idea of a resurrection to judgment had not yet been fully revealed —for none of them could hope to escape the first death, and surely God is not mocking them; nor can that ethical, or moral sort of death for which you contend, be meant, for this is their present condition, and it is of a future death that they are warned. But this is more clearly seen in the New Testament, after the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead and the new Zoe life has been brought to light. It is evidently of this second death, of which our Lord spoke, when He said (Matt. 10. 28), "Fear not them which kill (apokteino) the body, but are not able to kill the soul (psuche), but rather fear Him who is able to destroy (apolesai, put an end to by utterly destroying,) both soul and body (kai psuchen kai soma) in Gehenna." So when Paul says (Rom. 8. 13), " If ye live after the flesh ye shall die [not are now dead, but shall die], but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live," he could refer to nothing else than the second death and the second (Zoe) life, which it is the special object of the Gospel to reveal; and so in a multitude of other passages, when he brings this after death and this after life so sharply into contrast, as he continually does in his epistles. So James most clearly refers to this second death when he says (v. 20), "Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert him, let him know that he which converts a sinner from the error of his way, shall save a soul (psuchan) from death, and hide a multitude of sins." It is needless to multiply passages on this point.
But, according to your doctrine, there is no actual first death, much less can there be any second death. I never found one of your school who could give any intelligible idea of what is meant by this phrase, deuteros Thanatos, the second death. Your theory does not allow you to take the passage, Rev. 20. 14, " And death and hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death," in its obvious sense as meaning this is the agent or instrument which brings about the second death; but the same sophistical interpretation is given to it as is given by the papist to a singular passage, " This is my body," to prove his doctrine of transubstantiation.
I cannot now stop to consider your argument for a future life founded on the various passages of Scripture which you cite, nor is it important that I should, for I agree with you in accepting the testimony of Scripture to the resurrection of all the dead to a life of some sort. Your texts have no bearing whatever on the main question of the endlessness of the life beyond, for both the saved and the lost. But I cannot agree with you in your interpretation of these passages with respect to what is called the intermediate state. It would, however, be foreign to my purpose to enter upon the discussion of this incidental and subordinate question in this paper. But I cannot permit what you say of the death of Christ, and your inference from it, to pass without notice. You say:
It appears to me incredible that Christ was unconscious between His crucifixion and His resurrection. Not only His significant assertion that He had power to take His life again, but His divine nature as revealed to us in the Scriptures, His Godhead, if not His manhood, forbids us to think of him as not being. Was there nothing in Him who had life in Himself, whose life was the life of all created intelligences, to survive the shock of dissolution? It would seem that only by stress of theories preconceived could any one arrive at such a blank conclusion. Yet if He did not fall into unconsciousness, neither do we, else He did not "taste of death" for every man.
You seem here to confuse or utterly ignore the distinction between the psucke life and the zoa life, which you have elsewhere acknowledged. You seem to forget that Christ was possessed of this Zoe life in His own right, as His own peculiar life, a life that is absolutely indestructible. It was only His psucha life, or human life, that He laid down for man, and not His Zoe life, as He Himself expressly tells us (John 10. 15-18), " I lay down My (psuchen) life for the sheep No man taketh it from Me; I lay it down of Myself.
I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." It was not by any vis vitae of His human soul (psucha) that He lived again, but by that higher Divine life that was in Him. It was only by the sacrifice of His human life, pure and spotless as it was, that He tasted death for every man. Hence the inference you attempt to draw, that because our Divine Savior laid down His life and took it again, so every mortal man has the same power within himself, is without any foundation.
In closing, you say that you "shudder and draw back from the thought of eternal woe," and well you may, for the more you consider what is involved in this idea of woe that is absolutely eternal, the more you will shudder and draw back; and so will everyone who stops to think of it. Indeed, it is becoming more and more incredible, as this discussion goes on, and irreconcilable with any true views of the wisdom, justice or goodness of God. It is for this reason that our clergy, though they may hold to it still, as a dogma that belongs to the traditional creed of our Evangelical Churches, have very generally ceased to preach it, and have, I think I may say, with some few exceptions, ceased actually to believe it. But they have nothing with which to replace it. Hence the Gospel message which they bring to their fellow-men, has little or no power to influence them, for there is no alternative which they fear.
You appear to find some relief in the vagueness with which this dreadful doctrine, which you advocate is revealed to your mind. I think I discern in you, by the tenor of your closing remarks, a latent hope that it may not prove to be true, after all. And yet you will defend it. But why should you? It is certainly not directly taught in the Scriptures. It is only by a course of indirect inference, and special pleading that you are able to find any tolerable argument in its favor, and even so, you cannot build up any argument whatever without first assuming as its foundation, the very thing that needs first to be proved, viz.: the necessary immortality of the psucha or human soul. And then, if this be so, and the soul is not saved, as surely as sin brings misery so surely this misery will be everlasting! This is simply a deduction of your false philosophy of the nature of man, and not of Scripture teaching, but diametrically opposed to it; a philosophy which the Great Deceiver, with cunning malignity has fastened upon the Christian Church, and by which he still holds her in bondage, that he may furnish infidels and skeptics with arguments against the Bible and the Christian religion, and hinder the progress of the Gospel, and grieve and perplex the hearts of God's children who really desire to believe and love His Word, and to honor and trust Him, and who feel that they must honor and trust Him, in spite of the fearful cloud of darkness which this awful dogma throws about Him.
I beg you, in the light of my criticisms, which, though you may think severe, are offered in love and kindness, and as I think kindly expressed, to re-examine this question, for I am sure that, if you could come to see as I do, how this doctrine of eternal life only in Christ, by a new birth, is grounded on the explicit teaching of God's Word; how it magnifies and honors both the Law and the Gospel, and exalts alike the justice and mercy of our heavenly Father; how it harmonizes all the doctrines of the Evangelical system; and how, especially it illuminates those that are commonly regarded as dark, mysterious, and forbidding; and what infinite glory it reflects on the Author of our salvation; instead of finding fault, you would thank me for the trouble I have taken to convince you of your error, and gladly join me in my humble endeavors to set this grand Scripture doctrine again in its rightful place in the symbols of our common faith.
Philadelphia, Pa., Feb., 1885.
NOTE To the foregoing letter on Life and Death in the New Testament.
MY DEAR SIR, — The May number of your excellent Magazine has just come to hand. I hasten to make such reply as I am able to your welcome criticism appended to my paper on Life and Death in the New Testament, hoping it may reach you in time for your next issue. It is a great favor to me to have my writings reviewed and criticized by so kind, acute, and thoughtful a scholar as you have proved yourself to be. I could only wish it might be in advance of their publication. I am rejoiced to find that we agree so fully on all the main points of the question under consideration; and still further, I am happy to think that we differ even less than you suppose on the incidental points to which you allude. It seems to me that our divergence is rather verbal than actual.
The words, soul, spirit, life, death, and other important terms that we are obliged to employ in discussing eschatological questions, have undergone such changes through the influence of the Platonic philosophy and a false psychology, and are now used with such a variety of significations, that it is very difficult to understand each other, if we go deeply into the metaphysics of the subject, without first very carefully defining our terms. This could not be done in any such brief paper as the one now under criticism. I have devoted several hundred pages to an examination of these terms, under the head of Bible Terminology, in my larger volume, The Life Everlasting; to which I beg to refer you for a more particular reply to some of the points to which you call my attention. But I think that all that is important for me now to say may be included under a few brief heads.
1 I recognize, and freely admit the distinction you make between the words nephesh and Mai in the Hebrew, and their analogues psuche and zoa in the Greek; although they are both so often translated by the same word, "life," in our version; and yet we might not draw the line exactly in the same way between them. I agree with you, that chai and Zoe may be considered as abstract terms, and as having a more general application than nephesh and psucha; and that the latter, as concrete terms, often denote simple personality. But still I think this is rather their secondary sense, and that they are more correctly rendered life in most cases, as they very frequently are in our Scriptures, than by the word soul; for the word soul has unfortunately become so deflected from its original use, and so corrupted by a false psychology, that it certainly gives a false idea in very many passages, and obscures the sense in others. Indeed our Revisers have made some improvement in this direction, though not all that could be desired. It would have tended greatly to the better understanding of the truth, if the diverse ideas always expressed by the words, nephesh and chai, in the Hebrew, and their representatives, psucha and Zoe, in the Greek, and by anima and vita in the Latin, and fame and la vie in the French, and in other languages, had always been rendered by two separate words in our language, instead of by the single word life, as is so often done in our version.
2 I think you will agree with me-that two sorts of life are predicated of man in the Word of God, both in the Old and New Testaments, but more especially in the New; the one, our natural life received by ordinary generation, which is common to all the children of Adam, and which indeed we have in common with the lower animals, which we call from peuche, the psuchikos, or psychical, or soulical life; and the other, which is received only by regeneration by the Divine Spirit, which is peculiar to the children of God by a new birth, and which, from pneuma is called the pneumatikos, or spiritual life.
There are two classes, and only two classes, of men known to the Word of God. The line of distinction between them runs through the whole Bible, but is more sharply drawn under the Christian dispensation. These two classes are called by a great variety of names, which I need not stop to consider, to denote their peculiar characteristics; but the line of division always remains the same.
The New Testament, to which we will more particularly direct our attention, more clearly reveals to us the radical difference between them, and foretells their separate destinies.
The one class are the children of Adam by natural generation; they live after the flesh; they have their portion in this world; they have no life abiding in them. The only life they possess is a psuchical, or natural life; which, io its own nature, is transitory. They are destined to share the fate of all material, earthly, physical organizations and things; and as sinners against God, they are exposed to judicial retribution and destruction. The other class are the children of God by a spiritual birth; they have been begotten by a Divine Progenitor; His own peculiar life has been imparted to them; they are new creatures in Christ; they seek those things that are spiritual and eternal; they live after the Spirit, and are heirs of an eternal life.
The radical distinction between these two classes, and the absolute necessity of being actually born again in order to an eternal life, are among the chief doctrines of the Gospel. The necessity, not simply of a moral life, but of a new birth, is very clearly set forth by our Lord in His conversation with Nicodemus, and insisted on everywhere in His teaching. The Gospel of John is full of it, from beginning to end. It is the grand central idea of the Epistles, especially of Paul. It has long seemed to me, that, in arguing the doctrine of eternal life, this prime truth of a new begetting from above (gennethe anothen), and a new spiritual birth, should have as prominent and emphatic a recognition as possible; and this, not simply because it is so strongly emphasized in the Scriptures, but also because it is the one point that our opponents are most inclined to evade, or pervert, or explain away. They admit that the old, natural life is defective, imperfect, sinful; and that it needs to be reformed, improved, purified; but this is to be accomplished by the efforts of the individual himself, by the use of the ordinances of the Church, and by the help of Christ, the so-called Savior. But, after all it is the same old original life revived, and carried forward into the world beyond, and there perfected. It is not really and actually another life, it is only such by a figure of speech, to denote the change that has been effected in it. This change is only an ethical, and not a radical, fundamental, vital change, which the individual undergoes. In this way they contrive to evade the main force of our argument.
Perhaps I am the more disposed to insist on this point from the fact, that this is the very point where the cloud under which I had been reared, and had exercised my ministry for a quarter of a century, first broke away, and I began to see the light; and when I came clearly to recognize this grand vital distinction, which indeed lies everywhere on the surface of the Gospel, but which a false theology, founded on a false psychology, has so sadly obscured, the truth burst upon my mind in all its fulness; and the doctrine of eternal life only in Christ, seemed to me one of the clearest, most beautiful and glorious doctrines of Divine revelation. Hence in my first volume, written soon after this, and in all my subsequent writings, I have endeavored to make this point as clear and conspicuous as possible. I have also often wondered why other writers on this side of the question do not insist more strongly upon it.
I am very happy to find that Professor Drummond, whose recent work on Natural Law in the Spiritual World, has just come into my hands, sets forth the radical distinction between these two sorts of lives; and the absolute necessity of a new birth, and a new life, in order to an endless existence of any kind, in the most earnest and emphatic manner. I infer, from some expressions he uses, that he considers the views he takes are quite peculiar to himself; and yet they are the very same on this point, and in some cases in almost the same words, that I employed in my Theological Trilemma, written fifteen years ago.
Let me refer you to the chapters on Biogenesis, and on Eternal Lip, in his volume, from which I would be glad to quote largely; but I must content myself with only a few fragmentary extracts; and then, in consideration of the importance of this line of thought and argumentation, as I view it, I trust you will permit me to quote somewhat freely from my first work above referred to.
The Spiritual Life is the gift of the Living Spirit. The spiritual man is no mere development of the natural man. He is a New Creation from Above. As well expect a hay infusion to become gradually more and more living until, in course of the process it reached vitality, as expect a man by becoming better and better to attain to eternal life.
There is no spontaneous generation in religion any more than in nature. Christ is the source of life in the spiritual world; and he that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son. whatever else he may have, hath not life.
If the doctrine of the spontaneous generation of spiritual life can be met on scientific grounds, it will mean the removal of the most serious enemy Christianity has to deal with, and especially within its own borders, at the present day. The religion of Jesus has probably always suffered more from those who have misunderstood, than from those who have opposed it. Of the multitudes who confess Christianity at this hour, how many have clear in their minds the cardinal distinction established by its Founder between "born of the flesh" and "born of the spirit?" By how many teachers of Christianity even is not this fundamental postulate persistently ignored? A thousand modern pulpits every seventh day are preaching the doctrine of spontaneous generation. The finest and best of recent poetry is colored with this same error. Spontaneous generation is the leading theology of the modern religious or irreligious novel; and much of the most serious and cultured writing of the day devotes itself to earnest preaching of this impossible gospel. The current conception of the Christian religion. in short, the conception which is held, not only popularly, but by men of culture, is founded upon a view of its origin which, if true, would render the whole scheme abortive.
The passage from the natural world to the spiritual world is hermetically sealed from the natural side. The door from the inorganic to the organic is shut; no mineral can open it; so the door from the natural to the spiritual is shut, and no man can open it. This world of natural men is staked oft from the spiritual world by barriers which have never yet been crossed from within. No organic change. no modification of environment, no mental energy, no moral effort, no evolution of character, no progress of civilization, can endue any single human soul with the attributes of spiritual life. Except a man be born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. It is not said, in the enunciation of the law, that if the condition be not fulfilled the natural man will not enter the Kingdom of God. But the word is cannot.
Why a virtuous man should not simply grow better and better until in his own right he enters the Kingdom of God, is what thousands honestly and seriously fail to understand. Now philosophy cannot help us here. Her arguments are, if anything, against us. But science answers to the appeal at once. If it be simply pointed out that this is the same absurdity as to ask why a stone should not grow more and more living till it enters the organic world, the point is clear in an instant. He who lives the spiritual life has a distinct kind of life added to all the other phases of life which he manifests — a kind of life infinitely more distinct than is the active life of a plant from the inertia of a stone. The difference then between the spiritual man and the natural man is not a difference of development, but of generation. It is a distinction of quality and not of quantity.
It is a new and Divine possession. It is the manifestation of a new nature. It comes not from generation, but from re-generation. It ought to be placed in the forefront of all Christian teaching, that Christ's mission on earth was to give men life. `I am come.' he said, ` that ye might have life [Zoe] and that ye might have it more abundantly' (or rather exceeding abundantly). And that he meant literal life, literal spiritual and eternal life, is clear from the whole course of His teaching and acting. To impose a metaphorical meaning on the commonest words of the New Testament is to violate every canon of interpretation-, and at the same time to charge the greatest of teachers with persistently mystifying His hearers by an unusual use of so exact a vehicle for expressing definite thought as the Greek language, and that on the most momentous subject of which He ever spoke to men."— Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World.
In my Theological Trilemma, written fifteen years ago, I say: — The Gospel is not only a new and higher revelation, but the life itself that is revealed is a new and higher life, and those who are the subjects of it are new creatures. "If any man be in Christ he is a new creature." Not new in some metaphorical sense, denoting simply that he is a reformed man; that he now forsakes his old way of sin, and begins to regulate his life by a higher standard of morality; that he now seeks and finds his enjoyment in higher things. It means all this, but infinitely more. He is actually a "new creature." He has the beginning of another life in his soul. He does not lose his identity, for it is the same soul that receives the new life. But its former life was natural only; this is spiritual. It has hitherto lived only through the body. It now begins to live through the spirit also. The old Adamic nature still survives for a time. but it goes to death, and the soul that was associated with it must have shared in its destiny had it not received this new life; but now, after this natural body shall go to corruption, the renewed soul will take to itself a spiritual and incorruptible body, in which it will live forever.
This new life in the soul is a spiritual life, but none the less real and actual because it is spiritual, but infinitely more so. We would be glad so to emphasize the idea of its actuality that our meaning will be understood. It is a mistake — the great mistake that is made by most persons in considering spiritual things — to fritter away their reality in tropes and figures, to suppose that they are unreal, that the new birth is not a new birth in any other than a tropical sense; that the spiritual life in the regenerated soul denotes only a purified condition of the soul under its own life, which is the only actual life the soul ever has.
The old life of the soul is mortal; this is immortal, and is as distinct from it as any other two kinds of life in nature can be. It lifts the soul out of its former condition into a higher sphere. Its condition and destiny are altogether changed.
There is no such thing in nature as spontaneous generation or regeneration, No object takes to itself life, even of the lowest kind, by any inherent power of its own. It is the prerogative of God alone to confer it. All life, of whatever kind, can be communicated directly from Him, the source of all life. Much less can any human, dying soul take to itself this new life by any effort of its own. It is the prerogative of the Spirit of God to give it. The soul may indeed put itself into a receptive condition. It may seek this life from Him, but from Him alone it must come. Of His own will begat He us through the word of truth," "which were born (begotten) not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."
This new life in the soul is eternal, because it is spiritual, It is the pneuma, the breath of God Himself; the same that animates Him who lives forever. The old life is the same with that of his natural progenitor. The new life is the same with that of his Spiritual Progenitor. All the inferior forms of life are transitory. The objects they animate are earthly and go to decay. The whole material universe, with all that it contains of organized matter and life, will pass away, and be dissolved into its original elements, to be again reformed into the new heavens and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness; but the regenerated soul of man, purified by the Spirit dwelling within it, from all its carnal dross, and clothed with its new spiritual body, will survive the wreck and dissolution, and live in the presence of God, pure, immortal, and blessed forever. — Theological Trilemma, pp. 152-4.
3 Now, admitting this important distinction, as I trust you do, between these two sorts of life, the question arises, " By what term shall we designate them? " If we are to call them both simply "life," without any qualifying word, as is too often done in our common translations, this radical distinction is greatly obscured, and with the ordinary reader entirely lost sight of, in many very important passages. If we call one of them the psuche-life, and the other the pneuma life, as you suggest, we are met by the difficulty that, under the influence of the prevalent Platonic philosophy, these two words, soul and spirit, have been so deflected from their scriptural sense, that, with most persons, they have become almost synonymous. Not one person in a thousand can be found to give any intelligible account of the difference between them. Indeed, all our dictionaries define them in almost identical terms. I have attempted to bring out this their distinctive difference as clearly and briefly as I could, by using the compound words psuche-life and Zoe-life. You question the propriety of these terms, because the term Zoe of itself covers all sorts of life. I see the point of your criticism and freely admit that, as a question of simple dialectics, you are correct. If we are to fall back on the radical sense of the word, I have committed a verbal solecism.
But I think you must perceive that the terms you suggest, "the psuche-life and pneuma-life," in the place of the psuche-Life and the Zoe-life which I have employed, are open to the very same criticism which you bring against my terms. For the Divine pneuma or ruach, translated Spirit, is equally the source of all life. So that, in fact, the psuche is given by the pneuma as well as the Zoe. " Thou sends forth thy Spirit (ruach=pneuma), they are created." " Thou takes away their breath (ruach), they die." (Ps. 104). "They all have one breath (ruach)" (Eccl. 3: 19). It is only by employing this term pneuma in a special sense, par eminence, just as I do the term we, that it designates the higher supernatural life in distinction from the natural or lower life. We would therefore gain nothing on the score of dialectics by your substitution, while much would be lost from the fact that our modern psychology and pneumatology have utterly confounded the distinction between soul and spirit.
What life is in its ultimate essence, is a mystery that no one can fathom. We only know that it is a formative or organizing principle, which operates variously under various conditions. In one' case we have, as the outcome, a vegetable organism with a vegetable life; in another, an animal organism with a psuchical life; and in another, what is called a spiritual organism with a spiritual life, and which is called in Scripture he we aionios, the life everlasting, or simply he Zoe, the life. And sometimes only Zoe, life, as it were by synecdoche to include all that is meant by a holy, blessed, endless life, and which I have phrased "the we-life" to distinguish it from the psuche-life, which is perishable.
Now you say this is equivalent to saying life-life. Very well, let it be so. I have the sanction of the Scriptures in reduplicating a word to give it emphasis, even if it means nothing more than this in your view. This was the Oriental method of speaking emphatically, and which we even now sometimes practice. The Prophet said (Is. 26: 3), "Thou wilt keep him in (shalom, shalom) peace, peace whose mind is stayed on thee;" but it is rendered in our common version "perfect peace." So we have in the Greek aionas aionon, which we translate "for ever and ever "; and criminals are condemned to be hanged till they are "dead, dead." But I did not intend this for a simple reduplication of words that are precisely synonymous, but rather for the purpose of explaining or qualifying the term used, or rather to express in a contracted form as I have said, that sort of life designated in the Scriptures by psuche, and that kind of life designated by Zoe. I think I have here also the authority of the Master Himself, as well as that of all the sacred writers, for understanding these two words psuche and we as designating the two sorts of life, of which they so often speak.
The language they used was so complete and rich in terms, that they had no need, as our missionaries to barbarous peoples have, to invent new ones for the expression of new religious truths; but they often took a common word and set it apart, as it were, " from a common to a sacred use." In this way the Zoe, which was a somewhat abstract term for life of any sort, was adopted and taken up into a higher service, to characterize the peculiar life which is given in regeneration; and the word psuche, which is a concrete word, was left to designate the life (implying often the substantial personality) which we receive in our ordinary generation, and which is common to all men, whether natural or spiritual.
I need not inform such a scholar as you are, that this word psuche is never used in the Scriptures to designate any other principle of life than that which is common to all men. The adjective aionios is never coupled with it. It is invariably treated as perishable and transitory: in all the 105 times, in which it occurs, not one instance can be pointed out in which it is employed to designate the principle of life, which is peculiar to those who have been born again; while, on the other hand, the word we is invariably employed to designate this higher life. Though its primitive sense makes it applicable to all sorts of life, it has been so specialized by the sacred writers, that in all the 150 times in which it occurs in the New Testament, not more than seven or eight passages can be found in which it has not evidently exclusive reference to the Deity Himself or His regenerated people. Even these few exceptional cases, if they be such, would seem to prove the rule. Take the most striking one, which you yourself have quoted. " For what is your [we] life? It is even a vapor [or rather, ye are even a vapor] that appear-eth for a little time and then vanished away." (James 4: 14). Now if-you will lay the emphasis on the pronoun your life, etc., where. it evidently should be, you will get the force of this apparent exception to sustain the peculiar use of the word. It is as though the apostle had said, Your own natural life is vain, unreal, illusory, fleeting in comparison with THE LIFE that is in the children of God by a new birth. This is the only real, true, abiding life.
This is the great truth to which our Lord would direct the attention of His hearers in His memorable discourse, as recorded in the sixth chapter of John's Gospel, "I am the Bread of Life. If any man eats of this Bread, he shall live forever. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead." They had a natural life, a psuche life; and even the material food that was miraculously given did not avail to perpetuate it. But " my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life [true life] in you," or rather, "in yourselves." So again, in the First Epistle of John, "He that hath the Son has life, and he that hath not the Son, hath not life." I might fill many pages with citations in point; but these will suffice.
You cannot have failed to notice how many of the most familiar terms in the Greek and Hebrew languages have been specialized, and consecrated to religious uses. Take for example the word Thanatos, death. Though it may indicate the cessation of life of any sort, it is employed more especially and emphatically to denote what we call the second death, or real, actual, final death. And in this sense it is more commonly contrasted, not with psuche, but with we in the Scriptures. There are not a few passages which cannot be understood in any other sense. It is by disregarding this fact that so much confusion has arisen on this subject.
The word baptize which, with its cognates, denotes any sort of dipping or immersion or submersion, has been so consecrated to religious uses, that it now hardly suggests any other idea than a religious rite; and in view of the various methods of practicing it which have sprung up, it is quite proper to speak of "baptism by immersion," "baptism by effusion," "baptism by sprinkling." But to one who insists on adhering strictly to the primitive signification of the word, to say baptism by immersion, seems little better than saying immersion by immersion, just as Zoe life seems like saying life-life.
Perhaps no phraseology could be employed in treating of so abstruse a subject that would be entirely acceptable to all those who look at it from different standpoints. But I have done the best I could from my own standpoint, and I think also that I have the sanction of Scripture. At least, I have succeeded in calling especial attention to a very important truth, and believe I have made myself understood, which is my special aim in all my writings.
Now let me add a few thoughts as to the beginning of this new life, a correlated point, which I think has suggested your criticism, but in regard to which I think there is really less difference between us than you may suspect, even if there be any at all. At any rate, I cannot hold with Mr. Constable, and those of his school, that the eternal life is altogether in the future, and can begin only after the present life has passed away. Indeed, I am so thoroughly persuaded of the commencement of this new life, this side of the grave, that I have no faith whatever in the notion of a possible post-mortem regeneration, which I am sorry to see has the favor of so many of my Christian brethren. Mr. Hobson has so ably and conclusively argued the question, " When is Eternal Life first given?" in the RAINBOW for May 1885, that I am saved the trouble of arguing it further. Still I am inclined to think that the difference between him and Mr. Constable may be more apparent than real. The same perplexing question of the terminus d quo, of our natural life may be raised. One person might fix it at the period of conception, another at that of what is caned the quickening of the embryo, and another at the actual birth. The vital principle which we term "life " begins its work of organization immediately after the act of begetting, though it is not customary to include the period of gestation in the length of our life; but it is actually a part of it.
When we consider that the Greek verb gennao, which is so often and so unfortunately rendered " to be born" in our Scriptures, actually means to beget, or to conceive, and only means to be born in some of its exceptional and remoter senses, it is easy to perceive how misapprehensions among the unlearned, and disputes even among scholars, are likely to arise on this very point. I have been accustomed to bridge over this chasm of difference between brethren so as to agree essentially with both parties, by holding that this act of spiritual begetting — or this being begotten from above, so often and mistakenly rendered in our version "being born again," — actually takes place — and indeed must take place if at all — in this life, and that we may be considered as in embryo until the resurrection, when we may be said to be actually BORN into THE LIFE EVERLASTING.
If you ask, what is the receptacle or matrix of this new principle of spiritual life? I answer unhesitatingly, the soul of man. Hence the anomaly of which Paul speaks in Romans seventh chapter, of two laws of life, or two sorts of life, in the same person, struggling with each other for the mastery. The one a formative principle of life which comes from natural generation, and which organizes only a natural body; the other the formative principle of life which comes only from a Divine generation, or what is called regeneration from above, and by the operation of which a spiritual body is organized. But, by the grace of God, though the struggle is severe, it is not a doubtful one. As Jacob supplanted Esau in the birth, so this new life in the soul of man is destined to supplant that which was first, and to inherit the promise of " length of days for ever and ever." " That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual." In this light, such 300 LIFE AND DEATH.
passages as the following, referring to the two lives which unfortunately are not distinguished in our version, are perfectly luminous. "He that loveth his life [psuche] shall lose it, and he that hated his life [psuche] in this world, shall keep IT unto life eternal [Zoe aionion]." Hence the psuche or soul of man (denoting a personality rather than a simple essence) may live forever, not however with its own natural life, but only as a new life (he Zoe) shall be ingenerated within it. Take an example from the natural world to illustrate: There are two living grubs before me, of the same appearance, and equally active. By and by they both go into a chrysalis state, and in due time, one of them emerges from the state of apparent death, a beautiful butterfly. It is the same creature as before this transformation, and yet not the same either in its nature or appearance. Its identity only has been preserved. But as for the other, there is no such transformation. It has lived only the life of the grub, and perishes as a pupa. Why is this difference? Naturalists tell us that in both of these grubs there was the possibility or germ of this second life, but in the one case it had been blighted or destroyed by those microscope parasites that infest such grubs, and destroy this hidden life, without doing any injury to their natural vermicular life; and in the other only, this germ of a lepidopterous life has been preserved intact and allowed to develop into the butterfly. here is a striking scientific illustration of a spiritual truth which I would commend to Professor Drummond for treatment in some future edition of his very popular work, Natural Law in the Spiritual World.
Let us take one illustration more; and then I must bring to a close this paper, which, on account of the importance and suggestiveness of the theme, I have extended greatly beyond my original purpose. I hold in my hand two fresh eggs which are equally good for culinary purposes, and in which there is no apparent difference. But let them be subjected to the process of incubation, and only one of them will yield a living bird. The other will yield nothing but rottenness and corruption. The secret of this difference lies in the fact that only one of them had been fructified previous to the process of incubation. Here also is a scientific fact which the advocates of the doctrine of conditional immortality may well use, and to which I would also invite the attention of those who hold to the possibility of a post-mortem regeneration, for those who die with no spiritual life in them.
I find in writing for your excellent Magazine, that I must consider well what I say, and the language in which I say it, or my acute and scholarly English friends will take me to task for some actual or fancied indiscretion. But they do it so kindly that I cannot possibly take offence. Indeed, I rather enjoy it. At least, it discovers to me the comforting fact that I occupy a position very near the center of gravity among them, and am actually nearer to them all than some of them are to each other. In medio tutissimus ibis. You do not quite like the way in which I draw the distinction between the psuche and the roe. Not long ago, Rev. Mr. Hobson objected, though very courteously, to my insisting so strongly upon the fact, which he himself admitted, that the phrase aionios Thanatos is nowhere found in the Scriptures. My highly respected friend, Rev. Mr. White, would like to have me agree with him as to the conscious state of the dead. While my brethren of the Conditional Immortality Association think I would be nearer right if I held with them to the complete dissipation of the soul in the first death.
Now I am quite happy to concede to them all the liberty to hold their various opinions on outlying points, which I cannot see as readily as they do, while they agree so perfectly with me on the great main question of eternal life only in Christ, which outranks them all; and I shall be quite content if I can serve only as a vinculum to hold the extremes together that we all may lovingly and heartily unite in opposing the most insidious, seductive, mischievous error that ever invaded the Christian Church or hindered the progress of the Gospel.
PHILADELPHIA, PA., May 16, 1885.
ON The certainty of Endless punishment, IN NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW FOR FEBRUARY, 1885.
REV. W. G. T. SHEDD, D.D., LL.D., Professor of Systematic Theology, Union Theological Seminary, New York.
Dear Sir: —Your rational argument in the North American Review (Feb. 1885), in defense of the philosophical-traditional doctrine of endless punishment, under the above caption, has been read by myself, and, I doubt not, by many others of your Christian brethren, with grief and pain. I can fully agree with you in what you say of the fearful and destructive nature of sin, and of the necessity and certainty of Future punishment, and of the justice of God in inflicting it. But your view of the nature of man, and of the punishment that awaits him, and especially of the character of our Heavenly Father appears so false and so destitute of any solid foundation either in reason or Scripture, and the conclusion to which it brings you, appears to me so hideous and shocking, and, as I think, should appear to the moral sense of every reflecting man, and so contrary to the teachings and spirit of the Word of God, that I feel constrained to protest against it.
As one who loves the truth, and would love and honor his Maker, and would persuade others to love and honor Him, and also as one who has studied this particular question as long, as earnestly and as thoroughly, I think, as yourself, I beg leave respectfully to give you some reasons why I cannot accept your argument as sound, nor the monstrous conclusion you draw from it.
I know that the doctrine for which you contend has been very generally held, in some form, with more or less dissent, by the Christian church, since her apostasy in the early centuries, from "the faith once delivered to the saints," and that it is still the " orthodox " doctrine of the Papal church, from which our fathers inherited it; that it is one of the dogmas of that corrupt church, which they retained, — though not without the protests of ninny of them,— in the Reformation, and that it still lingers in the creeds of our Protestant churches, as an article of their traditional faith, to which those who would be accounted "sound in the faith " are expected to give their assent, though it is evidently held with a growing reserve and reluctance on the part of many, and a rapidly increasing number of our best Christian scholars.
I have no doubt that you, and those who still continue to hold with you, think that you are teaching true doctrine, and doing God service by endeavoring to uphold and perpetuate this medieval dogma of eternal sin and suffering. When I consider your learning and high position as a Professor of Systematic Theology in one of the leading Theological schools of the Presbyterian church — the one at which I received instruction in theology— I cannot but entertain great respect for you personally, as a Christian scholar, and I earnestly hope that in traversing your arguments I shall not even appear to be showing you any personal discourtesy or unkindness. But I cannot recognize the doctrine you defend, whether in its origin, or history, or influence, as having any claim to my kind regards; and I shall take the liberty of treating it, and the arguments that are adduced in its defense, as they seem to deserve.
1. I cannot conceal my astonishment that one so severely logical as you are in your reasoning, should undertake to rear so tremendous a superstructure upon nothing better than a popular sentiment, or a tradition of an apostate church, or a speculative fancy of pagan philosophy, or, at best, the mere ipse dixit of the Great Deceiver of mankind, who boldly declared, in flat contradiction of Jehovah Himself, " YE SHALL NOT SURELY DIE."
You take as your main premise, upon which you build your entire argument, this oracular declaration of Satan, the deathless nature of sinful man. You assume it as a postulate, an axiom that requires no proof, indeed, as one that will not be questioned by any readers of your paper. You do it so quietly, without one word or hint in regard to it, that the careless reader would very naturally overlook the extraordinary character of your assumption. In fact, it would seem that you do it unconsciously to yourself; and yet, as an intelligent man, you cannot but be aware that this is the very crucial point in dispute between you and your adversaries. As a logician you must know that in so doing you beg the whole question, and that if this postulate be denied you, your argument has nothing whatever to rest upon.
What if we should insist, as we do most certainly, that the threatening of Jehovah, " Thou shalt surely die," really means what the words so clearly express, and that Satan told a lie when he contradicted Him? What if we should contend that the speculations of the Grecian philosophers respecting the immortal nature of the human soul were mere speculations, without any proof whatever, as they themselves admitted'? What if we should show to you, as we can, that it was by these philosophical speculations, against which the apostle Paul so earnestly warns the primitive disciples that the Christian church was first corrupted, and that the horrible dogma of endless sin and suffering is the legitimate fruit of a heathen philosophy, and not in accordance with the teaching of Christ and the apostolic Fathers? What if we should assert, as we do, that the divine penalty of sin is Leath, as God's Word expressly declares; and in short, that in the very nature of things, a perpetual existence in sin and suffering is an absolute impossibility, excepting by a perpetual miracle, and that no life, apart from God the great Source of all life, can be indestructible and endless? What if we should demand of you, as we do, the proof of the contrary of all this, what becomes of your very logical argument for the "certainty of endless punishment," in the sense of endless suffering, which you build in the face of all these obstacle, by silently ignoring them?
But taking for granted, without one word of proof or apology, as though there were no disputing it, as your major premise, the natural and indefeasible immortality of all sinners, you undertake to show, not from the Scriptures, but by a logical process, "on the basis of sound ethics and pure reason," that, in view of the nature of sin and the strict justice of God, the punishment of sin must be eternal, and that, inasmuch as the sinner can never die, according to your assumption, and inasmuch as this punishment consists in the infliction of suffering, which you also assume, — as we will soon show,— therefore it is certain that he will sin and suffer forever. Quod erat demonstrandum.
I need not tell you that a building erected on the shifting sand, however showy it may be, or however solid may be its upper courses, is not to be trusted; nor has a chain, however long it may be, or however solid its individual links, any more sustaining power than there is strength in the hook from which it hangs; neither does your argument, however ingenious and logical it may be, carry any more force to its conclusion than it takes from the premise from which it starts.
Your argument on this question, by a silent petitio principii is not new, though there may be some peculiarity in your way of drawing it out. It is the same that was employed by the Grecian philosophers; it is the same that their disciples brought with them into the Christian church, in the latter part of the second century and onward, and which operated so effectually to corrupt the simplicity of its early faith, and obscure the beauty and glory of the Gospel, and defame the character of God, and reduce Him to the low level of the pagan deities they had formerly worshipped. It is the same that is now substantially employed by those who have accepted the teaching of this philosophy as superior to the teaching of the Bible concerning the nature of man. And yet, the wisest and best of the defenders of this fearful doctrine of eternal misery, which is a legitimate deduction from their postulate that the human soul is naturally and necessarily immortal, are free to confess that they have no proof for their postulate, without a divine revelation; but when we ask them to find it in the Scriptures, they are obliged to say that they cannot, excepting by way of inference, from the philosophy which they have read into them.
Bishop Tillotson says," The immortality of the soul is rather supposed or taken for granted than revealed in the Bible." Bishop Watson says, " That the soul is naturally immortal, is contradicted by Scripture which makes immortality a gift dependent on the Giver." Olshausen says, " The doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the name alike are unknown to the whole Bible." Archdeacon Blackburn says, " All the fine spun notions of the immortality of the soul and all the artificial deductions from that principle, teach nothing but the art of blowing scholastic bubbles."
Lord Macaulay thus writes, in the Edinburgh Review:
As to the other great question —the question, What becomes of man after death,— we do not see that a highly educated European, left to his unassisted reason, is more likely to be right than a Blackfoot Indian. Not a single one of the many sciences in which we surpass the Blackfoot Indians, can throw the smallest light on the state of the soul after animal life is extinct. In truth, all philosophers, ancient and modern, who have attempted without the light of Revelation, to prove the immortality of man, from Plato down to Franklin, appear to have failed deplorably.
Even Plato, the most positive, perhaps, of all those ancient philosophers, confesses his inability to prove his own speculations concerning the nature and des- tiny of man, and his need of a divine revelation, as he thus does in his 1'hmdon:
It appears to me that to know them clearly in the present life is either impossible or very difficult. But yet not to test what has been said, in every possible way, not to investigate the whole matter and exhaust upon it every effort, is the part of a very weak man. For we ought, in respect to these things, either to learn from others how they stand, or to discover them for ourselves; or, if both these are impossible, then taking the best of human reasonings, that which appears the best supported, and embarking upon that, as one risks himself on a raft, so to sail through life; unless one could be carried more safely, or with less risk, on a secret conveyance or some Divine Logos.
And again he says in his Alcibiades:
We wait patiently until someone, either God or some inspired man, teach us, as in Homer Pallas taught Diomede, and remove the darkness from our eyes.
Xenophanes closes his volume on Nature with these words:
No man has discovered any certainty, nor will discover it, concerning the gods and what I say of the universe. For if he uttered that which is the most perfect, still he does not know it, but conjecture hangs overall.
So of others whose language I might quote. Bat Cicero well expresses the common sentiment of them all when he says:
I have perused Plato's Phaedon with the greatest diligence and carefulness, over and over again, but know not how it is; whilst I read it I am convinced; when I lay the book aside, and begin to consider by myself the soul's immortality, all conviction ceases.
Archbishop Whately says:
To the Christian, indeed, all this doubt would be instantly removed if he found that the immortality of the soul was revealed in the Word of God. In fact, no such doctrine is revealed to us. The Christian's hope as founded in the promises contained in the Gospel, is the resurrection of the holy.
The late President Timothy Dwight, D.D., in his sermons, Vol. 1., p. 163, says:
Among Christians I know of but one who has regarded the immortality of the soul susceptible of demonstration. Should we believe with this ingenious writer, that the soul, metaphysically considered, is so formed as naturally to be immortal, we must still acknowledge. because it cannot be denied, that its existence may terminate at death, or at any other supposable period. Whatever has been created can certainly be annihilated by the power which created it. The continuance of the soul must therefore depend absolutely on the will of God. But that will never be known by creatures unless lie is pleased to disclose it. Without revelation, therefore, the immortality of the soul must be entirely uncertain.
Even Isaac Taylor, who rests his belief in the " survivance of the living principle on moral and religious considerations," as he confesses in his Physical Theory of Another lift, says:
As to the pretended demonstrations of immortality drawn from the assumed simplicity and indestructibility of the soul, as an immaterial substance, they appear either altogether inconclusive, or if conclusive, prove immensely more than we can desire, the immortality of birds, beasts, insects and zoophytes.
And yet you and that school of theologians for whom you speak, to whom God has given a Divine Revelation expressly to enlighten men on this very point, and to tell them how to make sure of this immortality, which these heathen philosophers thirsted after, while they were filled with apprehension of its forfeiture through sin, instead of listening to its teachings, must go back to this dubious philosophy for the foundation of your faith. You might better confess with James Martineau, " We do not believe immortality because we have proved it; but we forever try to prove it because we believe it." Indeed a late writer in the Bibliotheca Sacra, as quoted in McClintock and Strong's Encyclopedia, thus naïvely confesses that your convictions are all the stronger for the lack of the proof you seek:
It is said that much of the reasoning employed by pagan writers to prove the immortality of the soul, is unsound. This is a fact; and yet it by no means invalidates their right to believe in the conclusion which they deduced illogically. Believing a proposition thinly, we ate satisfied with the mere pretense of argument for its support. On searching in the distance for pi oof which earl only be found in immediate contact with us, we discover reasons for the belief, which, long before we had discovered them, was yet fully established in our own minds; and yet we deem these reasons sufficient to uphold the doctrine, although, in point of fact, the doctrine does not make trial of their strength by resting on them. If they were the props on which our belief in reality was founded, their weakness would be obvious at once, but as they have nothing to sustain, their insufficiency is the less apparent. Our belief continues, notwithstanding the frailness of the arguments which make a show of upholding it, and thus the very defects of the proof illustrate the strength of the conclusion, which remains firm in spite of them!!!
So much for the philosophical basis of your argument; and if you were to turn to the Scriptures you would find even less, if possible, than in your philosophy to warrant your conclusion. Indeed, the Word of God flatly contradicts bah your premise and your conclusion in every possible way, as I would show you were you arguing this question from Revelation. No attempt is ever made to find in the Bible your dogma of the natural and inalienable immortality of the sinner, with the logical conclusion of eternal sin and suffering to which it leads, excepting by first reading it into the Word of God, and changing the meaning of its crucial words on this question, compelling it to teach the doctrine by putting a forced and unnatural construction on its plainest language, and ignoring all that is opposed to it, both in the letter and spirit of its teachings; and even then there is hardly half a dozen passages in the whole Bible that can be relied on to give even a quasi plausibility to your doctrine. It is only by ringing changes on these texts and by constantly setting them forth in a new and unnatural sense, which is called their Scriptural sense, together with the powerful aid of traditional and ecclesiastical authority, with the indorsement of a heathen philosophy, that this incredible dogma for which you contend has been able to hold even a nominal place in the symbols of the Christian church to the present day. But since you have undertaken, as you say, to build your argument " on the basis of sound ethics and pure reason," as most of your school have preferred to do, I will not now enter upon the Scriptural argument on this question.
Let me say, however, in passing, that instead of discussing the positive side of this question of life and immortality, you have chosen — as is almost universally the case with those who hold with you—to discuss the negative and alternative side only. Hence this great question which is one, pre-eminently one, of Life, Eternal Life — what is it?— how are we to attain to it?— what are the conditions of its possession and enjoyment? — you and your associates, by assuming the very point on which everything turns, that all men are entitled to it without any conditions whatever, have degraded and confined to the alternative or negative question, that of the punishment ana misery of the unsaved. We, who oppose you, have vainly endeavored to hold you to the consideration of the question of the Life and Immortality that are brought to light in the Gospel. What is the source of this Eternal Life? To whom, how, when, is it given? If we could only prevail upon you to consider first the great primary question, and settle that in the light of the Gospel, I think you would find little difficulty in settling these secondary and alternative questions to the satisfaction of all true Christians. But so long as you decline to meet us in the open field, we must go to meet you in the one you have chosen, and try to show you that even there you are quite indefensible.
2. I am happy to be able to agree with you in the distinction you draw between that punishment which is final and penal, having no regard to the interests of the offender, and chastisement, often improperly called punishment, but which is administered principally for the reformation of the transgressor. On this subject President Hopkins well says in his Christian Ethics:
Evil inflicted for the sake of discipline is generally supposed to be punishment; and parents say to their children, that they punish them for their own good. But if that be the sole end, the infliction of evil has no reference to law, and cannot properly be called punishment. Punishment is the infliction of a previously declared penalty by the will of the law-giver, for the sake of sustaining the authority of the law.
But you seem to go further, and maintain that it is abstract law and justice that require this infliction, without any regard to the character of the Lawgiver Himself. You set up a grim, soulless impersonation of law and justice, against which every transgressor offends, in the place of a Holy, Divine Lawgiver, who claims our homage, not simply because He is a Supreme Lawgiver, but because He is infinitely wise and good, and every way worthy of our confidence, obedience and love, whether we can see the reason for what He commands or not. It is the moral quality of the power that commands, and not the power itself that claims our homage. You seem to 'forget that there an be no true obedience without love, for "love is he fulfilling of the whole law," and yet having divested our Heavenly Father of every attribute that can command our love, and set Him forth as an all-powerful, heartless Lawgiver, you represent Him as inflicting simple revenge or retaliation, rather than necessary punishment, in a word, punishment that is vindictive rather than vindicative
But you seem to make no distinction between guilt as an abstract quality, and guiltiness as inherent in the one who committed that act. According to your theory, there can be no such thing as actual pardon, or justification, or the blotting out of sins on repentance even in this life. It is true that guilt, abstractly considered, is always guilt, and it will always be a fact that every guilty act was a guilty act, and that the transgressor will never cease to have been a transgressor, but that he will forever remain a transgressor, and, as such, guilty and deserving of eternal punishment, may perhaps seem right and just to your mind "on the basis of sound ethics and pure reason," but I cannot think your moral sense would justify any such principle in its application; certainly not if applied to yourself. No doubt in your boyhood you may have committed many naughty acts, which you knew to be wrong, and for which you are now sincerely sorry, and which nothing would now tempt you to repeat. It would be neither just nor true to call you now a liar or a thief because you may have told a lie or stolen a lump of sugar from your mother's sugar-bowl when a child. However deserving you might have been of punishment then, I cannot think you would consider it just and right to punish you now and forever for these offenses. Such is your logic. But I do not find any such teaching in the Scriptures. Paul said to the Athenians, "The times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commanded all men everywhere to repent." David says, " He knows our frame and remembered that we are dust." The Lord Himself says, I, even I, am He that blotted out thy transgressions for Mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins." "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow, though they be red like crimson they shall be as wool."
3. But it is to your view of the nature of the punishment that I especially object. Here again you must take for granted the very point that needs to be proved, to give any plausibility to your argument or force to your conclusion. You assume everywhere throughout your whole argument, without the least hint that any other view is possible, that punishment is the infliction of suffering, positive suffering. Yon call the punishment which is inflicted on the sinner, "infinite suffering," not however, to denote its intensity, but its endlessness, for your theory admits of different degrees of eternal suffering. But you insist that in all cases "it must be endless from the nature of the case." This is the view of punishment that Dr. Bartlett urges in his "Life and Death Eternal." But he does not simply assume it, as you do, he labors to show that "punishment consists in suffering," and that the amount of the punishment inflicted is properly and only measured by the amount of suffering inflicted, and the extent to which it is protracted. Hence he says, " Even extinction (of life) in so far as it would be punishment at all, would be so only so far as the expectation of it and the process would be productive of suffering" (p. 289). Of course, granting you these two assumptions, 1st, that all sinners are deathless beings, and 2d, that the punishment which is inflicted on them in the future is positive suffering, the conclusion is logically sure, that they will never cease to suffer. But your second postulate is as baseless as your first. You seem to have taken your ideas of punishment from the barbarians of the darkest ages of the world. You cannot but know that under all civilized governments of the present day, punishment consists very largely in the cutting off from privileges, in the denial of rights and pleasures that are accorded to the innocent; that the whipping-post. the wheel, the rack, roasting alive, flaying, and other savage methods of torture, that once obtained, and still linger in the darkest places of the earth. have under the softening influence of the Gospel given place to methods that are more humane, and that too to the manifest advantage of the authority of good government. And capital punishment, the severest punishment known to human governments, consists in the deprivation of life itself, and even this is administered in as summary and painless a manner as possible.
Is there no such thing as capital punishment under the government of the Supreme Ruler? Has He put it out of His power to rid the universe of devils and obdurate sinners, by creating them absolutely immortal? Has He no other way of dealing with them as a final resort, but by putting them under torture forever and ever? Or does He choose to prolong their worthless existence that He may torment them to all eternity? Had you taken your theodicy and your notions of punishment from the Scriptures rather than from pagan sources, you would have seen that the phrase (Matt. 25. 46) kolasin aionion, everlasting punishment once and only once found — in the Bible, and then evidently referring to the punishment of the nations at the Second corning of our Lord, but which, your school insists on applying to the case of individual sinners in the future life, may be quite as literally rendered everlasting excision, according to the radical meaning of the word kolasis, as everlasting punishment; and when you find Paul (2 Thess. 1. 9) expressly saying that the incorrigible " shall be punished with everlasting destruction," you could have no reason for understanding this punishment in any other sense, but simply to sustain your hoirible doctrine of everlasting suffering.
But still more explicitly, if possible, the Scriptures everywhere declare, from beginning to end, with constant reiteration and under every variety of expression, positively, negatively, categorically, inferentially, implicitly, explicitly, and figuratively, that death, death, DEATH, is the penalty of sin. "Thou shalt surely die." " The soul that sinned it shall die." "Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." "The end of these things is death," and so on, in hundreds of passages that might be cited. It is nowhere said to be everlasting suffering, but always death and everlasting destruction.
The -prime agent in accomplishing this destruction is represented as fire, " devouring fire," "consuming fire," "the fire of Gehenna," " the unquenchable fire." The process of this punitive destruction may be full of pain; it will be on the part of the rejectors of the salvation offered in the Gospel. There will be "weeping and gnashing of teeth," but the end is sure and inevitable. Fire is pre-eminently a destructive agent. It is for this special purpose that it is employed. What authority have you for assuming that this fire, instead of being employed for its natural and legitimate purpose of consuming and purifying, — as the word implies,—is only employed as an agent to torment those whom the Deity miraculously keeps from destruction for this very purpose? The pain it inflicts is the evidence that it is doing its legitimate work, and nothing but a miracle of almighty power can prevent it.
That death is the punishment due to sin is made evident also by the penalty of the Mosaic law for the civil government of the Hebrews, instituted by God Himself. This was almost universally death, —not imprisonment, not torture, certainly not imprisonment for life under torture, but death. Death for adultery, for blasphemy, for bearing false-witness, for idolatry, for incest, for man-stealing, for Sabbath-breaking, for rape, for unchastity, for witchcraft, etc. The intent of all this was to illustrate and make evident that the penalty of God's moral law is also the penalty of death, to the soul of man.
The same truth is shown in the death of the animal sacrifices so continually offered, by the appointment of God, to signify the desert of the sinner, and the need of an atonement in order to his forgiveness and salvation. These animals were not to be tortured, but to be put to death. And so Christ the Lamb of God, the Great Sacrifice for the sins of the world, to which all these animal sacrifices pointed, was put to death. He laid down His life for us, in our stead. It was not simply by His suffering, but by His death, the spilling of His blood, and His resurrection to life, that we were redeemed from the power of death.
Now you cannot advance one step toward your monstrous conclusion that the punishment for sin is eternal suffering, without ignoring all these positive declarations of God's Word, and its equally explicit evidence that death and destruction are the sure penalty of God's law. Perhaps nothing has so taxed the ingenuity of Platonic theologizers, from the days of Augustine till now, as the discovery or invention of some way of avoiding the conclusion, that the punishment to be inflicted upon sinners is actual death, the deprivation of life, that is, capital punishment; for their theory of the deathless nature of man absolutely forbids them to admit that the Scriptures mean what they say and say what they mean on this matter.
Death when predicated of man must mean something else. The older theologians very generally believed, and so the Papal church now teaches, that it means the most excruciating torture that can be imagined, by literal fire and brimstone, perpetually increasing more and more to all eternity. I might quote to you page after page from Edwards, Bellamy, Jeremy Taylor, South, and a multitude of other good " sound orthodox divines " to prove this, if it were necessary. Cruden says in his concordance, under the word "Death," "It means the perpetual separation of the whole man from God's heavenly presence and glory, to be tormented forever with the devil and his angels." So the Westminster Confession teaches that the wicked are to be " cast into hell," to be punished with " most grievous and unspeakable torments in body and soul, with the devil and his angels" in "hell-fire forever." Indeed many of these theologians have endeavored to show, — and perhaps you agree with them, — that the atonement made by the Son of God consisted, not in His dying, but in His suffering, and that He actually suffered as much as those whom He redeemed would have suffered forever!! This idea of interminable torment by actual fire has proved to be so shocking to the moral sense, and so incredible, that the theologians of the present day have felt compelled to modify and soften it down. Hence Prof. Hovey, in his" State of Me Impenitent Dead," says death means not the extinction of conscious being, but the extinction of well-being. Landis, in his volume on " The Immortality of the Soul," says, " It means a severance between the creature and the Creator as the source of true life and happiness." Dr. Bartlett, in his "Life and Death Eternal," says, "Life is true functional activity. Death is merely a change of condition or mode of action," or in other words, the loss of "true functional activity." Prof. Mead in his volume entitled " The Soul Here and Hereafter," defines life as " vitalized," and death as "unvitalized, or rather devitalized." Others, as if to relieve the Deity somewhat from the odium of inflicting eternal torment say, that it is self-inflicted, and that it consists in being given over to the torments of an accusing conscience. A writer in a late number of the New Englander says, " If the soul were truly penitent, it could not suffer any longer the supposed agonies of remorse. And if such a case were to occur, orthodox theology, so far as we know, presents no obstacles to the soul's blessedness from that time forth." You seem to favor this view when you say, "If in the great day there are any innocent who have no accusing consciences, they will escape hell."
"Could Satan really convince himself that his moral character is not his own work, but that of God, or of nature, his remorse would cease and his punishment would end." Still another writer, Walker, in his "Philosophy of Skepticism," goes still farther, and says that "Hell is appointed in mercy to the lost because heaven would be less congenial." In one part of your paper you seem to agree even with him, for you argue, "That endless punishment is reasonable is proved by the preference of the wicked themselves. The non submissive, rebellious, defiant and impenitent spirit prefers hell to heaven." However, you evidently do not think it necessary to relieve the Deity of the responsibility of inflicting endless punishment on the sinner by trying to show that he inflicts it upon himself; nor for the purpose of pleasing the sinner because this is what he prefers; nor do you attempt to show very definitely in what this punishment consists, excepting that it consists in suffering, and that it is actually inflicted by God Himself; for you explicitly say that "when, as the Supreme Judge, He punishes rebellious and guilty subjects of His government, He causes an endless suffering."
But as you have not undertaken to argue your doctrine from the Scriptures, but rather as a philosopher, and a pagan philosopher I must say, I will not pursue the Scriptural argument, but try to meet you on your chosen ground. But before closing the Bible, which has been given-us for the express purpose of enlightening us on this very point, and going back into the darkness of heathenism for light, let me ask you as a Professor of Systematic Theology, in one of our Christian schools: What if the Bible should happen to be true, and mean just what it says? What if the death that is threatened against sinners should mean death? What if " destruction " should be understood as meaning destruction; and "everlasting destruction " should be taken to mean everlasting destruction? What becomes of your logical arguments " on the basis of sound ethics and pure reason," for endless suffering 1V. Your assumption that the condemned will live to sin and suffer eternally, is no more agreeable to sound reason than to Scripture. It is impossible in the very nature of things, for a dependent creature to live in a state of perpetual suffering, excepting by a miracle of almighty power to keep him alive. As surely as sin causes suffering, whether of body or of mind, so surely must it sooner or later, end in the death of the sufferer. It matters not whether we consider this death as the penalty of the divine law or as the necessary effect of natural law; the result is the same. It is as true to science as to Scripture, that " Evil shall slay the wicked "; that " Sin, when it is finished bringeth forth death "; that " Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse "; and that " The end of these things is death." The suffering that sin is sure to cause is symptomatic of disease within, a mortal disease, which is well likened to a cancer or leprosy which goes steadily onward corrupting, corroding the organism or life upon which it preys, till it brings its victim to inevitable, remediless death. It is like a defect or breakage in a machine that might otherwise be considered perfect. It produces irregular working. Its tendency is to increase more and more till it brings the whole to utter ruin.
Even the heathen poets recognized the necessarily fatal effect of the torments they supposed to be inflicted upon the victims of divine wrath, in the infernal regions. They supposed them to be kept alive only by miraculous power. The vitals of Prometheus at which the tormenting vulture was incessantly gnawing, needed to be as constantly renewed by a miracle. So the scholastics of the medieval church, who had taken over into their creed the notion of the eternal torment of the victims of God's wrath by fire, held that this was a peculiar sort of fire, ignis sapiens, that constantly renewed and restored that which it devoured. Even our modern theologians, such as are truly scientific as well as logical, are obliged to admit that no creature could finally survive the torments to which all lost sinners are supposed to be doomed, unless he were constantly upheld and kept in being by the power of God, and that all the condemned will be so upheld for this express purpose, that they may never cease to suffer.
The inquisitors of the Papal church, under the direction of such persecuting monsters as Charles V. and Philip 2. did their best to prolong the agony of their victims to the farthest possible extent, but death would come, in kindness sooner or later, to snatch the poor sufferers from their fiendish clutch, and all the sooner, as their sufferings were made more severe. Though suffering follows hard upon sin, as it ever will, and ever must, by the very law of our being, as well as by the ordinance of heaven, our God expressly provided, when sin first entered this world, bringing misery in its train, that neither the one nor the other should live forever. Tie, at once, as the Scriptures tell us, prohibited Adam from access to the Tree of Life, " lest he should put forth his hand and take also of the Tree of Life, and eat and live forever."
V. Your conception of the Deity seems to me to be false and inconsistent with the revelation He has made of Himself in the Scriptures, especially in the Gospel. I cannot understand how it is possible for you to love and trust such a God as you describe, though you may well fear Him; nor how you can commend Him to the love and confidence of others with any hope of success. The Bible, indeed, represents Him as just and as terrible in His judgments, but also as long-suffering and full of tender compassion and infinite in goodness and mercy. A false and erroneous view is given of Him when the severer traits of His character are alone exhibited, and those that are gracious and lovable are kept out of sight. As the colors in the spectrum must all be combined to produce pure light, so all the several attributes of His character though each is perfect in itself, must be taken together to give us any true view of that perfect character which is summed up in one word Love.
The view that you give is such as a guilty conscience, unenlightened by the Gospel, takes of Him. It is the view of heathen philosophers. Hence, I notice you repeatedly referring to Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Pindar, and even quoting from Dante, in confirmation of your views, but rarely quoting from the Gospels. Your description of God might well answer for that of Rhadamanthus, the fabled Judge of the Hadean world, who was supposed to be implacably just in his decisions. But I do not know that anyone ever thought of loving him. It was because the half pagan ecclesiastics of the dark ages had robbed the true God of every trait but those that were fearful, that they might hold the people in subjection by fear, that they were obliged to betake themselves to the saints and to the Virgin Mary, who were supposed to have some sense of compassion and some sympathy for their dig., tresses. It was in the name of this dreadful God, and by His authority, as they alleged, and in imitation of His method of dealing with sinners, that these merciless administrators of ecclesiastical law inflicted all their abominable atrocities upon the subjects of their displeasure. " Bloody " Queen Mary excused herself for her hellish deeds of cruelty by saying, "As the souls of heretics are hereafter to be eternally burning in hell, there can be nothing more proper than for me to imitate the Divine vengeance by burning them on earth."
The presentation of such a picture of the Deity as you give, not only offends the moral sense of intelligent men throughout Christendom, and strengthens sceptics and infidels in their unbelief and opposition to the religion that indorses it, but seems to justify even intelligent pagans in rejecting it. " How long does your God torment His enemies?" asked a heathen inquirer of his missionary teacher. "Forever and ever," was the reply. " Then," said the inquirer, "He is not as good as the one we now worship, for he torments them only a thousand years."
That every law, whether human or Divine, must have its sanctions, is too evident to require any argument. We have no thought of keeping out of view the fearful, fatal nature of sin, nor the disastrous results to which it will surely lead, if persisted in. Indeed, it is our special desire to "magnify God's law and make it honorable," by showing these disastrous results in their true character. When rightly viewed in the light of Revelation, especially in the light of the Gospel, this law commends itself to the conscience of every man. It is by presenting false, distorted, exaggerated views of the judicial character of the Deity, and revolting, incredible views of the penalty of His holy law, that it is brought into contempt. This is just the result we have to deplore at the present day. This picture of the heartless, vengeful, inexorably cruel nature of the Deity, and of the shocking and ceaseless torments He is said to inflict upon His enemies, has been so habitually held up before the minds of the people from generation to generation, and those who were famishing for the Bread of Life have been so abundantly served only with stones and scorpions, that a lamentable reaction is now setting in, that threatens to drive true faith from the earth. Infidels, sceptics, agnostics and neologists are fearfully multiplying. Multitudes have been driven from the sanctuary as "sheep having no shepherd," and those that remain are only kept in their places by ignoring the fatal consequences of sin, and by listening to the siren song of future bliss. Having nothing with which to replace the horrible dogma which they have ceased to fear, the masses are coming very generally to believe that all will be well in the world to come, and that though they fail to embrace the offer of salvation in this life, by some sudden change in articulo mortis, or through some post mortem probation, all men will at last, by the mercy of God, be swept into heaven.
It is only by preaching the Word as God has given it to us, stripped of human conceits, and of the accretions of error that have fastened themselves upon it, during long ages of darkness, and by presenting both the Law and the Gospel to the view of perishing men, and the alternative of Death and Life, as they are presented in the Scriptures, that they will be made to see their perishing condition without a Divine Savior, and induced to make haste to lay hold of the hope that is set before them in the Gospel. It is not by the terrors of the law chiefly, certainly not by such terrors as outrage their moral sense, and are absolutely incredible, that sinners are to be won to love and true obedience. It is pre-eminently " the goodness of God that leadeth to repentance."
It is also full time that we all should entertain some higher conception of our Deity than that of a mere Ruler or Judge or Rewarder and Punisher of His creatures; and that His supreme end in our creation and government is to reward and punish us; and that if we shall succeed in escaping the one, and in gaining the other we have nothing more to desire, and He nothing more to bestow. Such, indeed, are the low and crude conceptions that children often entertain of their relation to their earthly parents and tutors, forgetful that the grand object and end of all wise tutelage is to develop and form character, and to fit the subjects of it for higher and better conditions in life; and that, though rewards are offered and penalties threatened in every imperfect stage of advancement, as incentives to right action, the final object is the perfecting of character. So our Heavenly Father desires to lift us up from the low, animal, imperfect, sinful, mortal condition in which our career is begun, into that higher realm, which is purely spiritual, and to make us fit for it—if we will consent to it—and for companionship with the holy angels, and for union to Himself in love, and for the life that is everlasting. This is the perfected and blessed condition to which He will bring all who will throw open their hearts to the influences of His grace, and permit Him to work His own good pleasures in them.
But alas! for those who turn away from Him, and close their ears to His call, and shut their hearts against the sweet influences of His spirit, who resist His authority, who despise His provisions of mercy, and choose the way of sin and death, How can they be fitted for His everlasting kingdom of purity and love? There is no place for them there, nor anywhere throughout the length and breadth of His holy, happy universe. There is no eternal life for them to inherit.
Cut off in love as well as in judgment from Him who is the only true source of eternal life, the incorrigible sinner must perish in his own corruption, and the light of his forfeited, useless, hopeless life must go out in darkness forever.
Philadelphia, Pa., April, 1885.
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF " THE CONGREGATIONALIST"
BEING A REPLY TO AN ANSWER GIVEN IN "THE CONGREGATIONALIST" TO A CORRESPONDENT WHO ASKED THE EDITOR'S VIEWS AS TO THE STRENGTH OF THE PROOF OF CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY"
Published as a tract by 1. C. WELLCOME, Yarmouth, Maine; also reprinted in the Rainbow (London), January-February, 1885; also a translation in Ape, Biblica. Italy.
Dear Sir: —In your issue of Oct. 9th, 1884, you gave to your readers a brief note of inquiry, signed M. M., and your reply to the same under the above caption. I have no fault to find with the spirit of your reply, but I have with your argument. I would, at once, have asked for the privilege of briefly replying to it in the same spirit, in your paper, bad I not learned by experience how useless it would be to hope for any such privilege. This is my reason for addressing to you through another channel, a few criticisms to which I think your article is fairly open.
The note of inquiry, and your reply to the same are as follows: — I am a good deal perplexed, and sometimes a little troubled, by the arguments of a good neighbor of mine, who says that the old " notion" of the immortality of the soul is a dream and a mistake, and that the Bible doesn't teach that any people besides those who believe in Christ will be immortal. If she were an infidel I shouldn't care, but she seems to be a good woman, and I don't quite know what to think about it. What do you think? K. K.
We think the "good woman" has been misled by the crude fancies of well-meaning but too adventurous speculators as to spiritual things, who with great seeming of devoutness preach what they call Life in Christ alone, and who do this with an earnestness which interprets certain portions of Scripture into its support, and ignores the natural force of certain other portions making against it, until they have thus wrongly persuaded themselves that the Word of God is wholly with them.
They start unfortunately to reach the truth as to this.
Their primary object is to fashion some hypothesis which will permit escape from the force of the old-fashioned Scripture doctrine that all who live out their earthly lives without repentance and faith in Christ, must go away into everlasting punishment. They assume that it will be unjust in God to punish the impenitent forever, and therefore that some way of explanation must be contrived by which the conclusion that he will do so can be avoided. And they find this in the theory that man was not created naturally immortal, but that immortality is the gift of God through Jesus Christ to those who believe in him and to them only; so that all who die in impenitence die as the brutes die, and no longer live. They assume that this failure to receive immortality is what is meant by the threatened punishment of sin. They assume that it is more honorable to God, and more consistent with his eternal justice, to leave such disobedient children quietly to drop into non-existence than to give them an eternal life which must be spent away from him and heaven. Now the conclusions of those who go to the Scriptures with a theory all made out beforehand, for the purpose of finding arguments in its favor, are always to be distrusted. It is nothing against the Bible that, from its many-sided exhibitions of a vast variety of spiritual truths, it is possible, by a process of selection — a process not consciously biased, much less dishonest, yet which leans beforehand so strongly in one direction as to be constantly tempted to overvalue some classes of passages and to undervalue others — to manufacture the semblance of proof for a great many notions, which would never spontaneously suggest themselves to the mind which with predisposed candor sits down to take the Bible at its word and believe just what it naturally suggests, and what, by a method of interpretation such as it is common to apply to other books, it evidently says. Moreover, the divine character and the divine ways need no such justification from men. Our business is, by the humble, prayerful and diligent study of the Word, to find out what God says on these subjects, and then believe it; leaving him to care for his own consistency, and to justify his own righteousness.
We further think it not very likely that the almost universal belief of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history till now, has been the belief of a lie. Whence came it but from some original revelation from God? And would he mislead his creatures as to such a point? The Egyptians mummied the bodies of their departed, that their souls might have them again hereafter, and provided wheat for seed at the resurrection. The Babylonians, in like manner, laid up date stones with their dead. The Greeks put an obolus under the lifeless tongue, that Charon, the ferryman crossing the Styx might have his pay. Xenophon, Plato and Cicero united to indorse such an utterance as this:
Nothing could ever persuade me that souls live while they are in mortal bodies, but die when they leave them; nor that the soul is senseless when it has left a senseless body; but when freed from all admixture with the body, it has begun to be pure and upright, then it is sensible.
So Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Druidism. Mohammedanism, however differing as to all else, agree in declaring the fact of life after death. And if there be, or have been, any pagan tribe without a like conviction, the exception is so inconsiderable as only to prove the rule. We therefore wholly agree as to this with Herbert Spencer — glad once that we can cordially adopt his words — when he says:
To suppose that these multiform conceptions should be, one and all, absolutely groundless, discredits too profoundly that average human intelligence from which all our individual intelligences are derived.
Let us add as a consideration of vastly greater weight, it "discredits too profoundly" the character of God, to suppose that by his permissive Providence, if not by his direct suggestion in the beginning, the generations of his children, through so many scores of centuries, have been deceived as to their expectations of a life beyond the grave.
We think, further, that science, even the most "advanced." not only does neither deny nor conflict with, but positively affirms as probable, the doctrine that the soul lives on when the body dies. Profs. Tait and Stuart. in their "Unseen Universe," insist that personal immortality is the natural and necessary consequence of the modern ideas of the conservation of force, and the principle of continuity. Again, we think God has revealed to every human being, through his conscience, that he is to live after this life. What is it that guilty men, from Nero who fancied that groans came to his ear from the grave of the mother he had murdered, down to the poor fellow who, the other day, on his death-bed confessed a crime for years concealed, so dread? Not annihilation, they would welcome that; but " a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries."
Again, we think that that innate sense of justice which God gave us all, includes from him the revelation of our immortality. Suppose John Wilkes Booth had died, from the excitement of the moment, of heart disease, in that instant in which he assassinated the President. Could we be content to think that all was ended with him, and, if his illustrious victim were not a Christian. and so did not. on the theory we are combating, receive eternal life in Christ, that both sank together into a like nothingness, infinite justice leaving the great crime unavenged? And can it be reconciled with those conceptions of fair dealing, which our heavenly Father has associated with himself in human minds, to imagine that .Judas, who betrayed his Master, with such abhorred wretches as Robespierre and Marat, and their brutal and bloody fellows, received precisely the same treatment at his hands after their last breath, which has been accorded to the gentlest and loveliest human being who has failed to accept Christ for her Savior, and so, on this theory, gone down into her grave without his gift of life beyond it?
Finally, we think the Bible, however some of its utterances may be made to seem to indorse it. as a whole, is fatally against this notion. And of special utterances we cite — as specimen texts — the following, which seem to s impossible of harmony with the theory of "Life in Christ alone":
Eccl. 12: 7. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit to God who gave it.
This was spoken, in the largest sense, not of the dead who accept Christ by faith, but of all. And Prof. Stuart says the last clause means that "the soul returns to the peculiar and immediate presence of God, there to be judged; in what other way can we make out a consistent Hebrew sentiment from this passage?" Then that soul must be alive that it can return.
Matt. 22: 30. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as angels in heaven.
Here Christ speaks not of those who accept him by faith, but, generally, of all who die. Nor does he say to the Sadducees, "Ye are partly right," but he says, "Ye do err, not knowing [not rightly comprehending' the Scriptures, nor the power of God." And, as the angels in heaven live as spirits, we have here Christ's own word that all men who die will live as spirits after death.
Matt. 25: 46. And these shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous into eternal life.
This antithesis becomes pointless, not to say even fraudulent, if " to go away into eternal punishment" means to have ceased to be. Rom. 2: 6-9. Who will render that the future judgment] to every man according to his works . . . unto them that are factious and obey not the truth, but obey unrighteousness, shall be wrath and indignation; tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that worketh evil.
Was it dealing honestly with men for the apostle to say such things, if there really are to be at the future judgment no factious and disobedient souls; all having committed eternal suicide beforehand by the voluntary rejection of the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world?
If our friend then wants to know what we think about this matter, this, condensed to a single sentence, is what we do not think, namely: 1Ve do not think that all great, good, and wise men, from the beginning until within the memory of those now living, have been self-deceived as to a thing of infinite concern, and under circumstances almost necessitating the conviction that the light which led them astray was the light from heaven; nor that "star-eyed science" has wandered into error in regard to it; nor that our heavenly Father has deliberately deceived us through the conscience. or played us false in that instinct of justice which he has implanted within us, to make us expect a future judgment for the wicked, when they have long before ceased to be. Nor can we believe that the solemn declarations of his word are fairly to be read into less than nothing and vanity. They mean what they say. And those who are wise as they consider their latter end, will govern themselves accordingly.—Editor of "Congregationalist."
MR. PETTINGELL'S REPLY.
As I have made this question one of very earnest and careful study for many years, and have written and published somewhat largely on it — as you know, and have reached conclusions quite different from those you express, and to which tradition is still holding the majority in our so-called orthodox churches, I think I may be permitted in a modest way, without incurring the charge of egotism, to follow your example and say, what I, — or speaking editorially, as you do — what we think.
1. Let me, in the outset, in behalf of our common Christianity, and in the name of a large and rapidly increasing number of Biblical scholars arid earnest Christian disciples, of every name, both in this country and in other lands, who are at one with me on this question, thank you for omitting from your article those unseemly flings and contemptuous sneers that have heretofore so largely characterized the writings of those who have opposed the advocates of this doctrine of eternal life only in Christ. And now that you have begun to look at us somewhat more charitably, and at the doctrine itself, as deserving, at least, kind and courteous treatment, I would fain hope, that in process of time, you will advance a step or two further, and condescend to meet our presentation of the case, by fair and honest arguments.
2. While you have seemed—no doubt to yourself, and perhaps to those who wish to agree with you — to be arguing the question in dispute, namely: Do we inherit the boon of immortality from Adam, who, as the Scriptures expressly declare, forfeited it for himself and his posterity by. sin, or do we receive it, if at all, as the Scriptures also declare with equal clearness, as "the gift of God through Jesus our Lord "? You have hardly touched this, the real question. You have directed your attention almost exclusively to the alternative question — to the fate of the unsaved. This is indeed an important question, and has its place in the controversy, but it is not the main question. But even this alternative question you have argued on a false basis—though perhaps unwittingly, yet so entirely false, as to quite destroy whatever of force there may be in the argument you have thought to employ against us.
AL- You assume as the foundation of your whole argument against our view, and all your quotations are directed to this point — that the advocates of eternal life only in Christ hold to the utter destruction of the wicked in the first death, and that for such there is nothing beyond. That this view may be held by certain erratic individuals, who hang, as it were, on the outskirts of the great body of believers in the doctrine of eternal life only in Christ, need not be denied. It is only what is true of all religious bodies. But you must know, or surely ought to know, that the great mass of those whose views you have professedly undertaken to oppose, believe as you do, in the resurrection of all the dead, "both of the just and the unjust," and in a future general judgment, and that it is only in the second death that the wicked are to be "destroyed with an everlasting destruction." How long the interval between the first and second death; what may be the process of this final judgment; how many or how few "stripes" will be inflicted upon those who " have sinned without law," as Paul says, (Rom. 2: 12) and "shall also perish without law; what shall be the severer doom of those who perish from Christian lands, and who have despised and rejected the special grace of God as offered in the gospel—what chagrin, what shame, what anguish of spirit, what lamentations and gnashing of teeth shall be their portion, and how long protracted before their lamps shall go out in utter darkness and silence — we know not, nor do we venture even to guess. We have no theory nor knowledge on this dark side of the question, beyond what is on the face of the Scriptures; and the doctrine of eternal life only in Christ needs no human speculations on these points to indorse or sustain it. It is sufficient for us to know and believe what the Scriptures so explicitly declare, that the "eternal life" which God gives to his children, " is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath the life, and he that hath not the Son, has NOT the life." (1 John 5: 12.)
Having been set right here, you will readily perceive that all you have to say of the necessity for a future judgment; of the forebodings of a guilty conscience; and of the fancies of the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, and other heathen peoples respecting the future, is all well enough in proof of the doctrine of a general judgment to come, and of future punishment for sin — in which we believe as firmly as you do, — but is quite wide of the mark as opposed to the doctrine of eternal life only in Christ.
3. Assuming also, as you do, that this almost universal belief in a life to come, in which rewards and punishments are to be meted out to men according to their deserts, is the same thing as a belief in the endlessness of that life, both for the righteous and the wicked, which, by the way is quite a different thing, I am surprised that you should seem to be ignorant of the origin of such a belief, and inquire, "Whence came it but from some original revelation from God?" "And would he mislead his creatures as to such a point?" No, God would not; but Satan would, if he could, and this is just what he has done, as the Scriptures expressly tell us. If you will turn to Gen. 3:4, you will learn bow this " lie," as you hypothetically call it, originated, "And the serpent said unto the woman, thou shalt NOT surely die,' and this was in flat contradiction of the word of Jehovah, who had said to Adam, in case he should disobey: "thou shalt surely die." Our first parents believing the assurance of the tempter rather than the Word of God, as SO many of their posterity have done to the present day, disobeyed and incurred the doom — of what?—not simply misery, but of death itself, as we learn further on, 3: 17-19, "In sorrow shalt thou eat of it [the ground] all the days of thy life— till thou return unto the ground; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." This delusive lie of immortality without a Savior is pre-eminently the false tradition against which our Lord warned his disciples; for the speculating Pharisees had already in his day corrupted the Hebrew faith by teaching it. Paul also emphatically and repeatedly warns the early Christian disciples to beware of the seductive influence of the same philosophic delusion.
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world and not after Christ. "I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ."
If they had heeded these warnings, this Platonic philosophy as it is now called, would not have found entrance into the Church, as it did after the second century, to seduce these disciples from the simple "faith once delivered to the saints" and to dim the luster of the pure gospel.
4. You certainly misrepresent us when you call us " adventurous speculators," and say that our " primary object is to fashion some hypothesis that will permit escape from the force of the old-fashioned Scripture doctrine;" that we " assume" our points, etc., for nothing could be further from the truth. We bring no assumption whatever to the Scriptures. Our simple and only object is to learn just what they say and to believe that and nothing else on this question. Indeed, this is the chief objection which is commonly brought against us: that we construe the Scriptures too literally, and believe too implicitly what they say.
You cannot but admit that if the language of the Bible is to be taken literally as meaning what the words express, our doctrine is proved beyond all possible doubt, for it everywhere declares, from first to last, with constant repetition and in the plainest terms possible, that the wicked "shall die;' "shall perish in their own corruption;" "shall perish for- ever;" " shall be destroyed like the brutes;" " shall be destroyed with an everlasting destruction."
And this, not only directly and positively, but indirectly and negatively, and also by the use of a wonderful variety of illustrations from the natural world, all bearing on this one point: that the wicked cannot " inherit eternal life;" that they shall be " burned up as the chaff," " as the stubble;" " shall wither as branches that are severed from the vine," and are " cast into the oven to be burned;" that they " shall be as nothing;" shall be as though they had not been; " " shall be no more," etc.
Then, on the other hand, they declare with equal emphasis and clearness and equal frequency that eternal life is the "gift of God through Jesus Christ," that it is from him only; that it is the peculiar portion of the righteous—indeed, this is the real distinctive feature of the Gospel message—the offer of eternal life through a Divine Savior, to dying men; and sinners are urged to seek it, to strive to attain to it, to lay hold of it. To quote all the passages bearing directly on this point would be to quote a large part of the Bible. Let this one, which asserts this doctrine in the plainest language, both positively and negatively, suffice:
And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life; and this Weis in his Son. He that hath the Son hath the life, and he that hath not the Son, hath not the life. (John 5: 11, 12.)
Now we believe just what the Scriptures say on this matter, and that they mean what they say. But you do not; for if you were to accept of these utterances as meaning what they actually declare, you would not have an inch of ground to stand on. The only way in which you can stand for one moment before them is to deny all this, and to say that "death" when threatened against the sinner in the Bible does not mean actual death; that "destruction" does not mean destruction; that "to perish" does not mean to actually perish. But that these and other kindred expressions mean only an endless perpetuity of existence, in a state of sin and misery! and that the "eternal life " which is promised as the "gift of God" to believers, does not actually mean life eternal, but only a certain pure and blessed condition of a life that would otherwise be eternal also, but sinful and wretched.
Why must you deny to these plain, simple words their ordinary meaning when man is spoken of, and give to them a new and unnatural sense, such as they have in no other connection, a sense which you call a "religious or scriptural sense." The answer is obvious—your philosophy of the indestructible nature of man requires it.
No, No. It is not us, but you yourselves who go to the Scriptures, " with a theory all made out, beforehand," and feel constrained to construe their language so as to sustain it if possible; and this is the reason, and the only reason why their most explicit and positive language must be so changed as to make the Word of God seem not to contradict your theory of the natural and indefeasible immortality of man. This practice which scholastic ingenuity has fastened upon the Scriptures, and which has been given to us through the tradition of a corrupt church, has been so fully indorsed by all our systems of theology and church catechisms, our Biblical commentaries and our religious literature, and the teachings of the pulpit and the Sabbath-school, and theological seminaries, that it seems quite proper, and indeed the only thing to do in reading the Scriptures, to put these unnatural senses on all the texts that speak of the destiny of man. This has become so popular and habitual, that it exposes one to the charge of heresy " to believe and teach that the Bible actually means what it says on this subject. Indeed it is next to impossible to make those who have become habituated to this treatment of the Scriptures see bow false and mischievous it is, and how unfair it is, and how incompatible with any intelligent understanding of God's Word, and how utterly without any warrant but that of a false philosophy which is actually opposed to that Word.
I boldly challenge you or any other Biblical scholar to cite one single passage from Genesis to Revelation that asserts or implies the doctrine of our natural immortality which you advocate. There are, it is true, some few passages which speak of the future judgment of the wicked, into which it may be read if you bring the idea of their indestructible nature with you to their reading. There is not an error that ever cursed the Church, whether Papal or Protestant, that may not be—that has not been—read into the Scriptures by its advocate in the same way.
There are, indeed, numerous texts that speak of the Eternal Life of the righteous, but it is only as the gift of God through Jesus Christ. It is not a natural immortality. It is only by a new birth that they receive it. It is by ignoring this radical distinction between the natural man, and the renewed man, and by wresting these passages from their special application to the righteous, and predicating them of all men alike, that any appearance of a plausible support, from the Scriptures, can be given to your doctrine.
Of the four passages you cite from the Bible as "specimen texts," as well as the "utterance" which you say "Xenophon, Plato and Cicero united to indorse "—not one of them lends any real support to your doctrine—or, if they are good for anything in this connection, they are quite as good to sustain the doctrine of Universal Salvation, as that of Universal Immortality.
Without stopping to question what you say of these heathen philosophers—which is certainly open to question—if this sentiment which you attribute to them, namely: "the soul when freed from all admixture with the body, then is sensible and begins to be pure and upright,' teaches anything, it teaches universal restoration.
The first "specimen text" which you cite, (Eccl. 12: 7) asserts simply this and nothing more; that, at death God resumes or takes back the breath (ruach) which he originally gave, as the source and sustaining principle of life. Nothing more can be drawn out of this passage, unless it be first put into it by the reader, or some commentator.
The second "specimen text" (Matt. 22: 30) if given the general application which you claim for it, would as evidently teach the doctrine of universal salvation as that of universal immortality. But it certainly has no such general application, as you would have seen if you had consulted the parallel passage in Luke 20: 35, for we are there, not only told as in Matthew and Mark, that "they are as the angels in heaven," but we are also expressly told that this word "they" refers exclusively to those "who are worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead," and "neither can they die any more for they are equal to the angels, and are the children of God being the children of the resurrection."
As for the third "specimen text" which you cite to sustain your doctrine, and which is also quoted, or misquoted in the new Congregational Creed for this purpose, you cannot be ignorant that in the opinion of Biblical scholars generally, it has no reference whatever to the final judgment of persons at the general resurrection. The scene here described, as we are plainly told, is the judgment of the "nations," at the second advent. But waiving this point, and giving it the personal application you desire, it is to be noticed that the antithesis here drawn is not what you would make it, between two sorts of lives or conditions of life, the one a'life of eternal blessedness and the other a life of eternal misery; but between the award of eternal or age-enduring life on the one hand, and eternal or age-enduring punishment or, excision as the word implies, on the other, and which is called in 2 Thess. 1: 9, the punishment of "everlasting destruction." Instead of the "pointless antithesis' of which you speak, if understood in this sense, we submit that the only real and proper antithesis that can be to a life that is eternal is not that of a life of sin and misery, this would indeed be "pointless," but that of a death that is also eternal.
Your fourth and last " specimen text " is a very un- fortunate one for you, as would have been evident had you quoted the whole of it. It consists of two principal clauses. But you drop out of the middle of the passage the clause that categorically asserts the doctrines for which we contend, and quote only the first and last parts of the other to sustain your case. Let us read the whole of it together, and see what it teaches.
Horn. 2: 6. "Who will render to every man according to his deeds. 7. To them who by patient continuance in 'ell-doing, seek for glory and honor and immortality—eternal life, 8, But unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness — indignation and wrath, 9, Tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that work-eth evil."
Now your quotation, garbled as it is, is well enough to show the severity of God's judgments upon the wicked, yet even this gives no hint of their endless duration — of the immortality of sinners in a state of sin and misery. But verse 7, which you have entirely omitted — and for reasons that are quite obvious —distinctly declares that God will render to those — and by antithesis, which is, the strongest kind of assertion — to those only who seek for immortality — eternal life.
Indeed!! if these " specimen texts " are your strongest proof texts — and surely if you could have found stronger, you would have brought them to the front—you had better yield the point at once with as much grace as you can command, and confess, as many have already done, and as every fair man must do, if he can only be brought to candidly examine the question for himself, instead of blindly accepting his position from tradition, that the Scriptures, when honestly interpreted, afford not the least shadow of support to the Platonic, or rather Satanic doctrine of immortality in sin and misery, but are emphatically and everywhere against it; and were it not for the requirements of a false philosophy regarding the nature of man, and the cunning assurances of the great deceiver, and the pride of man, this great delusion, which casts such dishonor on the character of God, so obscures the glory of the gospel of Christ, and hinders its progress, which so strengthens the hands of skeptics, and so perplexes the minds and grieves the hearts of true disciples, could not main-tai? a decent standing among intelligent Christians for one single day. Yours for the faith once delivered to the saints.
J. H. P.
WHAT WE THINK - FURTHER.
ANOTHER LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF " THE CONGREGATIONALIST."
Dear Sir:— I find a second editorial in your paper of Nov. 13th, in which you notice the strictures that were made on your first article under the caption as above given. I am heartily glad that you have felt constrained to attempt some kind of a plea in behalf of this doctrine of endless sin and misery, which you hold; for I am sure that in your search for arguments to sustain it, you will see, more and more, the weakness of your position, and that in the end you will be obliged to confess, as many of us have already done, who once held with you — having received it by tradition as you have done — that it has no substantial foundation either in Reason or in Scripture.
It must he apparent to all who read your argument that, if this is the cream and substance of its support, the foundation is quite too insignificant for the tremendous superstructure you would build upon it.
I willingly gave place to the whole of your first article in my reply, that my readers might see what could be said in behalf of this traditional doctrine by one of its most able and earnest defenders — how little to the point, and how feeble and futile are his strongest arguments in its favor. I would also quite as cheerfully give place to the whole of your second, if you had really added anything new or important to your first effort — or could I afford room for it in this brief rejoinder.
I could wish that you might think it prudent to allow to some one of your Christian brethren whom you may think worthy — if there be any such among the large number who hold with me to the Bible doctrine of Eternal Life only by redemption through Christ —a fair opportunity, in your paper— which you have never yet done—to state the doctrine as we hold it, and to briefly give the reasons for our faith. But I know by hard experience how almost impracticable it is to carry on any fair argument with a partisan editor, in his own paper, and how extremely awkward it is to attempt to carry it on elsewhere. For, while he addresses one class of readers, his opponent must address another class, if any, and has no way of reaching those to whom he most desires to speak. And then, the editor feels quite safe in misrepresenting the position of his antagonist, which, I am sorry to say, is far too often the case, and in ignoring such of his arguments as he cannot well answer, and in confining attention to minor and insignificant points, and in quoting, if at all, only such fragmentary extracts from him as can be made to suit his purpose. In this way he finds it quite easy to lead his confiding readers, to believe that his own position is impregnable, and his opponent is a heretic, or a fool, or both.
However, in spite of these disabilities, I will venture to notice a few points in your second article. I showed, as I think, conclusively in my first reply, that not one of "the specimen texts ' you cited affords any support whatever to your doctrine of immortality in sin and misery, and that so far as they have any bearing on the question, they are decidedly against your position, and that the clause you dropped out of the middle of your last citation (Rom. 2: 6-9) flatly contradicts your doctrine, and sustains the truth for which we contend, as would have been apparent had you retained it!! And yet you take no notice whatever of these criticisms, nor do you venture upon any further citations in your reply.
I also showed that, while ostensibly arguing the question propounded to you—" Whether the Bible teaches that any besides those who believe in Christ will be immortal," you actually argued against quite another doctrine—one with which the great body of believers in immortality only in Christ are no more chargeable than yourself, namely: the Sadducean doctrine of the non-resurrection of the wicked, and that you scarcely touched the real question in issue, as to whether the Bible teaches that Immortality or Eternal Life is the special gift of God through Jesus Christ, to believers only, or whether it is the natural inheritance of all men, believers and unbelievers alike? This omission to argue the real question, which you professedly undertook to argue, was so obvious and glaring that you have now felt constrained to confess that you purposely " confined our [your] reply [?] to the narrower question, whether any man lives at all after death, who has not gained through faith in Christ an immortality "; which is quite another question; and yet, by way of self-justification, or through some inexplicable confusion of mind, or for some other reason, you now claim that after all you were arguing the real question propounded, or, at any rate, you see no important difference between the two. And now again professing to consider in your second article, the question propounded, you have nothing whatever to say of this Eternal Life or immortality which is so emphatically and repeatedly promised in the Scriptures to believers as their alone and peculiar portion; but devote your whole article to the question, " Whether it will be unreasonable and unjust for God to punish the persistently impenitent forever! " And you evidently use the word " punish " in the sense of torment, for if you were to take it in the sense of being deprived, or cut off from the enjoyment of Eternal Life, in which we understand it, that is, punished with everlasting destruction, as Paul expressly says, there would be no dispute with us, nor with the apostle. Why then should you wish to disguise your real doctrine by the use of this confessedly ambiguous term, when you might quite as easily set it forth in unmistakable language by inquiring "whether it would be unreasonable and unjust for God to torment the persistently impenitent forever," if this be the kind of eternal punishment you believe in, unless for the reason that the doctrine itself is too horrible to admit of being nakedly set forth?
You go on to say that the justice of such punishment is to be determined by a previous question, as to the justice of God in making " persistent impenitence possible." That He has made it possible, you assume without any reason and even in the face of the most evident teaching of Scripture that eternal persistence in sin is just what God has made impossible. We are everywhere taught that, "evil shall slay the wicked "; that " sin when it is finished bringeth forth death." Like leprosy, that fatal disease, which is made its fit type, it preys upon the very life of its victim; though its progress may be slow and gradual, it is to certain and remediless death. In this we see the mercy as well as the justice of God, revealed as it was in the very beginning, in barring man away from the Tree of Life, after he had sinned, and made himself inevitably miserable: For we read in Gen. 3: 22, 23, And now lest he put forth his hand and take also of the Tree of Life and eat and live forever. Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden and he placed at the East of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword, which turned every way to keep the way of the Tree of Life.
You further say that your opponents object to "that doctrine of future punishment which has been common to the Church from the beginning." This is not so. But on the contrary, it is just the doctrine which was common to the Church in the beginning for which we contend. This doctrine of life only in Christ was the only doctrine of the Church for the first one hundred and fifty years after Christ. It was not, until the latter part of the second century, that its faith was corrupted on this point by the Grecian philosophers who came into the Church bringing with them the Platonic doctrine, that the human soul is self-existent and indestructible; and as a consequence, all those many plain declarations of the Word of God which threaten death and destruction to the wicked, and promise Eternal Life to the righteous, and to them only, had to be interpreted in a new, unnatural, unreal sense to agree with their philosophy. This sophisticated sense of these words has come down to us, by the tradition of a corrupted and apostate church to this day, as the true scriptural sense of these words. This is the reason, and the only reason, why it seems so natural "to common readers of the Bible" as you say, to understand them in this sense. They have been taught from their infancy in the Sabbath-school, and from the pulpit, and in all our religious literature that "to die," "to perish," "to be destroyed," "to be utterly consumed, root and branch," and a multitude of other similar expressions, do not mean, in the Scriptures, what they say, and what they do mean everywhere else; but they only mean that the unsaved are to live forever in sin and misery, and that to think otherwise is rank heresy.
Man has a soul and a body. The body dies. The soul never dies. The souls of the good will be happy in heaven. The souls of the bad will be miserable in hell.
So teach the Scripture Lessons for Children, published by the American Tract Society, and this in the face of the Word of God which says "The soul that sinned it shall die." You further say that our doctrine, Weakens and perverts the natural force of the warnings of the Lord with regard to the risk of eternal conscious suffering as the doom of those who persist in impenitence.
I ask you where our Lord has uttered any such warning? I call on you to point to one single passage where he has threatened eternal conscious suffering, to the impenitent. He does indeed, warn sinners V the miserable end toward which they are hastening. He tells them not to fear their fellow-men who can only kill the body, but to fear him who is able to destroy both body and soul in Gehenna. He urges all men to accept of the life everlasting which He has come to offer them. But as for the idea of eternal conscious suffering," it has been forced into the Scriptures in order to make them seem to sustain that heathen philosophy which teaches that immortality is the lot of all men, whether saved or lost. There are several familiar texts into which this doctrine has been thrust and the common reader thinks he finds it there because he has been so taught, and because he brings this idea with him to the reading of them. But let him come to the reading apart from any previous bias in favor of the popular theory of the natural immortality of men, and he will not find one single passage in all the Bible that hints at any such doctrine as that of eternal conscious suffering. While on the other hand he will find scores and hundreds that unmistakably teach that Eternal Life is the portion of the righteous only, and that death and everlasting destruction are the portion of all persistent sinners.
But we deny that there is any substantial " force" in such warnings as you construe them. Whatever constraining and terrorizing effect they may have had in the dark and' brutal ages of the past, and we all know how an unscrupulous and tyrannical priesthood has used them — not indeed to make men better Christians, but to subject them more completely to their behests, — yet even this kind of force has exhausted itself by its enormity. Under the enlightening and humanizing influence of the Gospel, this pagan doctrine of endless torment that has come down to us through an apostate church, has nearly, if not quite, lost all the force, such as it was, that it ever did have. It is too incredible to be seriously held by any reflecting person who has any true sense of the wisdom, justice and goodness of God, in any other way than as an abstract article of a traditional creed. It is too hideous even for infidels and skeptics to entertain, excepting as a means for ridiculing the Bible in which they are assured it is taught. and blaspheming the God of the Bible, to whom it is slanderously imputed. Its only real force is to obscure the light of the glorious Gospel; and to prevent sinners from accepting it as their only hope of Eternal Life; to alienate men from that system of religion that is supposed to teach it as one of the fundamental doctrines of an orthodox faith, to drive them into skepticism and such various forms of belief or unbelief as appear to be more worthy of acceptance, and to perplex the minds and wound the consciences of sincere disciples who feel bound to believe what the Church teaches them concerning her God and His character, and who earnestly desire to love and trust Him, and do really love and trust Him, so far as they can, in spite of the hideous light in which He is presented to their faith; and who would gladly commend Him to the love and trust of their fellow-men, if they only knew how to do it.
This brings me to the saddest aspect of the case; its reflex influence upon your own mind, and the minds of those who persist, with you, in endeavoring to support this anti-scriptural dogma of Eternal Life apart from Christ its only Source. It is leading you all gradually but inevitably to the demoralizing belief of "the final restoration of all souls to holiness and happiness." Indeed, you have already got so far as to avow, as you do in the closing paragraphs of your article, that it is more agreeable to you, and that you would "quite as willingly undertake to harmonize it with the Word of God," as the doctrine of Eternal Life only in Christ. Not long since you published in your widely circulated paper, a series of articles from the pen of a much respected Professor Emeritus of our oldest theological school, in which this doctrine is more distinctly inculcated. Let me call your attention to some of his utterances, which can hardly have any other fair interpretation.
The common conception of death is a great illusion. Indeed it ought not require any very profound religious faith, but a nimble effort of good sense rather, to teach a believer in immortality, that death is not what it seems to be. The tyrant always wears a mask. The inherited notion of it, which has come down to us through ages of horror, and which still lives in some of our funereal usages, is a hideous fiction. We speak but a truism in saying that death never throttles the real man. It is one of the commonplaces which still are immense in meaning, that that which thinks and feels and hopes and joys, death has no more to do with than it has with God. Look at an Egyptian mummy. Is that a man? Yet it is all that death has to boast of. Why is it not more real to us that, to the thought of God no man ever dies? To His mind there is no death-bed, no dying struggle, no glazing eye, no grave. These as we think of them are but illusions of human sense. The real man once alive, lives on forever. That thing which we weep over and enrobe tenderly for the burial, and follow reverently to the grave, and there, with prayer and dirge cover reverently from our eyes, is not the man, the real being loved and lost. He is still what he was the last time we parted from him, and bade him good-by. He has only passed out of our sight for a little. Dying is a transition to an improved state of being. All nature teaches this. Decay is but the process to a new and better life.—The Congregationalist, July 31, 1884.
I know not how it could be possible to frame anything under the guise of Christian sentiment, more directly opposed to the letter and teaching of God's Word, and more positively in favor of universal salvation, than this. And yet it is the only legitimate conclusion to which every intelligent man who holds to your heathen philosophy of the nature of man, must come at last.
In my volume entitled " The Theological Trilemma," published several years ago, I showed that there are really but three positions which can be held on this question: First, that of the eternal blessedness of the saved, and eternal misery of the lost. Second, the restoration of all men sooner or later to eternal blessedness. Third, the eternal blessedness of the saved, and the ultimate destruction of all who are not saved. The first is what is called the " orthodox " view; the second is the doctrine of ultimate "universal salvation," both of which rest on the Platonic philosophy of natural immortality as their chief corner-stone; the third is the doctrine you are opposing, and the one I am endeavoring to sustain, as the only one that really honors and magnifies both the Law and the Gospel, which satisfies our sense of what is just and right in the Divine Government, and which agrees with the teachings of the Word of God.
And now, my dear Christian brother, in view of the high and responsible position you are called to occupy in the Church of Christ, and of the great multitude who are looking to you for instruction and guidance in their religious faith and practice, let me beg of you. seriously and prayerfully, to consider whether you are faithfully discharging your high trust, in your persistent endeavors to hold those who honor you with confidence, to a philosophy of human nature which so evidently contradicts the plainest teachings of the Scriptures, and which is producing such infinite evil in the Church and in the world, which is undermining the faith of so many believers or would-be-believers in the Christian system, and furnishing unbelievers with their chief weapons for attacking it; which, as the prophet says is " making the heart of the righteous sad, whom God has not made sad, and strengthening the hands of the wicked, that he should not return from his way, by promising him life "— and by opposing, with equal persistency, that view which confessedly accords with the literal teaching of God's Word, and which we profoundly believe is its real teaching, which is perfectly consistent with the whole scheme of Evangelical doctrine, which throws such light on many points otherwise dark, forbidding and even repulsive, and which brings such assurance, joy and peace to all who accept it, and so exalts and honors the great Source of all our hopes for the life to come.
That the Spirit of God may lead you to a better view of Divine truth, and open your heart to receive it, and give you the courage to avow it and stand for it, despite its unpopularity and the humiliation and loss it might bring you, is the prayer of your fellow-worker in the service of our common Lord. J. H. P. Philadelphia, Pa., Nov., 1884.
A REPLY TO REV. J. H. BROOKES, D. D.
ON ANNIHILATION In "The Truth" for November and December, 1885.
Published as a tract by 1. C. WELLCOME, Yarmouth, Maine.
REV. DR. BROOKES, DEAR SIR:—A mutual friend in St. Louis has sent me copies of your monthly magazine entitled THE TRUTH, or Testimony for Christ, for November and December of 1885, containing, under the caption " Annihilation," what professes to be a Review, by yourself, of one of my books entitled The Life Everlasting.
Were this merely an ordinary article in defense of the traditional dogma of immortality in sin and misery, such as I am accustomed to see in our various so-called " orthodox " periodicals, I should not think of taking any public notice of it, but should only regard it as one of the many evidences we have, that the advocates of this moribund, mediaeval doctrine feel the need of bringing to it all the aid and comfort in their power, and should only be too glad to see their oft-repeated arguments in its behalf again brought forward, and spread before an intelligent Christian public. For, as it was said by one, of the institution of slavery, in the days when, not long ago, you were fondly cherishing and stoutly defending it, " I don't care what men say, if they will only say something, and call public attention to it, for a free discussion of this abomination is the surest way to bring it to a speedy end," so I say of this relic of a barbarous age that still lingers in our Church creeds. It cannot stand in the light of free inquiry, in this age of the world.
But your double article is devoted, not so much to a discussion of the question, as to a professed Review of one of my books, a professed Review I say, for your caption annihilation is so misleading, and so entirely aside from the question I have really treated, that I should not have considered it as having any reference to it; and your scattered extracts are so disjointed and fragmentary that I should hardly have recognized them, had you not throughout the whole so continually referred to it by its title, and to me as its author —I therefore feel called upon, if not in justice to myself, at least, in justice to the truth to notice it.
While I would hope to do this in a spirit of forbearance and Christian charity toward a clerical brother, I am sorry to be obliged to tell you, that if I say only what needs to be said, my reply must, of necessity, bear severely upon the character of your magazine entitled The Truth, to say nothing of the character of its editor. For in all my experience in the discussion of religious questions — and I have had much, and am now an old man —it has never been my fortune to meet with so unfair, disingenuous and misleading a production as is exhibited in the 36 pages of your article on " Annihilation "!
You begin very gently by professing great respect for the author, and by saying:
It is a book written with candor, and in a tone of respect for those whom it opposes, that certainly demands similar treatment at their hands. Nothing, therefore, here said must be construed into personal reflection upon himself.
I thank you for the kind consideration with which you set out, and had you kept to your purpose, I would have been quite content, and would have had no thought of complaining, however severely you might have assailed, with any fair arguments, the doctrine of Life Eternal only in Christ, for which I stand.
But you do not go far before you drop down into contemptuous and sneering language, and begin to impute to the book doctrines which it not only does not advocate, but even opposes; to express your astonishment, your amazement at the blindness, puerility, and recklessness of the author; to offer, for arguments, dogmatic and oracular assertions, anti to endeavor to lead your readers away from the true question by making inconsequential issues which have no important bearing on the question.
I can easily understand the reason for all this, and so can your intelligent readers, I think, or they could, if they had access to the volume you profess to criticize; and I could readily forgive you, in view of the difficulties of your position, were it only a personal matter; but when the interests of the Truth and the very foundation of our faith are at stake, I feel that I cannot keep silent.
Waiving then all these personal reflections, which ought to have no place among Christian brethren in the discussions of religious questions, and which can give no force to real arguments, nor supply the lack of them, let me call your attention to some points that deserve special attention.
1. Had it been your real purpose to discuss the main doctrine, as set forth in the title of my book: " The Life Everlasting. What is it? Whence is it? Whose is it?" and which I have made especially prominent in all my works, I think you should have taken my last volume, entitled " The Unspeakable Gift, the gift of Eternal Life through Jesus Christ our Lord,"* which I know you have seen; for it not only gives my mature thoughts on this question, but it presents the argument in a more compact and orderly shape; and, being smaller, is free from the discussion of incidental and doubtful points by way of excursus or episode, in which I have indulged somewhat freely, perhaps too freely, in this larger volume which you have taken in hand. For this has given you some semblance of excuse for neglecting, and ignoring almost entirely the main question, as you have done, in order that you may confine attention to these minor and circumstantial matters, that have no vital connection with it. But what is worse, you have, not only lifted these incidental points into such a paramount importance as to shut out of view the only real question for which I care to contend, but you have so grievously misrepresented me, in regard to these minor points, as to make it necessary for me to give more attention to them than their importance in any proper reply deserves.
1. Let us come to the crucial point of difference between us. I agree with you, — if you are loyal to the creed of the Presbyterian Church, — in all the fundamental doctrines of your faith; in acknowledging the Divine inspiration of the Scriptures, and in taking them as of Supreme authority in all religious matters; in recognizing the sovereignty of God in the spiritual as well as in the natural world; the Divinity of our Lord; the necessity of a new birth, and of repentance, obedience and faith in order to salvation; in the pre-millennial coming of Christ; in the resurrection of the dead — of all the dead — and in a final judgment, the awards of which are death and destruction to the wicked, as the just punishment of their sins, and Life Everlasting, as the gift of God's grace to the righteous.
Whatever minor and unessential differences there may be between us, the chief, and crucial difference is, as to the Scriptural meaning of these two antithetical words, LIFE and DEATH,— Scriptural meaning I say; for there can be no difference as to their literal and ordinary meaning outside of the Scriptures. I take them in their literal and ordinary sense when predicated of man in the Scriptures, as meaning just what they mean when predicated of other creatures and things that have life and are said to die. But your philosophical theory of the deathless nature of man — which I admit to be a very popular theory —which you bring with you to the interpretation of the Scriptures — for you do not find it there — forbids you to take them in this sense, you are under a logical necessity of either giving up your philosophy of the natural and indefeasible immortality of all men, or of putting a forced spiritualistic, ethical meaning into these words and their correlates—which latter alternative you prefer — and this unreal, imaginary sense you, and those of your school, have agreed together to call the true Scriptural or religious sense of these words. You differ widely among yourselves, as to just what this unreal and spiritual sense may be; how much is to be understood by these terms, after being sophisticated, but you all agree in taking them to describe certain conditions of existence; the one of sin and misery, and the other of blessedness and joy, which in both cases alike are to continue forever; for both the righteous and the wicked you say are alike immortal creatures.
But those who hold with you to this deathless nature of man, do not usually stop here. This same vicious method of interpretation is carried through the Word of God. It is applied by them to all its eschatological doctrines: The Second Coming of our Lord; His millennial reign on the earth; The Resurrection of the dead, and the general Judgment, are all so spiritualized as to lose their true meaning and force.
But we on the other hand, who believe that the "death " threatened means death, and the " life " promised means life, universally, without exception so far as I know, receive the teachings of Scripture with respect to these other doctrines in the same literal common sense way. In this, you must admit we are consistent. I cannot understand then, why you and some of your pre-millennial brethren, who agree with us so fully, as I am happy to believe, with respect to the literal return of our Lord, and to ns personal reign on the earth, should so bitterly oppose us for applying the same literal interpretation of the teaching of God's word with respect to the Life and the Death to come.* But ah I this Platonic philosophy, to which you have become so thoroughly wedded, is too dear to be given up. Its fetters are too strong for you.
2. But this charge of Platonism offends you: for you say:
If there is one string upon which Mr. Pettingell plays more than upon another, it is the bold charge that soon after the days of the Apostles, the entire Church forsook the teachings of the Bible concerning his favorite theme, and adopted the views of Plato. p. 30.
*Since writing the above words, I have received a note from one of your clerical brethren referring me to some arguments you employ in your work entitled "Maranatha," against those who oppose your doctrine of the literal pre-millennial return of our Lord, which may be very effectually turned against you, in your opposition to the literal understanding of the Word of God with respect to the correlate doctrine of Eternal Life only in Christ. But I have not the pleasure of possessing this work, nor have I room for the passages to which he refers me.
This is just what I do charge; and I prove it too, by many witnesses; but the music of that string does not please your ear for you go on to say:
It is almost amusing to see how constantly he informs us that the universal creed of Christendom is Platonic. But he must have presumed largely upon the credulity and ignorance of his readers. There is not a word of truth in his assertion; for Plato taught that the soul is the divine essence imparted to man, and therefore pre-existent and eternal, and this no believer in the Bible accepts, as he ought to know. p. 30.
This is just where, as I have shown, that Plato was more logical and consistent than his Christian followers. He believed in the future eternal existence of the soul BECAUSE, as he thought, it had an eternal past and that like the Deity it was untreated, and had no beginning; therefore, for the same reason, it would never be destroyed, or cease to exist. In this conclusion, — however erroneous his conception of the nature of man,— he was severely logical. But his disciples on entering the Christian Church, found it necessary, as Christians, to drop this first premise, which affirms the eternal nature of the soul a parte ante: but they still held on to his conclusion with respect to its indestructible nature a parte post, without even his assumed premise to justify it. So they proceeded to change all those Scripture terms which relate to the Death of man through sin, and to the Eternal Life, that is given only through Jesus Christ, and to interject their own philosophy of his natural and indefeasible immortality into them. This perversion of the plain letter of God's Word, has done more to corrupt the faith of the Church, to obscure the glory of the Gospel, and to hinder its progress in the world — as I fully believe—than all other causes combined. It has come down by tradition in the channels of an apostate church, through all the dark ages till now.
I find by a careful examination of the Syriac (Peshito) version of the New Testament—the vernacular language of the Jews in the time of Christ—and evidently the very language in which He and His apostles taught, that the word Savior, as in our English version, is literally Life-Giver, and the word " save," to give life, and the word " salvation," life. But in putting His words into Greek, the early translators obscured or lowered the meaning of these words—for the Grecian philosophy began very early to infuse itself into the Scriptures—and so the Greek words were used, and, as our versions are made from the Greek, and not from the Syriac, or Syro-Chaldaic, as they should have been, we have come to have the English word Savior instead of Life-Giver, and save, instead of give life, and salvation, instead of life. In this way, as in many others, the great vital truth of the Gospel of Life, Life, Eternal Life, only in Christ, has been partially, if not wholly concealed from the observation of the readers of the Greek as well as of the English versions of the New Testament.
To me it is one of the saddest signs of the times, that professed ministers of the Gospel of Christ, and especially those who, like yourself, are looking for His speedy return, should be so willing to discredit His claim as the only Giver of Eternal Life, and so zealously determined to force the Scriptures into an unnatural though but partial agreement with the teachings of this heathen philosopher, who supposes that all men are immortal in their own right, and into a perfect agreement with the assurances of the Great Deceiver, who says to mankind now, as he did to our first parents, "Ye shall not surely die, ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
But as for myself, however few may be my followers, of whom you so contemptuously speak, I shall put Christ above Plato, though he was the greatest of all the heathen philosophers, and Jehovah above Satan in this controversy, and still continue to believe and to teach that death is the actual penalty of sin, and that there is no Eternal Life, of any sort, out of Christ the Savior. When I ask you by what authority you teach this doctrine, which is so contrary to the plain and explicit teaching of Scripture, you are unwilling that I should point you to this eminent pagan philosopher. You say he was wrong in the foundation of his argument, but right in his conclusion. If I should refer you back still further to the original source of your doctrine, you would be highly indignant, for he was, as you know, " a Liar from the beginning." But I cannot see in what respect your belief differs from his doctrine; in fact, the Bible assures us that this is just what he taught, and I am quite sure he is well pleased to have you teach it to others. I have never yet seen any basis for your doctrine, and I have waded through scores of arguments in favor of it, but just in the out and out assumption of the whole matter to be proved, viz.: man is immortal because he has an immortal nature; he never will die, because he is a deathless creature; I think it; I feel it; I know it to be true, because so many other people think it, and feel it, and know it to be true — the Word of God to the contrary, notwithstanding; Quod erat demonstrandum.
3. Failing to draw from you any satisfactory proof of your doctrine from sources outside of the Scriptures, I ask you to give me some Scriptural evidence of its truth, for it must be by Divine Revelation, if at all, that we are to come to any positive knowledge of the truth on questions like this. Indeed, this is the very object for which God has given us the Bible. Here you are obliged to acknowledge, if you answer truly, that there is no explicit declaration of the natural immortality of man in the Scriptures; I will add that there is even no implicit declaration to that effect. On the other hand, it is everywhere, both explicitly and implicitly, denied in every form of words of which language is capable. I boldly challenge you to cite one single passage in any part of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, that teaches any such doctrine. You cannot find one. I will point you to scores of passages in all parts of the Bible that teach very plainly just the contrary doctrine, that man through sin has become a frail, dying, transient creature, and that there is no immortality, no Eternal Life for him, excepting it be given to him in a new birth from above.
But in order to give some show of a reason for injecting this lie of the Adversary into God's Word, you tell us, it is too evident a truth to be asserted; it is taken for granted; assumed in the Scriptures 1 A strange way indeed of fastening a doctrine upon the Divine Oracles, that they everywhere so positively deny 1 Why, the Immortality of God Himself is most emphatically asserted, not assumed—but declared in many ways. It is incorporated into the very name by which He makes Himself known to us, JEHOVAH, the I Am, the EVER LIVING GOD, "who lives forever," who is and was and ever shall be, " whose years have no end "; "the same yesterday and forever," etc. Where do you find anything like this said of man in the Scriptures? The very name which God gave to him, Adam, earth-made, indicates his transitory nature. Indeed, he is contrasted with his Maker in this very respect, " Shall mortal man be more just than God?"
than God, " who only hath immortality."
You actually object to such citations, because, as you say, "they prove too much," — too much, indeed, for your doctrine, that sinful man and his Maker are equally immortal, but just what I intended to show, that the difference between them is infinite.
You go on to say:
For if they (these texts) are to be taken in the sense in which annihilationist use them, they affirm that there will be no hereafter for anyone. If the text, God only hath immortality, proves that the wicked are not immortal, it equally proves that the saints and angels are not immortal.
Certainly it does; that they have no inherent, independent immortality of their own. Life itself, even in its lowest degree, is a gift from God, much more an immortal life. It is, and must be, conditioned on the will of God and the fitness of the creature to enjoy it. Not Gabriel himself holds his own life independent of the will of his Creator.
4. You say on page twenty-four:
If it can be shown that the Scriptures do not use the words ' death ' and `life' as Mr. Pettingell does, his entire theory, and all his books, tumble into ruin, and should never be heard of again.
“So far from individual independent immortality being an attribute of man as such, it is not even an attribute of the saved. What! not even Christians partakers of independent immortality? No: their life as God's Bolls who shall live forever, is a matter of fellowship with the Father and the Son; that is to say, they participate this Divine and Eternal Life in common with the Father and the Son. This is the wonderful and glorious doctrine of the New Testament on this subject; they are one body of which the life is Christ. It is Christ's life in them by the Holy Spirit, not their own that gives them immortality. I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.' That is the language which each of them must use if he would speak Scripturally on this great subject. Christ came to give Eternal Life to as many as the Father has given Him, but this life is not a grant, so given as that each who receives if can henceforth live separate from, and independently of Christ the Giver. The eternal life-spring is in Him; out of that they are constantly sustained; because He lives they live; they are one body in Him, and they enjoy the certain prospect of immortality, because He their Life is the glorious Son of God, who with the Father only hath immortality."—Dr. Leask of London.
Very well; be it so. I accept the issue. And what is the showing that is going to prove so disastrous to my theory and my books? Your whole demonstration, as it relates to the word "death," is confined to one paragraph; and as it relates to the word " life," is confined to another single paragraph, and then you give all the rest of your thirty-six pages to minor and unessential matters, as I will show.
In your first paragraph you simply quote or refer to certain texts in which you think that the word " death " is used in a figurative sense; and then you jump at once to the conclusion that this word, which occurs about one thousand times in the Bible, should never, never, when predicated of man, be understood in its literal sense!! Why, do you not know that all concrete terms may be, and often are, employed in a figurative sense? The very fact that they are so used sometimes, proves that they have a well-defined, literal sense. Do you really believe, can any man in his right mind believe, that this term, which is one of the most important words in all the Bible, which is the very one on which turns the penalty of God's law, which is soberly and judicially uttered so many times, and against which sinners are so solemnly warned as the certain result of sin, never means what it always means in other connections, but means just the opposite, namely: an existence in sin and misery eternally perpetuated? And all this just to accommodate your heathen philosophy of the deathless nature of man 11 You conclude your demonstration thus:
In all these and in many similar passages that could easily be given, it is plain that men may be dead in one sense and not in another, and that death does not imply cessation of existence. So common indeed is this use of the word in Scripture, it may be confidently affirmed that not one in a million of those, who have read the Bible, ever thought of putting upon death' the construction that is, of actual death] given to it by Mr. Pettingell and his few followers. p. 25.
Alas! your boast of numbers is, or has been till recently, too true. The people generally, throughout Christendom, have been assured so long and confidently, from their infancy upwards, in the Sunday-school, in their religious literature, both sacred' and profane, in such magazines as you edit, and in others, and from the pulpit, by such religious teachers as yourself, that man will not, cannot ever die, and that what the Bible says about this matter does not really mean death, but must be taken in a figurative sense, that they have naturally grown up in the belief that you have some good reason, some authority for what you tell them.* In former days, no one was permitted to dissent from the teaching of the Church under the severest penalties. And now, though not in exactly the same way, this dogma is defended with equal vigor, if not with equal success. No one would be allowed in any " orthodox " pulpit like yours, nor in any of the regular Church organs to call this tradition in question, and even when one attempts in a more private way to show its falsity, he is frowned upon, and treated as a heretic, and not unfrequently excommunicated as unworthy of Christian fellowship But notwithstanding all this, the "few followers," of which you speak so scornfully, are not now so few as you would be glad to think — though you need not call them mine — they are followers of the Grent Teacher Himself. They have already become a multitude, wherever the truth has free course; and their number is only increased by such defenses as you are putting forth. For the sake of the cause I shall only be too glad for you to continue your efforts.
If any of the millions, of whom you boast, should think your defense "rather weak and unsatisfactory,"
*See Job 20. 7; 21. 30. Ps. 37. 20; 92. 7; 146. 4.
Prov. 13. 9; 29. 1. Ezek. 18. 4. Mal. 5. 1. Matt. 10. 28. John 15. 6.
Rom. 2. 12; 6. 21; 7. 5; 9. 22. Phil. 3. 9. 2 Thess. 1. 9.
Heb. 6. 8; 10. 26. James 1. 15. 2 Pet. 2. 12; 3. 7-9. 1 John 3. 15.
Rev. 20. 12.
*" Whereas, some have dared to assert, concerning the nature of the reasonable soul, that it is mortal, we with the approbation of the Sacred Council, do condemn and reprobate all who assert that the intellectual soul is mortal, seeing that the soul is not only truly and of itself and essentially the form of the human body, as it is expressed in the Canon of Pope Clement Fifth, but likewise IMMORTAL; and we strictly inhibit all from dogmatizing otherwise; and we decree that all who adhere to the like erroneous assertions shall be shunned and punished as heretics." (Decree of Lateran Council under Leo 10.)
as one of them has recently written me, I will say as I did to him, in your behalf: "Do not be too hard on your leader. He is doing the best he can. He is doing as well as any man could with the materials at his command. He is giving you the very cream of all that can be said in favor of his dogma.' Let me also intercede with you a little, in behalf of my "few followers," who are venturing to do some thinking for themselves. You should not be too uncharitable toward them for their extreme unwillingness to attribute to their Heavenly Father such sophistry and ambiguity in announcing the penalty of the Divine Law, as would be quite unpardonable in any human law-giver, and such cruelty in executing it, — if your interpretation be true — as they have supposed possible only for the Devil himself.
5. Now let us consider the other crucial word "life," in the second paragraph, which completes your showing of the falsity of my theory as you call it, namely, that the Eternal Life which is promised in the Word of God to the righteous, and to them only, means Eternal Life, and which establishes your contrary theory, that it does not mean any such thing, but means only eternal happiness. Here is the demonstration, and the whole of it. I quote your words:
Precisely the same thing may be said concerning his [my] utter confusion of mind with respect to everlasting existence as synonymous with everlasting life. The devil has everlasting existence, but he does not possess everlasting life. The angels that sinned, and were delivered into chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment, have everlasting existence, but not everlasting life. pp. 25, 26.
Who told you that "the devil has everlasting existence "? Surely not the Bible; as I read that book it teaches just the contrary doctrine. I have higher thoughts of the wisdom, justice, goodness and power of God. than to believe that He is obliged to permit, or will permit, this monster of iniquity to live and rage forever and ever. It is for this very purpose that Christ is coming the second time; to destroy the devil and all his works, and to establish a kingdom that shall be universal.
Though he may linger long, and die hard, and come down with great " wrath because he knows that he hath but a short time," yet he cannot survive the destruction of " the last enemy," " whom the Lord shall consume with the breath of His mouth, and destroy with the brightness of His coming." The evil spirits know that they are reserved for the same fate. They expected it at our Lord's first appearance, and cried out, "Art thou come to torment us before the time?" and again, changing the language, but not the idea: "Art thou come to destroy us?" What other destruction could they fear? for everything else pertaining to them had long since been destroyed but their miserable existence. But their full time had not then come. They are reserved unto the judgment of the Great Day, when He shall "thoroughly purge His floor, and gather His wheat into His garner, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire."
But even in this conclusive argument, as you seem to regard it, but which is no argument at all, having no foundation, you have felt constrained to misrepresent me, in a way for which I can find no excuse but in the fact that you find it necessary, in order to give some show of plausibility to your reasoning. For you must know that I do not hold "existence to be synonymous with life." I have taken special pains to repel that charge, which others have made for the same reason that you make it. I have devoted one whole section, of eight pages, in the book you profess to review, to this very object. I show that existence is predicable of anything that is, whether it have life or not, and that, while there can be no life without existence;— sensation, consciousness, sin and suffering are not attributes of mere existence, but only of life; and these experiences of sensation, consciousness, sin and suffering, which you say are the portion of the wicked, can no more properly be predicated of mere existence than they can be of a stone. And to say that sinners who are dead, whose life has gone out from them, continue simply to exist, in a state of sin and misery forever, is to talk sheer nonsense. No, this utter " con- fusion of mind," of which you speak, is yours, and not to be charged upon me, that you may give a show of sense to your reasoning. I understand by this Eternal Life (he aionios zee) which is so often declared to be the special gift of God to His people, all that you do, and much more, for it is not a mere blessed condition of existence, but it is more than all — Life, Eternal Life; and it is of necessity pure and blessed, and also eternal, for it is the life of God Himself imparted to His people by a new birth. " This is the record, that God hath given to us Eternal Life; and this Life is in His Son. He that hath the Son, hath the Life, and he that hath not the Son, hath not the Life."* You conclude your argument of two paragraphs, on these two words " death " and " life," very much as you began.
If there is taken from these books, what is manifestly false, that life and death mean mere existence [it is not I who have ever said any such foolish thing], his theory vanishes out of sight.
2. Now we come to incidental matters, not essential to the main question, to which you have devoted by far the largest part of your Review, and in which you have grievously misrepresented me, and this renders it necessary for me to give more attention to them than their intrinsic importance would require.
1. Why, in professing to review a book devoted supremely to the question of " The Life Everlasting. What is it? Whence is it? Whose is it?" as its very title declares, and which I have made especially prominent in all my publications, why should you put at the head of your articles in capital letters " ANNIHILATION, or Conditional Immortality," and say in your opening paragraph that it advocates the annihilation of the wicked? [Mark 10. 30. John 3. 15; 6. 40, 47. Rom. 2. 7; 6. 22. Gal. 6. 8. 1 Tim. 1. 16; 6. 12, 19. 1 John 2. 25, etc.] Why, unless it be to take advantage of a misleading and ambiguous term, to create a prejudice against the doctrine really advocated, and to give a false impression concerning it? What if I should characterize your Pre-Millennial Essays, and many other excellent publications in defense of Christian doctrine as ETERNAL TORMENT LITERATURE? Would you think it fair? Why not? Because, though you do believe the doctrine attributed to you, it is not the special object of your essays to defend it. But what is more unfair in your case, I do not even believe in the doctrine you impute to me, in the sense in which you would have it received. I have taken special pains, in this very book to repudiate it, and to protest against its use, in this connection, as unscriptural, ambiguous, misleading, and as asserting altogether more than I believe; and even in a restricted sense, it is but an alternative or negative deduction from the leading positive doctrine of Eternal Life only through Jesus Christ.
I no more believe in the annihilation of substance, whether it be material or spiritual, than you do. When an army has been destroyed in battle, or a library or a house, by fire, or any organism, by violence, we say, loosely speaking, that it has been annihilated, because there has been a destruction of its corporate or organized existence beyond the hope of repair. And in all this we take no account of its scattered parts, which still exist, and may enter into other combinations. I would not seriously object to the use of this term in its application to man, did it not give you the advantage of a prejudgment of the question, at the very outset of the discussion, — just what you seek. b or you assume the very thing in dispute, that man is naturally an immortal being, and his organized life and personality can only be lost by a divine act of violence or power. But I dispute this. I hold that he is, or has become a mortal, perishable creature, and will not, cannot live forever, unless this new life, this higher life, which is brought to light in the Gospel, be given him by a new birth. This is the great boon to be sought in Christ, and attained to, or he must sooner or later perish. If separated from God, who is the Source of all life, he can no more live on, and on forever than a candle will burn forever if let alone. His life must, by its own limitations, go out in darkness, and cease to be, and his individuality be lost forever. What becomes of the elements which once constituted his organic being I do not stop to inquire. Nor do I know what judgments may be inflicted on him in his downward way to death; how many or how few the, stripes that will fall on him from the hand of a just Gpd; how much the final catastrophe may be hastened or retarded; nor is it my object to inquire. But this I do hold, because the Scriptures teach it as plainly as they teach anything, that he has "no Eternal Life abiding in him." The very reason why Adam was prevented from eating of the Tree of Life after he had sinned, as the Scriptures expressly tell us, was "Lest he put forth his hand and take also of the Tree of Life, and live forever."
Professor Drummond has demonstrated, in his admirable work, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, as I have also done in my Theological Trilemma, that in order to an endless life, one must have a perfect correspondence with a perfect environment, and this no sinner has or can have, till he is again united to his Maker in holiness and love. But you do not agree with him any better than you agree with me, and for the same reason.
2. But we pass to another matter: If you had quoted any passage from me in its full integrity, I would have made no complaint. But the way in which you have cited isolated sentences, and fragments of paragraphs, jumping from one end of the book to the other, and professed to give the substance of others without citing them, — not for the purpose of showing what I really do teach, and confuting that, but for the purpose of fastening on me doctrines which you must know I do not teach, and which, indeed, I repudiate and condemn, — I cannot characterize, without using language that would be personally offensive; and I forbear. But I am sure it is not the method one would pursue who was confident of the strength of his own position, nor of one who was only anxious to disprove some actual error in an opponent. If one were permitted to do this, he might make out whatever he desired, either for or against any individual or doctrine. Any doctrine might be fastened upon even the Bible in this way. And this is the way, I am sorry to say, that the Scriptures are too often treated. The texts are "accommodated," as it is said, to the doctrine in hand. Doctor Hook's famous sermon before the Queen, on obedience to the Church, is said to have been founded on these three words: "Hear the Church." The whole passage reads, " If he neglect to hear the Church, let him be unto thee an heathen man and a publican." Matt. 19. 17. Archbishop Whately said of it, "Why did he not quote a little more of the text? thus: "If he neglect to hear the Church, let him."
3. Because I show that the distinguishing difference between a human being and a brute is not in the fact that the one is naturally and necessarily immortal, and the other is not, but in the fact that one is capable of immortality because he is capable of knowing and loving his Maker, and the other is not, you say:
Mr. Pettingell and his school seem very fond of belittling the creation of man, constantly asserting that practically there is no difference between it and the creation of the lower animals. (p. WO.)
Is this a fair representation? Though both may be alike mortal as earthly creatures, is there no practical difference in the fact that one is immortal and the other is not; the one is fitted, by nature, to possess and enjoy it if he will, and the other is not; the one has it offered to him, and the other has it not? Here is a vast, an infinite practical difference.
Because you profess to believe that man, like God his Creator, is actually immortal, would that justify me in saying, "Dr. Brookes and his school seem very fond of belittling God, constantly asserting that practically there was no difference between Him and mankind "?
You say, p. 35, " The heading of one of Mr. Pettingell's chapters is, 'Belief in future punishment necessary, but the punishment must be credible." No chapter or even section has any such heading. After looking in vain for it, where you say it is, I found these words among the broken and fragmentary sentences of the Table of Contents. I have no objection to the sentiment, but I mention it as characteristic of your random method of dealing with my book. You ought to aim to be accurate, if you cannot be forcible.
But it is the conclusion you draw from this miscalled " Heading " of one of my chapters, which I would more especially notice; for you go on to say:
`Credible,' to whom? Alas! this shows what lies at the bottom of annihilationism. It presumes to decide that the conscious existence of the wicked in misery is unjust and unworthy of God; and therefore it argues a state of mind not perfectly submissive to His will and Word.
This mode of reasoning is not new with you. It is the same that has been employed by bigots in all ages, toward those who were only one step in advance of them, in opposing the errors and false dogmas of the Church, and in advocating views that were soon to be universally accepted as unquestioned truths. The martyrs of one age are the saints of the next, and the successors of those who condemned, persecuted, and killed them as heretics, now build their sepulchers. Because, forgot, we cannot accept, as worthy of a God, who is infinite in wisdom, justice, goodness and mercy — or even credible, to those who believe with their understandings and their hearts— the picture of our heavenly Father, which you draw, or rather, which the sophists and scholastics of the pagan world, and of the dark ages of the Church have drawn for you, and to which you cling with wonderful tenacity, you take it upon you to sit in judgment upon our submission " to the will and Word of God." It is not from any want of submission to the will and Word of God, but just because of our supreme loyalty to Him, because we love and trust Him, and would honor Him, and would persuade others to love and honor Him, that we reject the abominations you impute to Him. It is our want of perfect submission to your " will and word," and not to His, that offends you, and brings us under your reproach.
You may, perhaps, by dogmatic utterances and ex cathedra denunciations hold for a time, even at this late day, such of your confiding followers as are willing to shut, not only their eyes, but their hearts, and take submissively such stones for bread, and such serpents for fish, as it may please you to give them—" asking no questions for conscience sake." But you will find a constantly increasing number whose stomachs reject this food, as altogether indigestible, who will demand of you, if they hear you at all, higher, truer, worthier views of God, than you are wont to give them, and a Gospel that provokes love and confidence, instead of fear and unbelief.
Let me kindly and soberly tell you, that by your zealous, and no doubt well-meant efforts to sustain the anti-scriptural theodicy of a dark and barbaric age, that makes God the infinite and eternal tormentor of the helpless, hopeless victims of His wrath, and to impose it upon an enlightened people whose reasons, whose consciences, and whose hearts reject it, I verily believe you are doing more to provoke doubt, skepticism, and infidelity among intelligent men, than you are doing, or possibly can do, by all your unwearied labors to confirm the faith of God's people or to lead sinners to Christ, through whom alone they may have hope of Eternal Life.
4. But your review is principally occupied with the question of the Intermediate State, which, though indirectly related to the main question, has no necessary connection with it. In order here to convict me of error, of some sort, you endeavor to fasten upon me opinions which I not only do not hold, but which I have disclaimed and opposed in this book, as well as in all my writings, and then you set yourself to ridiculing and confuting them, as my opinions. Thus you say, over and over again, in various ways, He tells us with reiterated emphasis. that, at death, man, at least sinful man, becomes extinct, is wiped out of existence, and is as if he had never been. p. 27. "He everywhere states that if you put an end to the body, you put an end to the whole person, and hence there can be nothing left for God to destroy." p. 506. "If the soul ceases to be at death, and becomes extinct, as Mr. Pettingell so often asserts." p. 562. "The one thought pervading every page is . . . that all others (but believers) die as brutes die, become extinct, cease to be when the breath leaves the body, as though they had never been," p. 553, etc., etc.
My first feeling, on reading these assertions, was of indignation; but I forbear to bring a railing accusation. I will leave you to the ninth commandment of the Decalogue and your own conscience, and simply say this is not true. I can only account for such perversion of my teaching, on the ground that, in hastily running your eye over the pages of the book in search of some charge to bring against my doctrine, you have mistaken the views I was opposing for those I was advocating!! If you have really made such a mistake, as I would charitably suppose, and wish to be set right, I will try to make my position clear.
As regards the question of the condition of man, when the breath has left his body, there is a variety of views, not only among us who believe in the ultimate destruction of the wicked, but even among theologians of your school, who believe they will never be destroyed. There are difficulties attending any view, for the Scriptures are not so clear on this matter as we could desire, and hence, texts are quoted to sustain these various conflicting views. With us there are two extremes, not to mention others, viz.: the materialistic, which regards man as utterly annihilated, as an individual, in the first death, and re-created in the resurrection; and the spiritualistic, which regards him as maintaining an active, conscious life during all this interval, till his resurrection. Now I have never seen my way clear to adopt either of these two extremes, though I have studied this question long and faithfully for many years. I cannot doubt that death, in the first instance, would have been the final end of all men, if it had not been for redemption in Christ, as Paul expressly declares, 1 Cor. 15. 18. But we are also told (22d verse,) that " As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." Therefore this Adamic death is not final; the complete execution of the sentence is suspended, in order to a resurrection and final judgment. I cannot then believe, with the materialist, that man passes entirely out of existence, and that he is re-created at the resurrection, for this would not be a resurrection of the dead, it would evidently be a new creation. The identity of the individual must be preserved; it is the very same person who died that is to be raised again, and not another person just like him. This, to me, is evident. It is also equally evident, that this identity does not inhere in the material particles that compose the body, for these are continually changing even in life, and in death the organism is totally dissolved, and the material atoms are scattered to the winds. It must therefore inhere in the vital or noetic principle, which to us is invisible. But exactly in what way this is made sure, I do not undertake even to guess, much less to assert. On the other hand, I cannot agree with the spiritualist, that this vital principle, when liberated from the body, is able alone to fulfil the functions of life; to maintain its activity, its consciousness, its sensibility, to be cognizant of passing events, and to enjoy and to suffer. To me it is evident that an organism of some sort is necessary to all this, and that this is just the reason for a resurrection. I believe that some of the worst errors of the Papal Church have their root in this false notion of the independent nature of the soul, such as that of purgatory, masses for the dead, prayers to the Virgin and other saints, etc., and also that it is a fruitful source of error among Protestants, the foundation of spiritism, and indeed is the reason why the doctrine of the Resurrection, which was one of the very central doctrines of the primitive Church, has so fallen into neglect. For, as old Tyndale said, if the saints are already in heaven they are as well off as the angels, and what need is there of any resurrection?
Hence I have never ranged myself with parties holding either of these two extremes, but have always stood between them, but holding, as I think, all there is of truth in both, without their accompanying errors, viz.: that all that is essential to the personality and identity of every individual, is preserved during this interval, but in a state of perfect unconsciousness, or coma, or suspense, or profound sleep, until he is awakened by the coming of our Lord. And I feel the more justified in holding this view, because this is the very term " sleep " by which it is characterized in the Scriptures; as I might show, could I spare the time, by numerous citations. [The death of brutes is never termed a sleep, because there is- no resurrection in their case. But when man dies the Adamic death he is often said to fall asleep. See Daniel 12. 2. 1 Cor. 15. 51. 1 Thess 5. 10. Acta 7. 60. 1 Cor. 15. 6, 18. 1 Thess. 4. 13, 14, 15. 2 Pet. 3. 4.] But I do not regard this matter as of vital importance to the main question, and have never made it prominent. You will see then how very unfair it is for you to try to charge me with the views of either of these extremists, and to say as you do, If it (the contrary doctrine) can be proved, the entire structure which Mr. Pettingell has laboriously reared in the seven hundred and sixty-one pages of his book, and his other works falls to the ground. p. 559.
Just as if I had attempted to rear any structure whatever, much less the whole argument for Eternal Life only in Christ, on this incidental and debatable point, when you know I have brought it into view in this larger volume, only to give a kind of completeness to the whole discussion in all its branches.
If you had published a book on Astronomy, in? which you had incidentally expressed your opinion, with respect to the disputed question, whether the moon is inhabited, and I should say, with regard to a contrary theory, " If it can be proved, the whole Copernican system which you are laboring to defend, falls to the ground," would you call that reasonable logic?
Or, to use a better illustration, supplied by one of your own friends, who, after expressing his astonishment, on reading what you assert in the above-quoted sentence, says, "That you, after having demol4 died this theory which you attribute to him, will ha'-' as much reason for claiming that the entire structure is overthrown, as David would have had for claiming the victory, if, instead of hitting Goliath in the head, his missile had only knocked off the giant's cap or torn a button from his coat, not one whit more."
5. After quoting several passages from the book in which you strangely confound what is said of the ultimate result of sin when it is finished, with man's natural or Adamic death, you conclude with the following remarkable statement, as though you were representing me:
This death and entire extinction of his being he suffered, of course, as the penalty of his sin; but if he is raised up, or rather created over, and cast into the second death at the judgment, it is clear that he suffers the penalty of sin twice, and that, too, without having sinned during the period between his death and resurrection, because there was nothing left of him to sin. p. 32.
Here you betray not merely an inexcusable ignorance of the doctrine of the book you have undertaken to review, but a manifest confusion of mind with respect to the distinction between the first and second death. I hardly wonder at it, for I never met an advocate of your doctrine who seemed to have any intelligible idea of the difference between the First or Adamic death, which is the necessary result of man's mortal condition, and the Second Death, in which he receives the penalty of his own individual sins. Let me try to make it clear to your apprehension, and then you will see that my view is not only beautifully consistent, but the only one that is, or can be made to harmonize with the teaching of Revelation.
As the children of Adam we are all mortal creatures, born to die, and this irrespective of our individual character. Those who "have not sinned after the similitude of his transgression," must die. "It is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment." It is in this judgment that we must answer for the deeds done in the body, and it is in the Second Death that the penalty of our own personal sins is visited upon us. So far from "suffering the penalty of sin twice," as you say, the sinner would not suffer it even once, were there no resurrection to judgment. Let him be ever so upright, he cannot help dying "once." This is his inherited lot, for which he is not held responsible. But by the grace of God, he may escape the second death. This is the only death we are warned against, and urged to escape. This is the fruit of sin when it is finished. "The wages of sin is death (of our own sins the Second Death), but the gift of God is Eternal Life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
6. From your unnatural construction of certain passages of Scripture, and the fault you find with the Revised Version, and from your attempts to criticize various words, I am led to infer that you have but a very scant, if any, acquaintance with the original Hebrew and Greek text. You say, p. 22:
The word ' hell,' in its modern and common signification as a place of torment, suitably expresses the idea often attached to sheol and hades; and our Revisers have made a serious mistake in substituting the original words, in many passages.
This is not so; the idea now attached to the word "hell " is not found in these original words, it has been forced into them. The word Sheol occurs sixty-five times in the Old Testament, and its analogue, hades, eleven times in the New. It means a place, or rather, state of darkness and silence, into which all men go at death, and there rest, " without thought or sensation," (Gesenius). The translators of the old version rendered it in a vacillating, capricious way, by various terms, according to their own ideas of what it should mean in any given passage. Hence, they translated sheol by the word "hell" thirty-one times, by "grave " thirty-one times, and by "pit" three times; and the word hades, by the word "hell" ten times, and by grave once. The Revisers made an attempt, though but partially successful, because they could not always command the consent of the necessary two-thirds majority, to correct the false ideas that modern usage had attached to the word "hell," by transferring these words sheol and hades to the text without translating them. The American committee consistently insisted on always transferring these words without translating them. But the British Revisers could be prevailed upon to do this with the word sheol in only thirty instances; in the other thirty-five instances, they perpetuated the old confusion, by translating it " hell," or " grave," or " pit," and putting the word sheol into the margin. But as to the word hades, they all agreed to transfer it without any translation. This is what displeases you — because your medieval hell is dropped out of sheol sometimes in the Old Testament, and altogether in the New.
7. Again you complain that the Revisers have rendered the word psyche " life," — as they should have done, instead of "soul," as it reads in the old version; for it spoils some of your false rhetoric concerning the "loss of the immortal soul," as for instance in Matt. 15ii. 26. "For what shall a man be profited if he gain the whole world and forfeit his life, or what shall a man give in exchange for his life."
1. Again, you would make a point, I can't exactly see what, on the difference between the two words, athanasia and aphtharsia; the former occurs three times, viz., in 1 Cor. 15. 53, 54, and 1 Tim. 6. 16; the latter twice, viz., in Rom. 2. 7, and 2 Tim. 1. 10, and are both rendered "immortality." Athanasia is composed of two parts, a, privative or negative, and Thanatos, death, and means, as an adjective, without death, deathless, immortal; aphtharsia is a noun composed of a, and the verb phtheiro, to corrupt, to kill, to destroy, etc., and means incorruptibility, immortality, indestructibility, etc. Which of the two words is the stronger it would be difficult to tell. Either of these is forcible enough to make good the doctrine for which I contend, that there is no immortality in sin, or apart from God, who claims this as His peculiar attribute, and who only is able to confer it upon Ilis children. The inference you attempt to draw from your criticism on these two words, shocks me; I must pronounce it unworthy of any Christian teacher. If you are not ashamed of it, on sober reflection, your brethren are certainly ashamed for you. It is this, page 33.
The text (2 Tim. 1. 10) does not say that immortality did not exist, but only that it was not brought to light. So it is with all the passages quoted to show that death makes a complete end of man. They prove too much, for if they are to be taken in the sense in which annihilationist use them, they affirm that there will be no hereafter for anyone. If the text (1 Tim. 6. 161 God ' only hath immortality,' proves that the wicked are not immortal, it equally proves that the saints and angels are not immortal 1 111 So you deny to Christ His chief crown of glory, as the SOURCE of Eternal Life to His redeemed people, which He claims—the very ground on which the Pharisees rejected Him— and reduce Him to the low level of a discoverer or demonstrator, such as was Columbus, who discovered America, or Newton, who discovered the law of gravity, or Franklin, who demonstrated the nature of electricity! And you would furthermore make it impossible for the Deity to bestow the boon of immortality, which He has promised through Christ, upon any of His creatures, because, forsooth, they have enough of it already; they only need to be made happy in their own immortality.
9. You say still further in this connection:
So the long list of texts, which Mr. Pettingell quotes, to show that the Bible teaches the utter extinction of being at death, etc.
But you have evidently forgotten what you said of the book the month previous in the first part of your Review (p. 557), viz.:
It is largely made up of human reasoning, of bold assertion, often wholly unsupported, and of an astonishingly small number of Scripture texts.
I might safely leave these two contradictory assertions to balance each other. But it may be well enough to say here to those who have never seen the work that is criticized, that in a volume devoted to the discussion of the question of Immortality, under four separate heads. 1. History, 2. Philosophy, 3.
Terminology, W. Scripture, no reasonable man would think such citations appropriate under any but the Pith head. Here they certainly abound. The Index refers the reader to nearly one hundred and fifty passages, that are especially noticed, to say nothing of numerous other texts incidentally quoted. But let me repeat what I have so conspicuously said in all my writings, that while the decision of this question must rest entirely on the testimony of Scripture, it is not to be settled by fragmentary texts, taken here and there apart from their connection, but by the general consensus of all Scriptures. It is quite possible — it would be strange if it were not — to pick out isolated texts, here and there, which, after your doctrine has been read into them, may seem to favor it. It is also quite true that you can quote numerous texts that predicate "immortality," "Eternal Life," "Life Everlasting," " length of days forever and ever," etc., of God's children, but it is always of His children ONLY, and not as a natural inheritance, but as a special gift of God's grace. But no man has ever yet found, or can find one single text in all the Bible that asserts your doctrine of the immortality of man by nature.
I make no complaint of the number of texts you have quoted, but I do of the false construction you would put upon them. One of your own clerical brethren has told you plainly, that " not one in ten of them has any reference to the question under discussion," and I will add, that not one single one of this fraction teaches the doctrine you are trying to support.
3. There are many other minor points which I would notice, if I could spare the requisite time and space; but this reply is already longer than I could wish, and I must hasten to a close. I am not specially anxious to defend myself, or my writings, from false representation. It is for the truth that I am concerned: I would be glad, if possible, to ignore all personal considerations, and all matters of mere opinion on doubtful points, and all side issues, and hold you to the real central question in dispute, viz.: Where do we get the Eternal Life, for which we hope? Is it the gift of God through Jesus Christ, and only to be received by a new birth, as the Scriptures so emphatically, and in so many ways declare, or is it the natural inheritance of all men by birth from Adam, who forfeited it for himself and his posterity, as we are explicitly told? Does Eternal Life mean simply purity and happiness engrafted upon an immortality which is common to all men, or does it mean the Divine Life of the Eternal God communicated to man in regeneration? Does Death mean a state of miserable separation of immortal sinners from God, or does it mean the loss of life itself, which only is actual death? These, or rather this, is the real question between us. The Bible, not tradition, not philosophy, not sentiment, not Plato, not Satan, must be our authority in this matter; and to this I appeal. If you can find any authority in God's Word which justifies you in disputing the claim of our Lord to be our only Source of Eternal Life,* and which sustains your abominable doctrine of endless sin and misery, a doctrine which reflects so terribly upon the justice, goodness, and mercy of our Heavenly Father, which is so at war with every instinct of humanity, you ought to be able to produce it, If you and those of your school had any solid ground under your feet, any satisfying confidence of the strength of your position, you would not, I am sure, seek to avoid, and to evade the main question, and try to beguile those who look to you for instruction, into these various by-paths that lead away from it, nor would you waste your strength in petty skirmishing, in discussing irrelevant topics, in making false issues, in setting up men of straw only to knock them down, in misrepresentations and unworthy flings, and in expressions of contempt for those who differ from you only in their supreme loyalty to the Word of God.
*See Matt. 19. 29. John 3. 36; 4. 14; 5. 24; 5. 39; 6. 68; 10. 28. John 17. 2, 3. Rom. 6. 23. 1 John 5. 20. Jude 1.21, etc.
I have never yet been able to get any answer to the inquiry after the reason of the hope that is in you, on this question, that would stand a moment's examination in the light of the Scriptures, nor any reasonable reply to our objections to it. To me, the reason for all this is obvious, and I think it must be to every reflecting mind. I am sorry to say this, or to think it of Christian brethren whom I love, and would fain honor as servants of our common Lord. I can only attribute their course in this discussion to the demoralizing effect of the unchristian dogma they are trying to uphold, and to the influence of tradition, false education, ecclesiastical trammels, and the fear of the loss of popular favor and position over their minds, and I must be permitted to add, above all, to the influence of the great Deceiver, who is only too willing to have Christ's accredited ministers repeat and uphold his original lie, which has wrought such mischief in the world from the beginning, which is so derogatory to the character of God, and such a hindrance to the progress of the Gospel, which is furnishing infidels, and skeptics, and scoffers of every sort, with their chief objections to the Bible, to which this doctrine is falsely attributed, and to the God of the Bible, who is made responsible for it, and, in short, which is doing more to lure sinners to death, by flattering them with the hope of immortality in their own right, without any Savior, while the threatening of the Divine law are completely nullified by their incredible enormity, threatening which professed believers dare only to hint at, in a vague and general way, as of doubtful import. Truly did Ezekiel in his time say, what may be repeated in ours, with greater emphasis, With lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad, and strengthened the hands of the wicked that he should not return from his wicked way by PROMISING HIM LIFE.
It is no pleasure to me to write to you in this strain. You have compelled me to do it. Loyalty to my Divine Master requires it, and I will not shrink from the duty which His providence has seemed to impose on me. While "contending earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints," I have endeavored to "speak the truth in love." I have avoided, as well as I could, all personal reflections. I have not been willing even to fling back your own discourteous language. It is not yourself, but your abominable doctrine, that I oppose and detest, as dishonorable to God, and a foul blot on the creed of any Christian Church, where it still lingers as an anachronism — a relic of a barbarous age. It is utterly incapable of any decent defense, either from reason or Revelation, and I must say that your method of defending it is in keeping with the character of the dogma itself.
Were I to repeat to you what some of your own Christian brethren, — clerical and lay, — who have been till recently your admirers and followers, and who do not now call themselves mine, have felt moved to say of your disingenuousness, of your exceedingly unfair treatment of my arguments, and of your discourteous language toward your Christian brother in this affair, and of your strange perversions of Scripture, and of the weakness of your Review, I am sure it would make you feel very humble. I had selected several passages in these letters received while writing these pages for quotation, but this reply is already too long; I must omit them; but I will, however, give you one short extract from a letter from one of your own flock, which has come to hand while I am writing this very paragraph, because it expresses my own thought, as well as that of others, and gives me the only explanation I can conceive of, why you have so misrepresented me. It is this: " I am under the impression that when Dr. Brookes began his review he had not read your writings, and after committing himself, like the man who swore the horse was sixteen feet high, instead of hands, he stuck to it when he and everybody else knew he had blundered."
But I would fain hope that you are not so irretrievably committed to your error, that you will not yet see it, and confess it, as so many who were once with you have done, and are now doing—for you have already come more than half way, in becoming a Second Adventist. In anticipation of this, I freely forgive you the injustice you have done me, in your misguided zeal. This is as nothing, and not to be thought of in comparison with the great wrong you are inflicting upon your Divine Lord, for whose speedy return both of us are anxiously looking. May He forgive you for wounding Him so grievously "In the house of His friends," because He knows you are doing it unwittingly, and open your eyes to see your error, as He did the eyes of Saul of Tarsus, and give you a better mind, and set you about some better work, than that of aiding His great anti-Christian adversary, in disputing His claim to be the only SOURCE and GIVER OF Eternal Life to perishing men. So that you, too, may be able at the end of your career to say, " I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me, at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love His appearing."
Sincerely yours in behalf of THE TRUTH AND TESTIMONY FOR CHRIST, Philadelphia, Pa., Dec. 25, 1886.
Ix the admirable discourse of President Porter, on " Science and Sentiment," published in the Tribune of April 21, 1879, we notice the following paragraph:
Science finds in man the desire for immortality, and finds it to be a persistent irrepressible force. It craves existence for those whom we love, as truly as for our individual selves. This desire is a constant, an ever-recurring fact, a phenomenon of enormous significance, a force of terrific energy, if we estimate it by its power of work. It may not he legitimate to reason: we are unwilling to cease to exist; but it is perfectly rational to conclude that Nature must put a lie on all her analogies and indications, if she has not provided a fact which shall answer to this desire, when viewed in its place among the springs of action.
In assenting to this truth so clearly stated, we could wish that the speaker had also said, that this "fact" which nature, or rather the God of nature, has provided, viz.: Immortality, 1.e., eternal life for man, is the substance of the Gospel Message. It is beyond the power of science to teach it, or of sentiment to assure it to man. United, all that they can do is to suggest to him the possibility or probability of an endless existence hereafter. They cannot guarantee it to him, or tell him how he may attain to it. This belongs to a Divine revelation. Life and immortality are brought to light in the Gospel: not as the inalienable inheritance of man, but as the special gift of God through a Savior; not to those who despise and spurn the offer, or who show themselves unworthy; but to those only who desire, and seek, and accept of it as the gift of God.
It is here we see how sentiment, taking no account of sin, by which every blessing may be forfeited, has over-ridden both science and revelation, and by " a persistent and irrepressible force," has silenced the teachings of both, and claimed for man, even in his alienation from God, or his indefeasible, unconditional prerogative, what the Gospel offers to his hopes, only as a gift, a free gift indeed, but a conditional gift through Christ, from whom it must be received, if received at all.
In denying to our Lord the high honor of being the Dispenser of eternal life to perishing men, He is robbed of His chief glory; the real object of His mission to earth, and of His death is obscured and perverted; and the Gospel is brought into comparative contempt, and reproach is cast upon the justice of God. For the alternative, to those who fail of this great salvation, from which the mercy of God would rescue man, instead of being death, which is the certain end of sin, is made to be an immortality in sin and misery,— a doom which it is becoming more and more impossible for intelligent men to accept, as either just, or credible, or possible, for a God of goodness to inflict on any of His creatures.
The Gospel, when presented with an alternative which defies the reason and the moral sense of the intelligent to whom it is offered, loses its power. Men become skeptics instead of Christians.
The dogma of sentiment, — that all men are necessarily and unconditionally immortal, because, forsooth, all men desire it, is no more true, with respect to the greatest of all boons, than with respect to all other things that are desirable; nor that sinful man shall not be destroyed, because he dreads and shrinks from destruction, than that he shall not reap the lesser evils he brings on himself by violating the laws of nature. The fact is, both the good and the evil that are set before him are conditional; and it is the object of a Divine Revelation to tell him what these conditions are.
The Bible doctrine that "the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord," however repugnant it may be to the sentiment in man that makes him shrink from the evil and crave the good, is the only foundation on which the Gospel can be offered.
It is, indeed, to this sentiment that its appeals are made. Let this be denied or ignored, and we have only an alternative, which men cannot, and ought not to believe.
It would not have been in the direct line of President Porter's philosophical discourse to have said all this. But it needs to be said, lest the argument should be abused, as it too often is, and accepted as teaching, — not simply the certain immortality of all who seek it, as it is offered in the. gospel; but the certain immortality of all men, — even of those who reject the Gospel.
We are happy to say, however, that there is nothing in this able discourse to warrant such an abuse of the argument; nor can we believe that so profound a theologian, as well as philosopher, as he is known to be, would so use it himself. We are the more inclined to think that the learned Doctor holds, esoterically, at least, to the view so evidently taught in the Scriptures, and also by Science and Sentiment when enlightened by Revelation, and to which so many of our best thinkers are coming, from the fact that nowhere throughout his larger treatise on the " Human Intellect," have we been able to find, as we do in the writings of others on this topic, any attempt to show the necessary immortality of all men, nor any assertion to that effect. We very much regret, however, that he has not declared himself more definitely on this question, that is so largely engaging the attention of the wise and good; and we cannot but hope that he may yet do it.
PHILADELPHIA, PA.
THE leading article in the BIBLE BANNER of December 26 is entitled, " This World a Failure." Were there nothing objectionable in the article itself, I cannot but think that the caption, at least, is unhappily worded, and calculated to convey a wrong impression. It certainly seems to cast a reproach upon Him who created the world, and whose providence is over all, and the dispensation of the Gospel through Christ our Savior, and the work of the Holy Spirit. The general line of thought running through the whole is open to the same objection. It is true, the good brother who wrote it had no such intention. He disavows, in the closing part, any such purpose. Indeed, I can most heartily agree with him in almost everything he says with respect to the depravity of man and the sad fruits of sin in the earth, but not in the main conclusion to which his argument is directed.
This world is not a failure. Nor is anything else that God has made. It is just what, in His wisdom and goodness, it was intended to be. The development of His original plan has been going surely forward, from the beginning till now, and will go forward till the top stone shall be laid with " shouting of grace, grace unto it "; and every creature shall pronounce it a glorious success. God makes no mistake. He is not obliged to resort to devices to meet unforeseen exigencies, or to repair unexpected mischances. He sees the end from the beginning, and "doeth all things well." As well might the tiny insect of a day, that passes its brief life amid the dust and debris of an unfinished temple of magnificent design and fair proportions, presume to call it a failure. God has not yet done with this world. At the first, it was but a chaos of elements, which might indeed, to a short-sighted creature, seem like a failure, when compared with the rude era that followed, and this also, when compared with that which followed after, and so with every subsequent stage of development.
The time was — and we know not how long it lasted — when nothing but the lowest forms of vegetable life existed. God was providing and storing away the abundant resources, from which we are now drawing our supplies. Then came the inferior forms of animal life; and after this. those that were higher in the scale of being, and last of all came man, the highest of all earthly creatures. He is put in possession of the whole, and made not only capable of controlling and using for his benefit all the resources of the earth — but endowed with a capacity for a still higher state of being, if he shall attain to it. It seems not to have been according to the Divine plan to introduce him, at the very outset, to that high and perfect state to which he is invited to aspire.
Indeed, we know not that the angels were created angels, at the first. Through what stages of trial and development they were led, from the lower to the higher, we may not be able to guess; nor how many were chosen to this high honor and how many were left behind. But, be that as it may, we know that with man, "that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward, that which is spiritual." We come not to the knowledge of the supreme good, but by the knowledge of evil also. We rise to the gate of life eternal, only through the gateway of death. We receive our crown, only after a struggle with all the opposing forms of evil, and enjoy the fruits of a victory which can be assured only by Divine help.
The present condition of man seems meager and imperfect, in comparison with that which is revealed to his faith and his hopes, and for which he is expected to strive, and so it is, but it is not a failure.
Man, even as an earthly and transitory creature, is a wonderful specimen of the wisdom and power of his Creator. " Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou made him to have dominion over the works of the hands; thou hast put all things under his feet; all sheep and oxen, and the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passes through the paths of the seas. O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth." If the Psalmist could say this in the comparative darkness and barbarism of his time, how much more truly can we say it now? What triumphs of skill, of genius, of persevering labor do we see on every side. They are to be found in every land. They fill the seas. Man bridges mighty rivers, levels high hills, fills up the valleys, tunnels the mountains, sweeps away forests, transforms the wilderness into fertile fields, brings up treasures from the depth of the ocean, and from the bowels of the earth, analyzes all substances, compels nature, as it were, to give up her secrets, and yield her forces to his control. He makes fire and water his servants to carry him wherever he will, and lightning his messenger to the uttermost parts of the earth; he points his glass to the sky and penetrates the infinite depths of space, and surveys distant worlds, and observes the laws of their motion and their construction.
This world with its surroundings, has enough to meet every want of his physical nature, to gratify his taste, and to feed his intellect. If all these fail to satisfy the aspirations of a higher nature, which God has implanted within him, it is simply because the good for which he thirsts is only to be reached in another state of existence, to which his God would lead him, if he will seek it with all his heart. It is spiritual and eternal. The highest good which this world offers is earthly and transitory.
From the Christian standpoint, it is indeed sad and affecting to see what multitudes spurn that higher good and the call to life and immortality, and desire and seek only that which is earthly and transitory.
How many aspire to nothing better than the gratification of their animal passions, and live like the brutes that perish, and perish with them and pass away forever. But it is well to remember that man has only that for which he lives. It is not according to the wisdom of his Maker to thrust upon him the higher gifts of his grace that are neither sought nor desired. It is indeed sad to contemplate the multitudes that fail to rise to that higher life which the Son of God, by His own death, has opened to mortal man. In this sense, in view of opportunities lost, the human career of millions of individuals may be regarded as a failure. Did we believe, as some do, that there was nothing before them in the endless future, but an eternity of sin and suffering, and that their almighty Creator could do nothing better with them than imprison and torment them without mercy, and without cessation, and without end, we could blame no man for calling their creation a failure. But we do not so understand the truth, neither does our worthy brother, whose unguarded language we have ventured to criticize. While he grieves over the depravity and folly of man, and thinks of the vain and transitory life of so many to whom an eternal career of glory was made possible by the mercy of God, as well he may, let him also consider the countless numbers which have already been gathered, and are now being gathered, and are yet to be gathered, from every age and clime under the whole heaven, to enter into His everlasting kingdom, and made possessors of the inheritance that is incorruptible and undefiled and that fades not away, to the praise of the riches of His grace in Christ their Savior.
There is a wonderful profusion, and an apparent excess of supply in nature everywhere to be seen. It is not every blossom, nor every bud, that develops into fruitage. But when the husbandman gathers in his bountiful harvest, he does not call it a failure, though a portion of the seed sown has gone to waste. So our Lord, when He shall gather in His glorious harvest of countless millions of ransomed mortals, will see of the travail of his/soul and be satisfied. When they shall come from the east and the west, and from the north and the south, and sit down to the feast of His love, there will be no vacant seats at the marriage supper of the Lamb. He has determined that His house shall be filled, and neither the cunning of Satan nor the folly of man shall be able to frustrate His gracious purpose.
Neither is the Gospel dispensation under which we now live a failure. It has already been, and is yet to be, more and more, a glorious success. Although the current sometimes runs slowly and seems even at times to go backward, its general course is steadily onward. All the glowing prophecies of Scripture concerning it are in the process of fulfillment; and when the Lord Himself shall come in His kingdom, not one of them shall have failed.
There appears to be a tendency on the part of many of my good Christian brethren, who look for the speedy coming of the Lord, to depreciate the fruits of His Gospel, which, I think, ought to be rebuked, as neither honorable to its Author, nor consistent with the truth. They seem to think it import int for them to show that the world instead of becoming better under its benign influence, is only growing worse, and will grow yet worse and worse, until He comes, to reject the present dispensation of grace as a misadventure, and to try another scheme for reforming it. But I cannot see how it is possible for any man who has any intelligent knowledge of the present state of the world and of its past history to take this view of it, either in its material or moral aspect. As it appears to me, there never was a time since the fall when the world was in so happy, prosperous, and hopeful a condition as at the present; when the lot of the common people was so remunerative and directed to such useful purposes; where the masses were so intelligent and free; when there was so little cruelty and oppression; when life, property, and character were so safe; when virtue was so highly honored, and so sure of its reward, and, in short, when the intellectual and moral tone of the world was so high. I say all this, without forgetting the vast regions that are still in the midnight of barbarism, or in the twilight of semi-civilization; and without ignoring or palliating, in the least degree, the numerous and abominable evils that exist in the most enlightened countries of the world. We are often shocked and made sick at heart in contemplating them. But one has only to compare the present with the past, to be convinced that wonderful changes for the better have taken place in every part of the world, and are now going on. Why, the common people, in all civilized countries, are better fed and better clothed, and have more comforts and more intelligence than kings and princes had a few centuries ago. The cruelties and barbarities that were once freely practiced under the most enlightened governments in the world in the name of justice or religion, and such abominable cruelties as the Church has not yet ceased to charge upon the Almighty in His administration, would not now be tolerated under any recognized government under heaven.
This is not because human depravity is taking on a milder type, and natural men are growing better and better. This we must not look for; but it is due solely to the influence of the gospel of the kingdom. Its principles and precepts are entering more and more into the foundation of social life and human governments, and controlling legislation, the administration of law and justice, and the conduct of human affairs, in every department of life. This is the fruit of the gospel, not merely, in so-called Christian lands, but it is even now felt as a power to the ends of the earth. Philosophy, science, education, the mechanic arts, manufactures, commerce, and every honorable branch of industry have received within the past one or two hundred years, and especially within the present generation, an extraordinary impulse and have shown a wonderful development; nor has the limit of progress apparently been yet reached. At this accelerated rate of advancement — if this present dispensation shall continue to the end of this chiliad — according to the common chronology, every department of human affairs is destined to undergo changes that must seem little short of miraculous, as compared with even this present condition of things.
Turning our attention from the material interests of the world to those that are more entirely spiritual, it cannot perhaps be said with truth that the Christian Church is any purer, or more self-denying or Christ-like than in the earlier ages of its history. Opposition, trial and persecution are needed to bring out the latent grace of Christ's people. Indeed, we have to mourn that its glory is so sadly dimmed and its progress hindered by the prevalence of a heathen philosophy as to the nature of man. But the Church of Christ, with all its defects is certainly more worthy of the name it bears, thin during the ages of darkness and corruption before the Reformation. That there are more real disciples of the present day than at any time since the beginning — more happy families and. peaceful, Christian communities, hardly admits of a question. The spirit of philanthropy, charity, beneficent activity was never so rife. Associations for the relief of the poor, the afflicted, the oppressed, and for the suppression of vice and crime, and the reformation of offenders abound on every side. Missionary effort, both at home and abroad, is pushed with great vigor and success. To say nothing of the large sums raised to sustain Christian institutions and carry on their benevolent work at home, the amount that is annually contributed to propagate the gospel in foreign lands, is millions upon millions of dollars. The Word of God has already been translated into all the principal languages of the world, and several scores of these languages have, for the first time, been reduced to a written form by our missionaries, and a Christian literature created for the people, and the thousand printing presses are constantly at work to multiply and extend it.
Numerous islands of the Pacific have been recovered from the lowest depths of barbarism, and lifted into a state of Christian civilization, and good, constitutional government. Missionary stations have been taken in almost every quarter and country of the habitable globe, and a thousand centers of light and civilization established; and all this, mostly within the present century. Indeed, the doors of entrance, which were closed, till within a few years to more than half the heathen world, have all been thrown wide open, and missionary laborers are permitted now to go almost everywhere, and they are going, and not in vain. Converts are multiplying in these dark places of the earth, so recently full of the habitations of cruelty, even more rapidly than in Christian lands. While I write, the report comes from the Baptist's mission to the Teloogoos, of India, of the addition of five thousand four hundred and twenty-nine converts to the one church at Ongole, within the space of twenty-one days. And yet, in most of our missions the work has hitherto been, very largely, one of preparation and of beginning, and we may reasonably hope, with the blessing of God, that the few thousands that have been won to Christ within the last half century, will be multiplied tenfold or even one hundred fold, during the few years that shall intervene before the coming and kingdom of our Lord.
If the Gospel, notwithstanding the false philosophies and traditions of men which obscure it, is. possessed of such living energy, hampered as it is, what shall be its effulgence and power when a true Gospel shall be permitted to shine in all its fulness and glory, and the Spirit of the Lord shall accompany the message to the hearts of those who hear? That day we trust is near at hand— " The Lord hasten it in his time."
What shall be the time of the end, when the King himself shall come to gather in the Gospel harvest, and take the government into his own hands, we do not venture even to guess; but of this we are fully assured, that his Word shall not return unto him void, but shall accomplish its mission in all the earth, and have free course and be glorified; and that His coming will not be to discredit its power, and to testify to its failure, but to cause its triumph and set up His kingdom and reign forever over his ransomed people, and a regenerated earth. Even so, come Lord Jesus.
MY DEAR BROTHER: — I thank you for your kind note of yesterday. I have no desire to draw you out in an argument, nor do I wish to inflict one on you. But before the subject on which you write is dropped, I want to say a few more words.
When I first began to study this question, it was to oppose the doctrine of life only in Christ; but the more seriously I investigated, the more evident it became that the traditional notions in which I had been trained were unscriptural, and I was obliged to follow the light, and to be true to my convictions. And when I came to recognize Christ as " our life" actually and truly, the fog which had hung over the eschatology of the Bible cleared up, and all the evangelical doctrines shone out with wonderful clearness; and the whole Gospel system was clothed with a beauty and power I had never seen before.
My subsequent studies during the past ten years have only strengthened and enlarged my faith. I wrote the book to which you allude in the interests of orthodoxy, and to exalt and not to depreciate evangelical truth. The drift of public sentiment of the present day, as it seems to me, is away from Christ and evangelical doctrine, especially in two ways.
1 The tendency to Universalism, near or remote, through a future probation, or some other way not revealed, is very manifest. I heard a beautiful sermon, two Sundays ago, from a prominent Congregational minister, in which he plainly avowed this hope. I took him to task for it. He confessed he could not believe in endless misery, and as for Plato's philosophy of the necessary immortality of all men, he was not quite ready to give it up. What else could he believe?
Bro. C—, who made a strong effort to have me turned out of the Association last year for heresy on this question, acknowledged that he would sooner accept of Universalism than of the doctrine of conditional immortality. So did the Congregationalist. And so will it be more and more. For men will not continue to believe that a just God will perpetuate the useless and forfeited lives of the lost, simply for the sake of keeping them in misery.
2 The tendency to depreciate or undervalue the work of Christ, and our need of Him, is also becoming more and more evident. He is indeed to be loved, trusted, worshiped, etc. We need Him to help us, to guide, to purify, to make us holy, etc.; but we do not need Him to save us from anything but sin and misery — from a metaphorical death, not an actual death. We need Him to give us a kind of blessedness — metaphorically called life, but not actual, real life.
Now, I am sure that the Bible teaches very explicitly, that the Adamic race is mortal and transitory, and that the (psuche) life we have in the flesh has not the principle of immortality in it — that it is only in and through Him that we have the (we) life everlasting. The very object of His death was to ransom us from the dominion of death and to immortalize us. " He is the resurrection and the life," and without this life we must perish, go to naught, become extinct.
You can readily see how greatly this view enhances the value of Christ's death and our need of Him as our Savior.
Now there is no reason whatever for taking the plain terms of Scripture denoting death, destruction, etc., and life, salvation, etc., to mean something less or different from what they always mean when applied to other matters, but to accommodate them to the false heathen philosophy which men bring with them to the interpretation of the Scriptures. And yet we have all been so trained into this philosophy, and all our theology and poetry and literature has become so saturated with it, that it is almost impossible to examine the Scriptures on this question without warping them to our philosophy.
But it must be confessed, and is confessed, that neither Scripture nor philosophy gives any assurance that we are possessed of immortality. This longing and yearning for it is just what God meant we should have to prepare us to accept of the Gospel which offers it-to us in Christ, and shows us how to attain to it. But heathen philosophers, who knew not Christ, jumped at the conclusion that because man desired it, he would certainly have it— without a Savior; and the Church, after the first two centuries, yielded the point, which the apostles and early fathers so stoutly maintained, of life eternal only in Christ, and accepted Plato's philosophy of the eternal life of all men, — but happiness only for the good, and unending misery for the bad; and this threw the Gospel and the whole Christian system into confusion and opened the way for a multitude of other errors — some of which we renounced in the Reformation —but this, which really lies at the bottom of the whole, is suffered still to linger.
Now I agree with you that holiness and its fruits are set over against sin and its fruits in the Bible (as well as in Nature). They are made antithetical—and this is what I insist on more strongly than yourself. Happiness and misery are antithetical, so are life and death. The endless misery of the wicked in hell might be set over against the endless blessedness of the righteous in heaven, if both have an endless life of which to predicate this misery and blessedness. But "life," "life," "the life everlasting," is just that which is promised to the righteous and denied to the wicked —and this life is made to include all that makes life enjoyable. Nothing but death is its proper antithesis. The pains and miseries that follow sin are not its full consequences. They are but the first fruits. They are — as with the body — symptomatic of the death that is to follow. " Sin when it is finished bringeth forth death." That is to come hereafter — for sin is not yet finished. But we are forewarned by the miseries now experienced of the fatal end to which it will surely bring us. Holiness is as essential to perpetuity of being, as it is to happiness, and sin is as destructive of life and being, as it is of happiness. Here we see the wisdom and power and glory of God. But I must close. I hope you will not dismiss this subject till you reach the same happy and satisfactory conclusion in which I rejoice.
Very truly and fraternally yours, PHILADELPHIA, PA. J. H. P.
* To the Editor of St. Louis Evangelist:
My DEAR SIR: —It is not my good fortune to see your excellent paper as often as I could wish. Some two months ago a friend sent me a copy containing some strictures on my last book, " The Unspeakable Gift," and you were kind enough to permit me, in a brief article, to correct some of his misrepresentations. And now I find in the issue for May 21st, which the same friend has sent me, that Mr. Luther Dodd makes very free use of my name in one of his articles entitled " The Penalty of Sin not Extinction of Being, but Conscious, Unending Suffering." I again appeal to your courtesy to allow me a few words in reply, not for the purpose of entering into any extended discussion with him, for I have no time for this, even if you could find room for it in your paper, but simply for the purpose of setting this question, which I have attempted to discuss in my book, in its true light before your readers, if not before the mind of my respected critic. For he seems to have a very imperfect conception of it, which, perhaps, is not to be wondered at; for he confesses that he has never seen the book of which he speaks, but has only seen sundry sporadic leaflets, written in reply to certain points in the argument. Let me say then,
1 It is the question of Eternal Life that I have discussed. How do we attain to it? From whom is it received? To whom is it given? What are the conditions of its bestowment? etc. This is the great boon which all thinking men naturally desire. Even those who are groping their way to the death, which is the common lot of all men, without the light of the Gospel, are filled with hopes and fears with respect to the future. For God has given to all men some glimmering intimations of the possibility of another life beyond the tomb. But how to assure themselves of it, or how to attain to it, Nature does not teach them. This was the great question of the wisest of these ancient philosophers.
If a man die shall be live again? They indulged in many and crude speculations, and constructed many hypotheses, but, after all, confessed themselves unable to solve the mystery of a future life, and that they "must wait for some Divine Logos from heaven to teach them."
Now this is the reason why we need a Divine Revelation, and the very reason why one has been given to us, to tell us of this immortality which we desire, and how to attain to it; how it has been forfeited by sin; and how Christ has regained it for all who will receive it at His hand; how He has redeemed us from death by His own death, and how He rose again by the- Divine Life that was within Him; and how He offers this life, or a new life by a resurrection from the dead, to all who shall come to God through Him. This then, is THE GOSPEL, the proclamation of "Life Eternal through Jesus Christ our Lord." This is what He Himself taught with a constant reiteration that is most remarkable. This is what His commissioned disciples proclaimed with the greatest emphasis in all their discourses and epistles — That Eternal Life is to be sought and found in Him, and in Him alone.
To quote all the passages in point would be to quote a large part of the New Testament. Let me simply refer you to the sixth chapter of John's Gospel, where our Lord sets forth this truth with such clearness and force that " From that time many of His disciples went back, and walked no more with Him." This is just the doctrine that offends the pride of many who call themselves His disciples at the present day.
They love to claim this Eternal Life as their own natural birthright, and cannot consent to be indebted to Him for it. They are willing to own Him as a Savior from suffering, and the Giver of eternal blessedness, but not as the actual source of their eternal life, for this they have never forfeited. This they have without any Savior. " Then said Jesus unto the twelve, ' Will ye also go away?' And Simon Peter answered him, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of Eternal Life'" (verses 66-68).
Now I have endeavored in my volume to clear away some of the traditional rubbish with which a heathen philosophy and mediaeval scholasticism have encumbered this glorious Gospel, and to set it forth in its true light as the " faith once delivered to the saints," and the only doctrine taught by the true followers of Christ for the first one hundred and fifty years of the history of the Christian Church.
That this doctrine should now encounter the same opposition—and for the same reason, too — which the Platonized Pharisees and Rabbins offered to it, is not to be wondered at. Our learned men, at the present day, will ignore this positive side of the gospels, and if the question must be discussed, they will insist on discussing, not the question of Eternal Life, What is its Source? What are its Conditions? but the question of eternal death and "endless conscious suffering." For assuming, without any warrant from Nature, Reason, or Revelation, and indeed in spite of them all, the deathless nature of the human soul, and giving to the words "Death," "Destruction," which the Scriptures predicate of it, such an interpretation as will consist with their theory, it seems to them that the questions of eternal punishment and of suffering are the only questions to be considered. So it is, all their arguments take this shape. But this is certainly to begin at the wrong end of the argument. Let them first establish their postulate — the deathless nature of the soul—which, by the way, the Scriptures, from beginning to end, everywhere declare to be mortal, perishable, transitory — and then it will be in order to discuss the negative, or alternative side of the Gospel.
That the final doom of the impenitent, especially the doom of those who have sinned against great light, and have actually rejected the offer of Eternal Life through the Savior that God has provided, will be fearful, and that there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth and hopeless rage, on the part of the condemned, when they shall see so many others entering the kingdom of heaven, and they themselves thrust out as unfit to enter, and forever excluded, the Scriptures most evidently declare. But what shall be the measure of punishment meted out to them according to their deserts; how long they shall linger on their way to the second death, from which there is no possible resurrection; under what varying circumstances they shall perish in their own corruption, or be consumed by the fires of God's wrath; I profess to know nothing more than the Scriptures teach, and I forbear to speculate. But this I do know, because the Word of God plainly teaches it, "That God hath given to us Eternal Life, and this Life is in His Son. He that has the Son has the Life, and he that hath not the Son hath not Life," and of course cannot live and suffer forever. This is the Life, a life of purity, a blessing unending, because it is the life of God Himself in the soul of man —that unspeakable gift," the gift of God through Jesus Christ our Lord," and through Him only, that I have chosen as my theme, and which I would fain press upon the consideration of my readers.
2 I am surprised that my critic should say that I " adhere to no clear definition of the penalty of sin," when the scriptural word death is the one, and only one, upon which I insist. "The soul that sinned, it shall die." That sin always brings misery, sooner or later, is true, and this may well be taken into consideration. But this is merely its accompaniment, and not its final end. It is the prelude, the foreshadowing of the coming of the fatal result. " Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth the DEATH." It is those who oppose this doctrine who "adhere to no clear definition of the penalty of sin." They have invented a great variety of definitions to make the threatened penalty consistent with their assumption, that the soul of man cannot die. But they cannot hold to any one of them. They vacillate from one to another as the occasion seems to require. It is the "loss of God's favor"; it is "the separation of soul and body"; it is "devitalized"; it is the loss of true "functional activity"; it is "all the miseries of this life, and the pains of hell forever"; it is "eternal sin and misery"; it is "to be tormented with the devil and his angels forever," etc., etc. But it is never actual "death and destruction" as the Word of God declares. Indeed, my critic accepts it in its literal sense only when predicated of the " worm," in the passage which he quotes to establish the doctrine of the "unending suffering" of the soul of man. That is, when the Scriptures say, "the worm dies not" and the "soul shall die," the same thing is meant—there shall be no death in either case. They shall both live together in torment forever! It does not concern me to attempt to disprove the immortality of a "worm," if he chooses so to understand the passage — for this would establish nothing concerning the immortality of the individual sinner. Nor need I say to any intelligent reader that the use our Lord makes of this passage, quoted from Isaiah, last verse in the book —"For their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched," etc., was evidently to illustrate the awful, certain, complete and remediless destruction of the wicked who are cast into Gehenna —where as in the valley of Gehenna—from which his figure is taken, the worms are continually devouring, and the fires are consuming the bodies of criminals, and all the vile refuse of the city that are cast into it —they shall also be utterly consumed. To quote this passage to show that the wicked shall never be consumed, but only tormented forever, is to completely reverse the meaning of the original text in Isaiah, and of the figurative illustration our Lord draws from it.
As for the influence which the threatening of endless torment may have upon the minds of sinners, to terrorize them, and deter them from sin, this depends largely upon whether they can be made to believe the threatening or not. No doubt this had some restraining influence in those ages of cruelty and barbarism, when it was the practice to inflict the utmost possible torment upon offenders against the will of the sovereign, and our Heavenly Father was supposed to be only another and greater tyrant capable of inflicting infinitely more terrible and more enduring — yea, endless— torments upon the victims of His wrath. But these threatening, even when believed, never had any power over the hearts of men to bring them to sincere repentance, to the love, holiness, and true faith in the Savior. It only made them Christians in name — hypocrites — and drove them to the Virgin Mary and to the saints, who were supposed to have some pity in their hearts, and to the priests for absolution, or indulgence to commit sin. But even this power has exhausted itself among the more intelligent at the present day, for men have ceased to believe it possible for God to inflict endless torment upon any creatures. And the sure result of preaching it is to drive men from the sanctuary, to make them Universalists and Infidels, as Satan no doubt intended when he imposed his lie of the natural immortality of sinners upon the human race. I do not question the sincerity of my respected critic in repeating this lie of the Tempter, as though it were the voice of God, and in trying to hold men to a theodicy that not only outrages their sense of justice, but is absolutely incredible; but I can assure him that he is doing more to make infidels and skeptics, and to fill their mouths with arguments against the Deity and His Christ, than he could do in any other way. Why should he not preach to perishing men the true Gospel that has been committed to him: " God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life "?
He says that Christ redeemed us from the penalty of the law "by His suffering." But if unending suffering be the penalty of the law, then man has never been redeemed; for He endured no such suffering. But the penalty is on the contrary death, actual death, and this is the penalty He suffered. And now, as a perfect Redeemer of the whole Adamic race from this death, He is able to give the life by which He again lives—His own peculiar life—The Life Everlasting—to all who will receive it at His hands.
Is there no power in the thought of such a redemption, and in the offer of such a gift, the "Unspeakable Gift" of God through Jesus Christ, to touch the heart of the sinner? Is there nothing terrible in the prospect of a second death, from which there is no redemption, and no possible resurrection, of being blotted out from the "Book of Life," and being counted unfit to live any longer or anywhere in that coining kingdom of purity, blessedness, and joy, which is yet to be universal, and to endure forever? My friend greatly underestimates the power of Gospel motives if he thinks that such considerations are weak and vain; he sadly errs when he imagines that he can increase their force and efficacy by adding to them the fanciful and hideous conceptions of pagan worshipers, medieval scholastics, and power-loving priests. It was by the preaching of this simple Gospel that such victories were achieved in the early stages of its career, and it was not till its glory was obscured by the vain conceit of selfish and brutal men, that its progress was stayed, and the Church fell from its high position as " the pillar and ground of the truth," and it is only by returning to the primitive faith that the Church of Christ will regain the power she has lost, and her ministers," by the manifestation of the truth, commend themselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God."
I am very truly yours, in the fellowship and labor of the Gospel. J. H. P.
PHILADELPHIA, PA., May 25, 1885.
Another book has been written to defend the traditional dogma of endless sin and misery; another Theological Professor (in the language of the Congregationalist) "has earned the gratitude of all lovers of Bible truth for having taken down the old sword and wielded it so valiantly, and so successfully in the fight that now is "; another great religious Publishing Society invites for him the approbation of its numerous clientele for giving to them a "timely book" in behalf of this great popular delusion, which seems to be losing its hold on the minds of thinking men and intelligent Christians throughout the world.
The book is entitled, The Soul Here and Hereafter. The author is Rev. Prof. C. M. Mead, of Andover Theological Seminary. It is published by the Congregational Publishing Society, Boston. It is a volume of 462 pages. It had its origin, as the writer tells us, in a series of newspaper articles reviewing Dr. Ives' Bible Doctrine of the Soul. But as now completed, it embraces criticisms on Rev. E. White's (English) work, entitled Life in Christ, and Rev. J. H. Pettingell's Theological Trilemma, with occasional allusions to the works of several other authors on the same general question of Conditional Immortality.
It is indeed " timely " in view of the exigencies of the cause it undertakes to defend. But we are inclined to think that this "old" media3val "sword" of the Schoolmen, which has proved such a terrible weapon in the hands of the Papacy, will hardly answer his purpose among Protestant Christians in this enlightened age, however " valiantly " he may be thought to " wield it." Thinking men at the present day need something more than traditional dogmas or ecclesiastical decretals, or theological sophistry to hold them to those views of God and his government that outrage their moral sense, contradict the plain teachings of His Word, and are utterly inconsistent with the spirit and principles of the Gospel. They are beginning o suspect, to hope, to believe that our God is, not like the gods of the heathen, a monstrous tyrant, whom none but His special favorites can trust, but a benignant Father, whom all can love and confide in, and who " so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not PERISH, but have EVERLASTING LIFE."
They are coming to believe, more and more, that the great salvation He has provided, is not a rescue from an incredible doom which none but a fiend could desire to inflict— and which God certainly has never threatened; but from the death which is the necessary result of our fallen condition, to an endless life in His heavenly kingdom; that it was — not man's Creator, but — the deceiver who said, "ye shall not surely die"; that this death was the very doom which Christ suffered for us, and rose again that He might give eternal life — not blessedness simply —but ETERNAL LIFE to perishing mortals.
This work makes quite a show of Greek and Hebrew scholarship, and of Biblical criticism. But the author succeeds most wonderfully in muddling the Scriptures and in mystifying whatever point he attempts to discuss. Indeed, he does not aim to establish any definite position for himself, but rather to see how often he can hit his antagonists, and how unworthy of confidence he can make them appear. His method is what is called in "carnal warfare" bushwhacking, or that employed by the Indians — firing at the enemy from behind a tree. He shows considerable tact in searching out unguarded points, or infelicitous modes of expression in any one of the several authors he criticizes, and of charging them over against all the others.
This device of reviewing several authors at the same time, and of making them all responsible for the deficiencies, mistakes or errors of each other is not new with him. It is an old artifice, and an easy way of avoiding the strong arguments of any one of them, and of seeming to gain a victory over them all. If we should practice it upon him, and charge him with all the errors and heresies of others who hold the doctrine of endless sin and misery in common with himself, he would complain, and not without reason. Indeed, the modern advocates of the modified view of the eternal torments of the lost that now obtains, do complain when we reproduce the horrid pictures of hell with its material fires, and cite the graphic language employed by their venerable fathers, in describing the dreadful sufferings of "immortal souls" in the world of woe.
The object of religious disputants upon any moral question should be the truth. In comparison with this, the personal faults of writers or speakers, the idiosyncrasies of those who argue for or against any view, are of small consequence. Now the real question in discussion between us is. or ought to be this — Is immortality the certain and inalienable inheritance of all the children of Adam by a natural birth, or is it the special gift of God through Jesus Christ by a second. spiritual birth? Did Christ die to save immortal creatures from eternal sin and mitering, or to save men from actual death as the final result of sin, and to raise them to an eternal life of blessedness in his coming kingdom?
It seems a great pity to have this great question, that has so important a bearing on our estimate of the character of God and of our relation to His government, and of the object of Christ's death, and of the meaning of the Gospel message — degraded or obscured and so lost sight of, by the discussion of irrelevant issues and by personal accusation, and flings and unchristian reflections by the parties who engage in it. It is no doubt very difficult for earnest men to conduct any controversy, — much less a religious controversy, in a fair, Christian spirit. We are all too much inclined to consider whatever is said against the truths or the errors we advocate as said against ourselves. But it certainly should be the aim of every disciple of Christ to discuss the great doctrines of Divine revelation with a supreme regard for the truth, with charity toward those who may differ from them, and in as impersonal a manner as possible. That the advocates of the doctrines of Life in Christ are without censure in this regard, we do not assert, for they have had great provocation; but we are constrained to say, that the treatment they have received, and are receiving at the hands of those who oppose their views, is eminently unchristian and unfair, not to employ harsher terms to characterize it. They have been sneered at, denounced, misquoted, misrepresented, falsely accused, and rarely, very rarely, has there been, in all the notices that have appeared of their writings or their views, any honest attempt to state the doctrine as they hold it, or to meet the real issue. In fact, there has very generally appeared a determination to misrepresent them and their views; and the "orthodox organs" of our various denominational bodies, through which these misrepresentations have been freely circulated, have been persistently closed against them for the purpose of brief correction or explanation.
The leading characteristic of Professor Mead's book is its personality. Instead of devoting himself to the discussion of great principles, he nibbles at all the little vulnerable points he can discover in the several books he criticizes and directs as much attention as possible to the authors themselves. Hastily running my eye over the pages of this book I count the name of Dr. Ives three hundred and forty-seven times printed in full and the personal pronoun is everywhere used still more frequently. The names of Mr. White and Mr. Pettingell, though not so often employed, may be found scores of times. This personality cannot be altogether excused on the plea of convenience; for it is really the critical, or logical, or exegetical ability of the individuals themselves that he discusses.
I have no reply to make to what is said in his book of the materialistic views of Dr. Ives, and of his definition of the soul as the physical organism, for this is not my doctrine. I have always regretted that Dr. Ives chose to found his argument for the corruptible nature of the soul so largely on a hypothesis concerning it that is certainly open to grave objections in an evangelical point of view, when he might have rested it on a more solid foundation. It is by no means necessary to determine whether the soul be a physical or spiritual entity, or whether it be actually separable frow the body and as such capable of independent activity, before we can decide whether it be destructible or indestructible. If, indeed, it can be shown to be only a material organism, as Dr. Ives argues, then it would seem necessarily to share the fate of the body, as he believed. But if it were proved to be a distinct spiritual entity, it does not follow that it cannot be corrupted and destroyed. If the soul, as such, was created, then it can be untreated. If it had a beginning, it may have an end, for anything that reason or nature can show to the contrary. And if Divine revelation, which is our only sure authority in this matter, assures us that it is in the power of sin to destroy it, then the teaching of God's Word is to be accepted as conclusive on this point. If indeed we held with Plato and his disciples that the soul never was created, but is eternal in its pre-existence, then, we can logically believe with him that its future existence will be endless. But Christian philosophy rejects the former part of this proposition as essentially atheistic, and yet, strange to say, its popular defenders hold to the latter part of it, which by itself has no logical force, and to my mind, is equally untenable; and in spite of the teachings of God's Word, gravely asserts, as one of its fundamental axioms, that the soul of man is in its very nature immortal, and, therefore, the death with which it is threatened on account of sin cannot mean real death, but an eternal state of misery, and that the Life everlasting which is promised through Christ is an opposite state of endless blessedness.
Professor Mead holds in his book, as does Dr. Bartlett, another of this school, that life and death are merely modes or conditions of existence, and that therefore living creatures who could not have begun to be without life, and the very essence of whose being is life, can exist after they are dead, and not only exist, but fulfill all the functions of their being without any life at all. This we deny. And to characterize it in his own language, to our minds it is "rank nonsense."
He charges us with making no distinction between life and existence. But the confusion is in his own mind. Existence is certainly a broader and more inclusive term than life. Whatever is, exists, whether it have life or not. But he seems to forget that life is the essential thing, the sine qua non of certain kinds of existence. For instance, it takes life to constitute animal existence. Without life no animal can exist. as an animal. What is a horse, for instance, after he is dead? It is certainly not a horse. The dead carcass remains; that exists; but the horse no longer exists, nor can he exist without life. If we were to say that the life or soul of the horse is a distinct entity of itself that leaves the animal at death, this entity does not constitute the animal. It cannot perform the functions of the animal in its separation. It requires a body, and a body with life in it, to constitute the animal. And there is not the shadow of evidence, in Nature or Revelation, to show that the same is not true of man, or that the spiritual entity, whatever it may be, is all that is necessary to constitute the man, that he can continue his conscious existence, think, remember, sin and suffer outside and independent of a physical organization, and without life. The Bible always speaks of man as a unit, formed, it may be, by the union of a living force with a material organism; but neither of these alone is a man. It requires both together to constitute a man, as truly as the formation of water is by the union of oxygen and hydrogen; neither of them alone is water. It is a speculative philosophy that undertakes to dissolve man into his constituent elements, and to determine which are, and which are not, necessary to his existence as a man. If the body were not needful, then of what importance is the great doctrine of the resurrection, a doctrine which this species of philosophy has thrown into the shade, but which Christ and His immediate disciples thought all-important? "For if the dead rise not, then they which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished."
I am astonished that the Congregational Publication Committee should have been willing to put their imprint on a volume that is so pre-eminently and offensively personal toward members of their own household, and containing little else but words. I can account for it only on the supposition, that confiding too implicitly in the source from which it came, they neglected to examine it before publication. It has never been my fortune to see a work that made such a tremendous show of learning with such meager results. He lays down no principle, nor does he undertake to defend any thesis of his own. The most he does is to say that this or that idea is false or preposterous, or ridiculous, oi cannot be proved. He devotes one hundred and ninety pages to the two words " Life " and "Death." He quotes a vast number of texts, and gives their Hebrew or Greek equivalents, and tells us how this and that and the other are to be read, and when he comes to the end, it is all a muddle. I have read this whole section twice through, pencil in hand, with an earnest effort to discover what he intended to teach, and have been obliged to give it up. Nor do I believe any other man " can find out," nor that he himself knows, excepting that he has a very contemptible opinion of the authors he criticizes, and wants to show it. But I have succeeded in fishing up out of the muddy water these two definitions of Life and Death, and will here give them for the benefit of searchers after the truth. They are as follows: Life means "vitalized," and Death means "devitalized" or "unvitalized." This almost equals Dr. Bartlett's two definitions, namely, "functional activity" and "functional inactivity."
I am not surprised to hear that the publication of this volume has been discontinued, and that it is no longer on sale at their office. This is creditable to the good sense of the committee (1885).
I cannot think that the work, however widely it may be circulated by the Congregational Publishing Society, will do much to check the progress of the "heresy" at which it is aimed, nor to add to the reputation of its author as a clear thinker and sound theologian, unless by soundness is meant a pertinacious adherence to the traditions and dogmas of the school in which he has been trained, and whose creed he is bound to represent and defend. In this sense he is eminently a safe teacher, and his soundness is not to be questioned.
Without definitely stating what he does or does not believe concerning the doom of the wicked, he comes to this grave conclusion at the close of his volume. "That the doom of the lost will be just, whatever it is." "That God is just; and the Judge of all the earth will do right." And that we are not qualified to determine what is just or right for God to do in the administration of His government, and that we are to accept the truth as it is made known to us concerning Him, as good and just, whether we can see or feel it to be so or not. " It belongs to us to say, not that such things are not just and therefore cannot be, but that they must be just, because they are the doings of Him whose judgments are true and righteous altogether." The first part of this proposition, that God is just and good, is a truism that no one would think of disputing. The question is not whether God be just and good, or not, but whether the acts which men attribute to Him are just and good. If God be good, how are we to know and feel this, and to love and trust Him as such, unless we can form some judgment in our own minds of what is good and just? Because God is just, it does not follow that we are bound to accept with an unquestioning faith of doctrines concerning Him that outrage every sentiment of justice within us, that are absolutely hideous, even to the mind of a savage, doctrines that can be made tolerable, only by covering them up, and explaining them away. Whatever may be true of past generations, men of the present day — if they are to be held to the belief in any God —must have one whose goodness they can be made to see and feel, and whom they can love and trust as well as fear, and a theodicy that commends itself to their moral sense and their hearts. If our theological professors and our great religious publishing societies hope to do anything effectual toward checking the progress of irreligion and infidelity, and keeping the masses within the influence of the Gospel, and winning them to the love and service of Christ, they need not expect to do it by such a sort of literature as this.
This barbarous creed don't serve their need, Nor stir their hopes or fears; They've heard such stuff full long enough, And turn away their ears.
Professor J. H. K., M.D.:
MY DEAR SIR: —Your recent work, entitled Harmony of Science and the Bible on the Nature of the Soul and the Doctrine of the Resurrection, which you kindly sent me, I have read with great interest. I admire the kind spirit which characterizes it; the clear and forcible language in which your ideas are expressed; and especially its reverent bearing toward the Word of God, and the Christian religion. As an honest attempt of a religious man, who is no mean scientist, to harmonize the teachings of Science and of the Scripture, it commends itself to the kind and careful consideration of all Christian scholars. I am the more inclined to regard it with special favor from the fact that you express so exactly my own sentiments with respect to the destiny of the wicked. In your opposition to the old philosophical dogma of the indestructible nature of the human soul—which I regard as the most seductive, pernicious, and yet fondly cherished delusion that ever prevailed among men — I wish you all success.
But I am sorry to say that I cannot agree with you in all the arguments you have employed to reach your conclusion. I cannot think that the harmony you seek, and which I agree with you in desiring, and in thinking quite possible, is to be secured by conceding to the speculations of science the fundamental principles upon which any true system of religion must rest. This, I know, is not your purpose or desire, for you recognize the existence of a Creator, and speak of Him reverently, as "the First Great Cause," and you speak of man "as a morally responsible creature." But it seems to me that the premises from which you argue, if carried to their legitimate conclusion, must lead you to practical Atheism or Pantheism, which is but little better, and to the denial of man's moral responsibility for his acts.
Indeed, you say yourself, "It may be objected that this view of mind makes man an automaton, and hence morally irresponsible. The seeming force of this objection, together with the fairness with which it is urged, entitles it to receive attention." But you do not appear to have given it the " attention " that might reasonably be expected in your book; certainly you have said nothing that tends to weaken its "seeming force."
You say, page 33, " Science teaches that immaterial existence is non-existence"; page 124, " Matter is the basis of all existence. Force is a property of matter, not a separate entity"; pages 36, 37, "Force is an intrinsic property possessed by matter." "All existences have a material base; in other words, matter is the basis of all existence. All existing things are either material in character, or are the attributes or characteristics of some material thing. Such a thing as an immaterial substance is a non-entity, an impossibility," etc.
Here you deny, not merely the existence of any created spirit, — purely such — but also the spiritual existence of God! Apart from the material universe, He is nothing; He exists only as a force in matter, and this force is an attribute, not of God, but of the matter in which it exists. This must be either Atheism or Pantheism, as it seems to me.
Again you say, pages 37, 38, "Each atom has connected with it a certain definite amount of force, which is unchangeable in quantity, and inseparable from it. It is through this property that matter manifests itself to our senses. Force is the source of all motion, of all the activities which we see in the world of matter. . . . The relation of atoms to molecules is about the same as that of planets to the solar system," etc. But the Bible teaches us that God is a Being, a personality distinct from the work of His hands, and 18* that not only "the small dust of the balance," but the heavenly orbs are controlled by His power, and not by the force that is in them and a part of them. The Scriptures everywhere teach — if they teach anything—that God is a Spirit. They cannot be made to harmonize with that kind of science, falsely so-called, that teaches a contrary doctrine. Either one or the other must yield the point in question.
You admit, it is true, that there is, or rather was, a " Great First Cause" of all things at the beginning, which some scientists of your school are unwilling to do; but you leave Him there, or rather you so incorporate Him into the material universe as to exclude the idea of His personality and providential control over the works of 3s hands. He is no longer needed in this universe to direct its affairs, but like a great monster machine, it is so perfect that it runs of itself, and works out all its own changes by the forces that were " delegated " —as you say—to its atomic parts, at the outset. I do not so understand the Scriptures. My soul thirsts for a living, personal God, whom I can love and trust, to whom I can pray, and who can, and will, answer the prayers of His children, and whose superintending providence is over all, as well as in all creatures and things. I believe we have such a God. I would fain hope you do, in spite of your philosophy.
Your theory with respect to what is called the soul, seems to be identical with that of my dear Christian brother, Prof. C. L. Ives, recently deceased, whose work, entitled The Bible Doctrine of the Soul, you have no doubt read. He defines it as " the ORGANISM of man and of all animals." You define it in language quite similar, and this is your view, if I correctly apprehend you. Unfortunately I was never able to agree with Prof. Ives in his definition of the soul, although I did agree with him, as I do with you, in the conclusion arrived at with respect to its destructible nature. But you go beyond him, and carry your theory of what is commonly termed the spiritual nature of man to the farthest extreme of materialism. You subject it, as you do all things else, to the domination of the material elements, or rather, you recognize no other elements than those that are material, either in man, or anywhere else in the universe.
You say, page 63, " Considered in the light of philosophy, man is simply a peculiar organization of matter.' The only difference between him and other animals, or, indeed, anything else, is in the organization of the materials of which he is composed. "Life is simply the result of organization," page 39; and again, "Life results from organization, not organization from life." "The mind is wholly dependent upon the brain, — thought is simply cell-action," page 52; " Any particular thought or sensation is the result of the action of a certain number of nerve cells in a particular manner Whenever, in future time, the same cells are called into action, they reproduce the sensation, thought, or perception by which they were originally modified. This is memory or recollection!" page 55; also "Consciousness is the result of organization," page 75.
According to this philosophy, in what is man better than a galvanic battery, or a locomotive engine, excepting in the more delicate arrangements of the atoms that constitute his make-up? What are the exercises of his mind or heart but the necessary results of organic action? What is character, what is sin or holiness, what is love or hatred, what is repentance or faith, but the outcome of organic changes within him, over which he has no control? Indeed, this is all there is of the man. There is no spiritual agent or principle within this splendid p'e2e of mechanism to control it. There is nothing that is morally responsible within him, even if there is any Being over him to whom he is held responsible. if this is Christian philosophy, what is Fatalism?
There is, indeed, no room in your philosophy for the old dogma of the indestructible nature of the human soul. For as you say, page 82, " When the organization or arrangement [that constitutes the man] is broken up, the man disappears; surely he is not immortal." Nor is there any room in it for man himself according to my conception of man. You have philosophized him away, and there is no man —of any account — to " disappear." Non tali auxilio. Such help in opposing this popular dogma of the indestructible nature of man, which many regard as lying at the foundation of the Christian religion, is not needed. It is worse than none. It encourages the delusion which you oppose, and excites the suspicion of those who cannot accept your philosophy, against the doctrine of conditional immortality, with which you associate it. True, it necessarily follows from your premises and arguments that men are not naturally and necessarily immortal. I accept the conclusion, but not the philosophy. I believe in the destructible nature of the soul, because the Scriptures teach it, and both reason and nature, when enlightened by the Word of God, so far from teaching anything to the contrary, corroborate it, and unite in showing that man can claim nothing more than a conditional immortality.
I am glad to see that you hold so firmly to the doctrine of the resurrection, so evidently taught in the Scriptures. But it seems to me you have greatly obscured and mystified it by your peculiar views regarding our personal identity. You have devoted much space to the proof that "the identical atoms need not necessarily compose the resurrection body. I am inclined to believe that there are but few who would care to contend with you on this point. But this argument naturally appears the more important tq you, from the fact that you allow to man nothing but atoms. He has no spiritual nature in distinction from the atoms that enter into his composition. Hence, according to your view, his identity consists in the same peculiar arrangement of the atoms that characterizes him, and distinguishes him from all other creatures. This peculiar organization of atoms and molecules constitutes what you call his" Somatic" life; and death results from the disorganization of these atoms and molecules; and the way in which the identity of the individual is preserved during the interval between death and the resurrection — which you hold, of course, to be an unconscious state, is this:
The soul is not an immortal, conscious entity, distinctive of man, but is simply the plan of his makeup, his organization, the association of the living molecules which constitute him a living, intelligent creature in the present life, in connection with matter; and by preservation after death through the record of the individual's life in heaven, the organization may be in the resurrection restored, or again represented in matter, thus reproducing and identifying the individual, restoring to him his consciousness, recollection, personal peculiarities — leaving out defects — and so connecting the present with the future life," page 102.
I have read this remarkable statement of yours again and again, and have given it much thought, and I must confess that I cannot make any sense out of it. Were it not that it is substantially repeated elsewhere (see page 126), and made the basis of much argumentation, I should have supposed you had written it without consideration. Of course, "the soul is not an immortal, conscious entity," if it is no entity at all. It is absolutely annihilated,—it ceases to be when the man dies, if it is nothing but " the plan of his make-up, his organization, the association of living molecules." What you mean by "the preservation of this soul] after death, through the record of the individual's life in heaven," I cannot comprehend. What kind of a record is this? Surely not a manuscript or printed record. And where is the heaven in which it is preserved? And how is it preserved? But let this pass. He is raised again, you say, in the resurrection. But who is raised? Surely not the same, identical man, for the atoms and molecules are not the same as you have proved. And there is no other entity. But he is restored by the creation of another man, with precisely the same organization, with the same "make-up" out of other materials after the model, or pattern, or record which has been "pre- e served in heaven." You bridge over the chasm between the two men by supposing that the physical, intellectual, and moral nature of the first man or organism, with "his consciousness, recollection," etc., will be taken up by the second man or organization where they were laid down by his predecessor when he was annihilated; and this you call the preservation of the man's identity!!
I must confess that I am hardly able to treat this hypothesis of yours as it seems to me to deserve, without appearing to be disrespectful to its author. I do not know but that is the best that can be done with your premises, if you still hold to the doctrine of the resurrection. But it seems to me that the Sadducees, who, after denying, as you do, the existence of all spiritual entities, denied also the doctrine of the resurrection, were more logical than you are. I do not see how it is possible to reconcile the philosophy that denies the existence of any but material entities. with the teaching of God's Word in respect to spiritual things. The Scriptures, throughout, represent "the Great First Cause" as a spirit, a pure spirit, in contradistinction from His works; as a personal Being to whom all things, whether material or spiritual, are subject. Matter is known to exist in three states: solid, liquid, and gaseous, and even if there be a fourth state, as some scientists suppose, or even more, a quintessence of matter almost infinitely attenuated, above and beyond all this there is spiritual being. God is such a Being, existing independently of all things else. So the Scriptures teach, I think. There are also other spiritual entities; whether they do, or can exist and exercise their functions without organization, independent of all material things, I would not affirm, for I do not know this. It may be that every created spirit needs the limitations of an organism that is in some sense material, so I think. At any rate, no spirit, whether organized or unorganized, can exist independent of its Creator. But all dependent existence, from the necessity of the case, must be conditional. Hence the doctrine of Conditional Immortality. True philosophy teaches so much as this; and the Word of God makes known to us what the conditions of endless life are, viz., Holiness —a conformity to God's moral law.
Man, according to the Scriptures, must be something more than a mere material organization.
But I must forbear to say more. I have no philosophy concerning the soul, or the spirit, or the necessary conditions of life —nor of the intermediate state, nor of the resurrection, nor of the mode of our future existence — any further than I can frame it from the Bible. Certainly I have none to urge against the manifest teaching of the Scriptures. I am not willing to encourage, or even countenance by my silence, others in philosophical speculations that are opposed to the Word of God, and subversive, as I think, of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion, although I may agree with them in opposing what I believe to be a great popular error. I am sorry to have felt obliged to find any fault with your book, but I have done it in all kindness. I have felt the more free to criticize it, because you have invited me to do it. You say in your letter accompanying the book, "After you have perused the work, I shall be glad to receive any criticism you may have to offer." As your work is for the public, you will naturally expect me to publish my criticism on it. I cannot believe that you have yet followed out your philosophy to its legitimate results. But so far as it is adopted and followed out, it will lead you, and all who adopt it, into darkness and error.
With kind regards, I am very truly yours, J. H. P.
MAY 19, 1879.
MATTER AND SPIRIT.
REJOINDER.
PROFESSOR K. — My Dear Sir: — You and I cannot, of course, discuss satisfactorily to ourselves or others, the great question of Ontology in all its bearings, in one or two newspaper articles. All I can hope to do in my reply to your very kind and acceptable letter in last week's BANNER, is to make some general observation, in the same courteous way you have done, with the hope that by comparing our views and stating our difficulties, we may do something to elicit the truth, for which we both are seeking.
Our differences are due partly to a different understanding of the terms we use, and partly to a different conception of the subjects to which they relate. You certainly understand more by the word matter, and less by the word spirit, than I do. For you include what I understand by spirit in your definition of matter, and then speak of spirit as a complete non-entity, which is certainly not my idea of spirit, as I will try to show you.
I think you are inconsistent in the use of your own terms. You speak of " Matter AND Force" as distinct from each other, and then deny your premises in your reasoning; for in your reasoning you make this force to be an essential element, a constituent part of matter, without which there is and can be no matter. Now granting, as you say, that force of some kind is always found with matter, which I will not now question, we have here two conceptions, or we should not need two words to express them,—two entities. If you should say, as you imply, that matter without force would be a non-entity, and as you do say, that force alone considered is a non-entity, then by joining two non-entities we have an entity which you call matter, which is absurd: 0 plus 0= matter. It is quite true that neither of us can understand what either matter or force is in its ultimate analysis, its very essence. Indeed, some philosophers have argued that there was nothing but force in the universe, as you do that there is nothing but matter. But as far back as we are able to go, we must recognize a radical distinction between the two. They are something more than mere qualities—they are entities. Here, then, is just where we diverge: You in- elude both under one term which you call matter, and I, under two terms, and consider them as distinct entities and carry this distinction up through all the various gradations of matter and force, and find this distinction growing more and more obvious to the very top.
The very lowest kind of force found even in the ultimate atoms of matter you would call, I suppose, the force of resistance; but never mind the name. Then, after this, we have molecular, chemical, crystalline, assimilative, vital force. We call these various manifestations of force by different names, as we find it exhibited in chemical compounds, minerals, vegetables and animals; but it is this formative principle, the life, if I may use the word in its most general sense, in them all. Because you find these forces always in connection with matter, and manifesting themselves to the senses only through matter, you conclude that they are necessarily one with matter, and, indeed, have no distinct entity of their own; and that the Deity Himself, the First Great Cause, as you call' Him, is actually nothing but matter, and subject to all the conditions and limitations of matter. But I hold that they are spiritual forces, or a spiritual force having its ultimate source and highest expression in the Deity, who is a pure Spirit, entirely independent of matter in His existence, but who manifests Himself to our senses only through matter.
Your fundamental principle, that "matter is the basis of all existence," I hold to be utterly wrong. It is 'Spirit, as I believe, that is the basis of all existence. Instead of being unreal and inert, according to your conception, it is intensely real and active: it is force itself, and the source of all energy, power, activity and life in the universe.
You deny all this because, as you say, it does not manifest itself directly to the bodily senses, and because you cannot form a concept of an entity that " has no tangible concrete existence." And yet you do, and must, as I think, recognize the existence of such entities. Many of the gases of which, until recently, men had no conception, because they were too ethereal to be observed by the senses, you now recognize, although you have had no sensible evidence of their existence. Granted that they are matter almost infinitely attenuated, it is only as they combine with each other or some grosser material base, that they can be recognized. Water was formerly supposed to be a simple element, and it certainly so appears to all the senses. But now it is found to be composed of the union of two invisible gases, Hydrogen and Oxygen, neither of which is water, or has any resemblance to it. Your scientific predecessors would have stoutly denied their separate existence, as you now do that of matter and force. What if I should say, " Water and oxygen constitute water." You would see the fallacy at once. But you say that Matter AND Force constitute matter. What then do you mean by the second term of the couplet? You might as well say matter constitutes matter, if you have no conception of force as something distinct from matter. It may, indeed, always, in some of its many varied manifestations, be found with matter as perceived by our senses, and yet be as distinct from it, as oxygen is from hydrogen.
Again, what conception can you form of the attraction of gravity? It is certainly a force acting through matter, but it is not matter itself, and you can conceive of matter without this force. Now what is it — a material or immaterial force? You may say it is law; but it is also a positive force. How is it possible for a material object to exert any force where it is not? How can you explain that force by which the celestial spheres are held together and kept in their places as they revolve around each other, and all, perhaps, around a common center? It is something more than a mere quality. You can and do conceive of it as an actual force. I relegate it to the realm of spirit, as I do all the other forms of energy and life in the universe. There is a formative, regulating, controlling principle in all the various forms of order and beauty in nature, which is above them and distinct from the grosser materials of which they are composed. Without it matter would be absolutely inert, and such, matter must have been, until God gave it life.
You- say that " Life results from organization, and not organization from life." I think just the reverse is, and necessarily must be true. Now you admit by the very terms you use, that there is distinction between life and organization. The one is an active force, the other is a result of a plan, a rational design. All these infinitely varied forms of beauty and of utility, could not have planned or formed themselves and correlated themselves to each other by a blind, senseless force of their own. They must have had an intelligent force infinitely above them to have contrived and adapted them to each other. That force is God. The thing that is formed, and that which formed it cannot be one and the same. They must necessarily be two separate entities. "The heavens declare His glory, and the firmament showed His handiwork." "Without Him was not anything made that was made."
This may suggest to you an old catch, " Which was first, the hen or the egg?" If you say the egg, then, where did the egg come from without a hen to lay it? If you say the hen, then, where did the hen come from without a previous egg? Nor do you get rid of the difficulty by taking both the hen and the egg back into the infinite past, and referring them both to a primordial cell or monad. This plan of future development, which gradually unfolds itself, must have been enveloped in the original protoplasm. Who contrived it? Who put it there? It could not have been done by itself. It could not have been devised by itself before it had any existence? Nor could it have sprung into existence with all its adaptations without any antecedent cause. It will not relieve the difficulty by saying that there was absolutely no beginning—no First Cause. You admit of a First Great Cause, but you seem to deny it in your reasoning, or rather to regard it as its own creator — as nature itself and nothing else.
What is your idea of God? You speak of Him reverently as the Creator, as the Great First Cause. What do you mean? Is He material or is He immaterial? — but as you seem to attach the idea of non-entity or non-existence to these words, immaterial and immaterialist, let us use the words spirit and spiritual in contradistinction from matter. Is God spirit, or is He matter? Did matter create spirit, or did spirit create matter? You may hold, if you please, that both are eternal, in their existence. But then, what do you mean by the First Cause?— by Creator? You mean, perhaps, that the plan and arrangements of nature are due to an ever-living God as their First Cause.
But you can hardly mean this, for you say "Life results from organization, and not organization from life "; and again, "Life is simply the result of organization." Then organization must have come before life, and been greater than life, and if organization is from God, then, God has no life. The fact is, your philosophy leads you inevitably to the denial of the existence of a personal, living God as the Creator and Governor of the universe. It is a wonderfully contrived plan, with no one to contrive it; a great machine with no one to control it. It was contrived and formed by itself, and is controlled by its own blind, inexorable force. You cannot have thought out your philosophy to its legitimate end. You are carried away by your love of the physical sciences, and by your theory that nothing is to be accepted as truth that cannot be demonstrated to your senses, and all there is that saves you from blank infidelity is in the better principles, no doubt, of your earlier training, and which your heart and conscience have accepted, but which your speculative philosophy is now teaching you to deny. "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust; avoid profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called, which some professing, have erred concerning the faith."
You should remember that we have two sources of knowledge — nature and revelation. You assume that our only dependence is on the teaching of nature. If this had been sufficient, we should have had no need of a Divine, written revelation. The one is natural, and the other supernatural. The one concerns itself with physical or material things, and their phenomena; the other with spiritual things. As both these books are from one infallible author, they will harmonize when we rightly interpret them. But they were not designed to teach us the same truths, but different truths. Our scientific hypotheses are not to be allowed to contradict or over-rule the manifest teaching of revelation, nor our theological dogmas, the demonstrations of science. The attempt to exalt the one to the prejudice of the other has bee? the cause of the apparent conflict between science and theology. The progress of true science has been greatly hindered and actually arrested for long centuries by the dogmatism of theological schoolmen.
A bigoted and intolerant Church has asserted her authority in both dominions, and has long exercised it, to the detriment of science. Now that science has broken the bonds that so long enslaved her, and is beginning to exercise her freedom and her right of free and independent inquiry, her devotees are running into the same error on the opposite extreme. They are carrying their hypotheses and decisions into the domain of theology. Because the spiritual truths of Revelation do not yield to the test of the blowpipe, the microscope, to chemical and spectroscopical analysis, they discredit and reject them, and even insist that theologians shall yield their well-founded religious faith to their scientific speculations. And you are casting in your lot with them, and leading others, whose confidence you enjoy, to follow you. You insist on subjecting all truth to physical laws and processes, and testing it by the evidence of the five senses alone. You leave no room for a religious faith. The great spiritual truths of Revelation, and which it was the express object of this Revelation to make known to us, because nature does not reveal them, you exclude from your philosophy; and for this reason, that you cannot demonstrate them to your senses.
But this is not all; many of the conclusions of science which have been urged against Revelation, have been shown to be only hasty guesses, and many of those which are now in apparent conflict with it, will no doubt be modified or entirely disproved by further investigation. It is quite remarkable how many of the so-called fundamental principles of modern science — especially as arrayed against Revelation — are mere working hypotheses, suppositions that have never been demonstrated, even to the senses. The very first principle on which you build your own philosophy, that matter is the basis of all existence, you confess is only a supposition, destitute of proof, but it is as you say, "what seems most probable — to you! On the contrary, the first truth of Divine Revelation is that God is the basis of all existence, that He is a pure Spirit, and as such the source of all life, energy, and power, yea, Life Itself; that His existence is absolute, and quite independent of all things else; that He is everywhere present, and that He manifests Himself to us in nature, but He Himself is not seen, nor can He be seen. Moses did not see Him, as you seem to suppose, but only His glory. The object of His incarnation in Christ was that He might be manifested to the physical senses of men whose spiritual sense had become dull through sin. It was in the material form of a man and not of God that He appeared. The image (the eikon, as it is in the Greek, in one place, and character, in another), of God spoken of in the Scriptures, means the moral, not. material, likeness of God. Indeed, Christ Himself declares that GOD IS A SPIRIT.
This fact is everywhere recognized and taught through the whole Bible. It seemed to be the great object of the Mosaic dispensation, and of God's special dealing with the Israelites, to eradicate from their minds those sensuous ideas of God, which everywhere prevailed throughout the heathen world, — and to which, I am sorry to think, you are inclined, — and to establish in their minds that higher truth of His spiritual and invisible nature. In quoting special passages of Scripture to prove this, I might quote a large part of the Bible. Let me ask you to read the 139th Psalm. It is already familiar to you: "O Lord, Thou hast searched me and known me," etc. If this does not satisfy you, I must leave this for the teachings of God's Spirit to do it. Here let me ask you: As a Christian man, have you never felt the action, of purely spiritual influences, yea, of that Divine Spirit, upon your own spirit, of which the Scriptures have so much to say, giving you evidence of His presence and power, as real and convincing as any that could be addressed to your senses? If not, then your experience is not like my own, nor like that of an innumerable multitude of believers for whom I speak.
There has been a great advance in theology, as well as natural philosophy, within our time. You do not seem to be as well posted in the one as in the other; and so your present position of apparent antagonism to Theology, in some respects, is more apparent than real. It hardly surprises me, when I consider how generally your arguments are directed against the untenable dogmas of the past, rather than the doctrines now held by intelligent and liberal-minded Christian men. I am not unaware, as you hint, that the notion of the resurrection of the same identical particles and parts of the human body, was formerly held, but it has fallen by the weight of its own absurdities, and there are but few intelligent men, as I think, who hold it now.
Nor is the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul, which you agree with me in opposing, though on different grounds, argued now as it once was, on the ground that it is a pure spiritual essence; for in giving up Plato's postulate of its eternal preexistence, on which it was based, and admitting it to have been created, its eternal subsequent existence on this ground is seen to have no force; and so it is argued now, so far as it is argued at all, as a sentiment or instinct of nature.
I agree with you in thinking that the arguments heretofore used, and still used by those who can find none better, to prove the necessary immortality of human souls, would also prove — if they proved anything — the immortality of the brutes also. Indeed, the Scriptures employ the same words (nephesh in Hebrew, and psuche in Greek) to designate the souls of men and brutes alike. It is something that is common to both. But in the present popular use the word " soul " has taken on a higher meaning, and is employed almost exclusively to designate what in the Scriptures is called (Ruach in Hebrew, and Pneuma in Greek) the Spirit. It is the spirit, and not the soul, that distinguishes man from the brute. It is of this, and never of the psuche, soul, not in one single instance, that the Scriptures predicate eternal life. It is because -the distinction between these two words, soul and spirit, has been lost, that this whole question of eternal life has been thrown into confusion, and is so vaguely apprehended. I hold to the tripartite nature of man — certainly of the renewed man —body, soul, and spirit. I cannot stop to draw out this distinction here; you will find it in my Theological Trilemma, to which I must refer you. I do not therefore, by any means, hold to the actual dissolution and extinction of all there is in man, as you assume that I do, in the first death, or the death of the body. But under what condition he exists until the resurrection, in which we both believe, or in what way his identity is maintained, if he is unconscious, I do not know, and therefore I do not attempt to say or guess. But it seems to me that the continuity of something—of some entity —is necessary to the preservation of his identity. If a knife were to lose its blade and receive a new one, or its handle and receive a new one, I might perhaps call it the same knife; or, even if it were to lose them both successively, and have them replaced at different times, I might not possibly dispute the identity of the knife. But if both were to be destroyed together, and another one made, however closely the model of the old knife might be imitated in the new, I could not say it was the same identical knife. And yet, this is your theory of the identity of man in the resurrection.
But I cannot stop to argue this and other points to which you call my attention in your letter. I have already exceeded my limits. I have many more things I would like to say, and I doubt not you have, but I question whether the Editors of the BANN ER, or its readers, would be pleased to have us continue the discussion in this paper. I hasten, therefore, with sentiments of high esteem and kind regard, to sub- scribe myself, very truly yours, J. H. P.
August 14, 1879.
ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE WICKED.
MR. EDITOR: — I read your excellent paper, from week to week, with interest and pleasure. I like the general tone of its articles, and specially its unpretentious Christian spirit. I fully agree with you on the main question of conditional immortality, and of eternal life through Christ alone. I am glad to co-operate with you, in all practicable ways, in exposing and opposing the most widely-spread and most fondly-cherished delusion the world ever saw, for I believe the doctrine of immortality in sin to be operating more effectually to obscure the luster of the glorious Gospel, and to hinder its progress in the world, than all other errors combined — to be, indeed, the source of most of them, and the cause of much of the infidelity and indifferentism of the present day.
We agree so well in opposing this monstrous dogma of compulsory immortality, and in exalting Christ and His work in our behalf, that I could wish that we were in perfect accord on all other points of doctrine. This, perhaps, however much it is to be desired, is hardly to be expected of Christian brethren who do their own thinking, and form their own opinions from different points of view, specially in regard to events which are yet future, and, perhaps, necessarily obscure.
Such differences ought not, certainly, to cause divisions, and strife, and mutual reproaches between the followers of one common Lord. It may be well, however, and profitable for them to mention their differences, and exchange views upon them for the purpose of aiding each other, and securing a more perfect agreement, and the promotion of the truth, if it can be done in the spirit of kindness and charity.
You have very kindly spoken of my recent work, "The Theological Trilemma," in your columns, and given your readers several extended extracts from it, for which I thank you, although you do not accept of all my views, especially my views as to the resurrection and the future judgment of the wicked. This, as you say, is a subject not very prominently treated of in the work, for it is devoted mainly to the question of conditional immortality. But still I regard it as by no means unimportant. I believe in a general resurrection of all the dead, and in the final separation of the righteous from the wicked at the judgment, and in the unending blessedness of the former and the destruction of the latter in the second death. And, with your permission, I will give you the reasons for my belief, and for my dissent from your views, in as few words as possible, not for controversy, but for the purpose of drawing from you, or some of your able correspondents, a statement of your objections to my view, and the grounds of your own belief.
If I rightly understand your position, and that of your paper, it is that there is no future punishment, beyond this life, for the wicked. Whatever of punishment there is for them is here inflicted, and when their earthly career is finished, all is finished. Their life is forever and totally extinguished.
Now, the reasons and the objections I would offer for your consideration have respect to the following points:-
1 The justice of God. We all believe Him to be perfectly just in His dealings with all men. But I do not see how it is possible to show this if we have regard to His dealings with them in this life only. It is, no doubt, generally true, that virtue brings its own reward, and sin its own punishment, in the long run, even in this life; or rather they are followed by what may be called their natural results. But the career of multitudes is cut short before virtue and vice have had time to develop their legitimate fruits. There are innumerable exceptions to this rule apparently, even in the case of those whose career is prolonged. The allotments of joy and sorrow seem to be distributed very unequally among those in whose characters we can distinguish but little difference. Indeed, the best often appear to fare the worst. In some cases, and with respect to some sins, it may not be difficult to determine the character of a man from his outward condition. But this is true only as a kind of general rule. In respect to others it is far from true. With regard to in ward suffering some men suffer far more than others in the commission of the same crime. In fact, the more hardened one becomes in sin, the less he suffers from the reproaches of conscience. Of two companions in crime, how often is the one, whose share in the guilt is comparatively small, compelled to bear the burden of reproach and suffering, while the other, though his guilt is greater, escapes altogether! Some are detected in the very act of sin, and forever disgraced; others, more wily and cautions, are able to conceal their wickedness from their fellowmen. They are prospered and honored throughout their whole career, and go down to their graves in peace, and their crimes fail of detection, till they have passed beyond the reach of justice. "Some men's sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment, and some men they follow after." Leaving out of view all future retribution, men have been led into infidelity, and have denied the overruling providence of God altogether in the affairs of this life, because of these inequalities. This was the danger to which the Psalmist was exposed, as he tells us in Psalm 73, and from which he was only saved by going into the sanctuary of God, and there learning how the justice of God will yet be vindicated in their punishment. This was the very point in controversy between Job and his three friends. They held that God treated all men in this life exactly as they deserve, and that the reason why Job suffered more than other men was because he was a greater sinner.
Job knew that this was not so, but, having no revelation to enlighten him, he was in darkness and trouble until God Himself appeared to show them their error, and vindicate His justice.
2 The moral sense of mankind. Every man has within him a kind of instinct which upbraids him when he does wrong, or rather, what he thinks to be wrong; and, what is more, it awakens fears and forebodings of evil from the invisible power that rules over all. This sentiment I believe to be the voice of God in the soul of every man, and the voice of truth. It is, indeed, susceptible of cultivation. It may also be greatly blunted and almost silenced by persistency in sin. We are told of those whose " conscience is seared with a hot iron." But I think it is a natural instinct, which God has given to men as a premonition of punishment yet to come. This, I think, is one of the elements of fear in the prospect of death, when the transgressor shall come more immediately into the presence of his Maker and Judge. It hardly seems consistent with either the truth or justice of God that this expectation is to be falsified.
3 The influence of this doctrine on the conduct and character of men. It cannot be denied that the fear of future punishment is calculated to have a restraining influence upon men, to keep them from overt acts of sin. It may not lead to repentance for sin, or to any genuine religious feeling, but every law needs the sanction of a penalty, and every penalty is operative in securing at least a formal obedience, in proportion as it is felt to be just and sure of execution. It is a strong objection to the doctrine of endless torments that it has lost, or is fast losing, its hold upon the consciences and the belief of men. They neither believe it to be just, nor fear its execution. Indeed, it is incredible. But this is not true with the doctrine that men who die unforgiven will be judged and punished, whether with many or few stripes, just in proportion to their deserts, and then perish forever in the second death. Let the fear of any future punishment whatever be taken away, and the effect can- not but be demoralizing upon sinners generally, and especially upon desperate sinners. Men who have incurred the highest penalties, and have nothing to fear or hope for from human laws, may yet be restrained from adding to their crimes by a salutary fear of the wrath to come. But let this fear be entirely removed, and what is there to hinder such a criminal from ending his career in a high carnival of crime? Indeed, such instances are multiplying. A frenzied wretch, after perpetrating enormous deeds of cruelty and bloodshed, glutting his rage upon a whole household of innocent victims, leaps out of life himself, and escapes the hand of justice on earth! Does he elude also the justice of heaven? I think not.
4 The general impression which one who has no theory on the subject would receive from reading the Scriptures. We are in danger of carrying our own peculiar views to the Word of God, and of reading them into the Scriptures. And then we think we find them there. This is just the fault with those who assume the absolute immortality of man. All the many passages that speak of the dreadful destruction of the wicked, of the devouring worm that dies not, and of the consuming fire that is not quenched, which to us give the assurance of their certain and utter destruction, seem to them to teach the doctrine of ceaseless and eternal torment, because they read them with the theory of the indestructible nature of man to blind them, and control their understanding.
Now is it not possible that you may have some philosophical theory with respect to the soul, its identity with the human organism, or its inseparable connection with it, that leads you unwittingly to construe the teachings of God's Word so as to sustain that theory? I must confess that if I felt altogether at liberty to adopt what I suppose to be your theory of the soul, I should be strongly inclined to adopt your view of the final extinction of the wicked at death. Indeed, it seems to me now so natural and plausible that I should accept it were it not for what appear to be insuperable objections. It seems to me to be contrary to the explicit teaching of the Scriptures.
The Word of God, as I read it without any definite theory with respect to the nature of the soul, in the spirit and tenor of its teachings, throughout, seems to suggest, imply, sustain, and even affirm the doctrine of retribution beyond this life. While I agree with you in believing that it nowhere teaches the natural immortality of man, or the monstrous doctrine of eternal misery, I cannot believe with you that the doctrine of no resurrection of the wicked and no future punishment, is agreeable to its teachings.
5 But in addition to the general impression of which I speak, there are certain passages that so clearly seem to affirm the doctrine of the resurrection of all men, a general judgment, and the future punishment of the wicked — every man according to the deeds done in the body— and their final and utter destruction in the second death, that I see not how it is possible to explain them away, or to understand them in any other sense. There are, it is true, not a few texts both in the Old Testament and the New, that have been taken to teach this doctrine, which are far from being decisive. I will content myself with citing such only as appear more directly and positively to affirm this doctrine:— And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake; some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. (Daniel 12: 2; see also chapter 7: 10.) "But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets; and have hope toward God, which they themselves also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust." (Acts 24: 14, 15.) "Marvel not at this; for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation." (John 5: 28, 29.) "And I saw a great white throne, and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God, and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged out of those things that were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them; and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire." (Rev. 20: 11-15.)
The harvest is the end of the world, and the reapers are the angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall it be in the end of the world. Read the whole passage (Matt. 13: 38-43). " Many will say unto me in that day," etc. See Matt. 7: 21-23. "He hath appointed a day in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained, whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he has raised him from the dead." (Acts 17: 31.) "As many as have sinned in the law shall be judged of the law, in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men, by Jesus Christ, according to my Gospel." (Rom. 2: 1- 6.) See the whole context. " For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ." (Rom. 14: 10.) " For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that everyone may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad." (2 Cor. 5: 10) "I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at His appearing and His kingdom." (2 Tim. 4: 1.) "And it is appointed unto men once to die; but after this the judgment." (Heb. 9: 27.) " Who [the Gentiles] shall give account to him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead." (1 Pet. 4: 5.) "Reserved unto the judgment of the great day." (Jude 1:6.)
P. S. Since writing the above I have read two or three articles of Bro. R. C. B. in these columns, in which he endeavors to break the force. of some of these passages; but his explanations seem labored, unnatural, and far from satisfactory. An ingenious man like him might perhaps explain them all away one by one, to the satisfaction of those who were anxious to be convinced. But to a plain, common reader who comes to the Bible simply desiring to know what it teaches, and without any opposing theory of his own to blind his mind, or warp his judgment, these several passages, and others that might be cited, seem each one of them to teach what they have generally been understood to teach, but when taken together they present an accumulated evidence that it is difficult to gainsay or resist. J. H. P.
PHILADELPHIA, PA.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
I heard a sermon on the Resurrection, in which I thought the preacher gave undue prominence to it when he said it was " a cardinal doctrine and a central truth in the Christian system." I am at a loss to see it in quite so strong a light as he represented it. Why is it the central truth, exceeding or equal to the Incarnation or the Atonement, especially the latter? In fact, does it belong to the redemptive economy at all? Is it not merely a revelation, on the same footing as the general judgment? It seems to me to be only an effect of Christ's work. as naturally would take place in the economy of God's laws. The resurrection of Christ is a matter of fact; with regard to us it is yet a prophecy to be fulfilled, the same as the general judgment, and of no more importance to know or believe. When Christ said it was "finished," and gave up the ghost, how could this truth belong to the remedial system, when it was only a future event? It is a comforting belief, and as such strengthens our faith and enlivens our hope. Please give your views on this subject in the Union. Whether it belongs to the Christian system as a doctrine strictly, or only a result arising out of the nature of the economy of God i n His government, it seems to be ai subject of interest to learn all we can in relation to it. —An Inquirer in the Christian Union.
OCEAN SPRINGS, Miss., March 29, 1880.
The apostles laid much greater stress upon the fact of the resurrection than has been laid by modern theologians. It is not, however, easy to say what is the central truth of Christianity, because, of several truths, no one can be plucked out without impairment of the whole. The fact of Christ's resurrection is important in two aspects: 1st, as an evidence of the truth of historic Christianity; and 2d, as an evidence that our Savior is not a dead Christ, whose influence is simply that of an example, but a living Christ, whose influence is that of a living person upon the lives and characters of all who trust Him and love Him. — Editor of Christian Union, June 80,1880.
MY DEAR Mn. EDITOR: — In replying so briefly, in your last issue, to the Questions of an Inquirer concerning the doctrine of the Resurrection, and the prominence to be given to it in the Christian system, you hardly did justice to the subject —certainly you did not fully meet the difficulty as it lies in the minds of many inquirers.
The true reason, as 1. think, why modern theologians generally lay " less stress "— as you admit, and as is lamentably too true — on this great doctrine, than the apostles and early Christians did, is because their ideas of death and the life beyond have undergone a change. That fiction of a heathen philosophy, now so prevalent, that teaches that death is not death, but simply a transition from one condition of life to another, that the individual himself does not, cannot die, whatever may become of his body — upon which the mediaeval church founded their doctrine of Purgatory, and to which, with some modification, Protestants still very generally hold, in the hope of a future second probation in a certain ghostly state beyond this life —reduces the doctrine of the Resurrection to a mere incident, or even an unmeaning pageant, which is hard to be accounted for or explained. If men go at death immediately to heaven or hell, if they are conscious, and, as we are now taught, even more free to act, to enjoy or suffer out of their bodies than when in them, then what need is there of any resurrection? Tyndall, in arguing against this false philosophy in his day, well inquired, "If the souls of the saints are already in heaven, tell me why they be not in as good case as the angels be? And then what cause is there of a resurrection?"
But if we understand death to be death, as the apostles did and taught, and that there is no possibility of any conscious life whatever beyond the present, much less of an immortal life, but by a resurrection through the miraculous power of God, and that this resurrection is assured to us by the resurrection of our Lord, who by His own almighty Spirit conquered the power of death, then this doctrine will take its true place in the Christian system, from which it has fallen, and be to us, as to the early Christians, the great central doctrine upon which all our hopes for the future are founded. " For," says the apostle, " if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." " Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished." "But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that. Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring [from the dead] with him." J. H. P.
PHILADELPHIA, PA., July 2, 1880.
My Dear Mr. Abbott: — I read with great interest, as others did, your exposition of the Transfiguration, in a recent number of THE CHRISTIAN UNION; but I think your theory of death and the life beyond, as developed in the article, is open to some fair criticism. Your known courtesy to those who differ from you encourages me to ask the privilege of saying a few words on this point, especially as it is one of great importance — not, however, for controversy, but only for the sake of the truth which we all seek.
Not having a copy of the paper at hand, I can only refer to your views as expressed in a general way. You seem to regard death not as the termination of fife, but only as an incident in the normal development of life; as a natural process, which causes no interruption to any man's conscious existence. Indeed, you liken it to the swinging open of a door which admits us at once into a sphere of higher activities, and into a life vastly more intense and real than the present. This, I know, is a very popular notion, and is evidently becoming more and more so. The followers of Swedenborg, and Spiritualists generally so called, hold to it. The author of the Parousia, recently published, earnestly advocates it. Indeed, it is very much like the doctrine of the ancient heathen philosophers and poets—the doctrine of the Athenians, who accused Paul of preaching a new and incredible doctrine when he preached to them Christ and the resurrection. And was it not a new doctrine?
There are some passages of Scripture that may be interpreted as favorable to this ghostly view, as indeed of almost every other notion, however false; but does it accord with the general teaching of God's Word? Are we not very plainly told that man was created with the possibility of an endless life only in case he should remain holy, and that when he sinned he became a mortal? He was shut off from the Tree of Life " lest he should eat and live forever " in sin. Death brings him back, as it does every other living creature on earth, to the chaos from which he sprung. It was only through the intervention of a Savior who should die to redeem him from death, at first very dimly revealed, but fully "brought to light in the Gospel," that he could hope to live again and live forever. Is not the life beyond spoken of everywhere in God's Word not as a natural, normal process into which man is developed by dying, but as altogether supernatural and miraculous?
Great use is made, by those who hold your view, of the figure used by Paul in 1 Cor. 15., the germination and springing up of a new shoot from the old seed planted in the ground. This is a natural process. Hence the dying and living again of man is thought to be and even declared to be a natural process. But there is evidently a confusion of figures by those who so teach. The same analogy is made to cover two events entirely separate and radically distinct from each other; the propagation of living creatures by means of their seed, and the dying and living again of the creatures themselves. There is a certain resemblance in the opening up of the living germ from the decaying seed of a plant to the rising of a dead man to a new life. But in this case it is not the plant or tree itself that dies and lives again. The propagation of species, whether of plants or animals, is a natural process. Every living thing, and man him- self, may he said to live, in a certain sense, in those of his kind that come after him. But this is not the point in question. What if the tree itself that bears the seed dies? Does it live again the self-same tree?
If a man die, shall he live again? not, Shall his children live after him? Does not the analogy of nature as well as Scripture teach that death is the natural and final end of every living thing, and that if a plant, or a tree, or an animal, or a man shall actually die, life can be restored only through the supernatural intervention of Him who gave the first life?
Hence our Lord most emphatically taught, with constant reiteration, that man's future life depended on Him; that His coming and death were for this very purpose, to redeem men from death and to immortalize them. The Gospel, especially of John, is full of this teaching. To quote the passages in point would be to quote a large part of the Gospel. " I am the Resurrection and the Life." " Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness and are dead. I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread he shall live forever, and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I give for the life of the world." " Whoso eats my flesh and drinks my blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day." His doctrine was opposed alike to the ghostly spiritualism of the Pharisees and the infidel materialism of the Sadducees, and hence they were both offended.
This is the most prominent doctrine of all the Epistles: the resurrection of the dead, made sure by the death and resurrection of Christ, not at death but at the last day; not as a natural event but as a great, stupendous miracle. This is the foundation of Paul's argument in 1 Cor. 15.: "If Christ be not risen then is our . . . faith vain; . . . then they also that have fallen asleep in Christ have perished" — become extinct.
This was the faith of the early disciples — their main hope in dying; it was the unique and uniform motto on their tombstones: "Resurgam " I shall rise again at the last day, when Christ shall come, " in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump." When Christ who is our life shall appear, then shall we also appear with Him in glory.
Is there not danger of denying to Christ the honor which belongs to Him when we speak of the future life as the natural and normal outcome of the present, and of falling into the error of " Hymeneus and Philetus, who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already "? s. H. P.
Dear Bro. P.: — As you have requested me to give some account of my recent trial before the Association of Congregational Ministers, of which I was a member, for heresy on the question of Immortality in Christ only, as taught in my book entitled the Theological Trilemma, I will endeavor to comply with your request.
Removing to this city, in the spring, about the time my book was published, I requested a letter of dismission from this body of which I had been for many years a member in good and regular standing, and of recommendation to the Association of Congregational ministers in Philadelphia. This raised the question of my soundness in the faith. A committee was appointed to examine my book and report what should be done with me. While this was pending I received several letters from members of the body urging me to be present, and intimating that the action of the Association would be against me, and also a letter from the venerable brother who was to make the report, advising me to silently withdraw from the body. To these I replied that I would attend if possible — not, however, as a defendant, but to give the brethren every opportunity to know my views; but that I had no idea of withdrawing; that I was a Congregationalist from conviction and from choice; that I knew of no difference between themselves and me either in regard to polity or doctrine, excepting on one point, and that we differed here simply because they founded their belief on a traditional dogma of the dark ages and I founded mine on the Word of God; that their controversy was not so much with me as with the Scriptures, and that if I was to be separated from them, they must take the responsibility of putting me out. 449 The meeting at which final action was to be taken was held in December last. It was fully attended. I was fortunately able to attend.
The report of the committee, prefaced by a few extempore remarks, setting forth the enormity of my offense, was brief and to the point in the shape of two resolutions to this effect:
1 That the author's teachings through his book, and in other publications of like character, were opposed to the faith of the Gospel. 2 That his name be dropped from the roll of the Association.
In reply to the first resolution, the defendant expressed his surprise at the broad and sweeping terms in which it was couched, and said that, so far from opposing the faith of the Gospel, he believed it more fully and loved it better than ever before. It was his only hope, both for himself and for the world. That the great difference between himself and the other members of the Association was, that he made more of the Gospel and exalted it more highly than they did. fie begged to be informed in what respect they regarded him as opposing the faith of the Gospel. It was only as he insisted on definite specifications that the brother who had offered the resolution consented to its modification, and after various amendments it finally took this shape: " That the doctrines of the book are opposed to the teachings of the Scriptures, as understood by this Association." As this was a simple declaration of an obvious fact, the author expressed himself as satisfied with it, and as willing to vote for it himself; and it was passed by a unanimous vote.
With respect to the second resolution, he said, that as a member of their body in good and regular standing, against whose moral or ministerial character not one breath of suspicion had been whispered, he had a right to demand and expect a certificate of character which he could show to the strangers among whom he had gone to reside, and that he must insist upon having one, or a fair trial on definite specifications. It seemed to the majority that they were bound by the principles of justice and honor, to say nothing of Christian courtesy, to give him such a letter, provided they could do it without recognizing his right any longer to preach the Gospel, or subjecting themselves to the suspicion of any leaning toward his heresy. But how this could be done was a question which gave rise to considerable discussion. There were those who seemed quite unwilling to forego the opportunity and privilege of punishing, so far as they had the power, the only man of their number who bad the presumption to call in question the old traditional dogma of the absolute and indefeasible immortality of all men, and to believe and teach that the Bible really means what it says — that " the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
The aged brother who offered the resolution, and whose opinions seemed to be both law and gospel to the majority, went into an argument, or what he intended to be an argument, but which was simply a series of assumptions and assertions, to show that both the "death" and ° life" spoken of in the Scriptures are mere figures of speech; that there is actually no such thing as death and extinction. And when reminded that this would give eternal life to all animals as well as to all men, he replied that all this might be true, for aught he or anyone else knew to the contrary. He concluded by affirming, as the editor of the Congregationalist had recently done in reply to the author, that he could more easily an I willingly accept of the doctrine of universal salvation than of that of the conditional immortality of men. But for the sake of unanimity, a quasi letter of dismission and recommendation was finally voted, to which was attached the declaration, that the Association disavowed all sympathy with and responsibility for the heretical teachings of the book; with the express understanding that the author's connection with the Association should terminate as soon as he had been received by the body to which he had been recommended.
It ought to be said that no unkind words were spoken or unkind feelings expressed. Indeed, as each member was called upon for the expression of his individual opinion on the merits of the case, the majority had no opinion to express. It was but too evident that the whole proceeding had been initiated and carried through by two or three leading minds; and as for the others, they were acting rather from constraint of circumstances than from their convictions of duty; and that they were, by no means, so sure of the soundness of their position as their silent acquiescence might seem to indicate.
This old dogma is evidently losing its hold upon the more intelligent and thoughtful members of this and other clerical bodies and I am quite sure that the time is not distant when it will be discarded as a monstrous error But it requires more faith, and more of the spirit of self-sacrifice than are ordinarily seen, for a man whose living is at stake, to incur the suspicion of heresy and ris the consequences, until the strong pressure of necessity is laid upon him.
The leaders in this crusade were evidently somewhat mortified at their failure to carry their point. They, no doubt, thought they were doing God service. I have nothing but the kindest feeling toward them, and as for the others who felt constrained to justify their own orthodoxy by voting against the doctrine of Conditional Immortality as heretical and opposed to the teachings of Scripture, I pray that the Lord will enlighten their minds by his good Spirit and lead them to the truth. And when they do see it, as I confidently believe many of them will before long, may they have the courage to be true to their conviction.
I presented this quasi letter to the Philadelphia Association at their meeting, January 15th, and after a very full, free, and kind consideration of it on the question involved, they voted unanimously to receive me as a member—not that they indorsed my views, but that they considered them as neither opposed to the faith of the Gospel, nor as a bar to ministerial fellowship and confidence within their body.
January, 1879. J. H. P.
COUNSEL TO AN UNKNOWN INQUIRER.
MAY 18, 1883.
REV. J. H. PETTINGELL — Dear Sir: — I have finished your " Theological Trilemma." I thank you for the service you have done me. To be led into a clear comprehension of divine truth, is to receive greatest benefit.
But now I need advice. What shall I do? I am a minister in the M. E. Church, South, nearly fifty years of age, thoroughly convinced that it is my duty to preach the Gospel, warmly attached to my own denomination of Christians, trusted by them — I am presiding elder now. The truth, as I understand it now, would modify but slightly my ordinary manner of preaching. Occasionally I have preached on the future punishment of the ungodly as against Universalism, in which holding as I did, the natural immortality of the soul I was bound to represent this punishment as endless suffering. And I have fallen into the habit of saying, "immortal soul," "deathless spirit," etc. But remedying all this, as in duty bound, the change in my doctrinal preaching would scarcely be observed, except I myself should call special attention to it. What ought I to do? Before reading your book, I would have been unwilling to tolerate a man in the connection, as a preacher, who held such views. Could I wonder if I was expelled? I could endure that, but what about my obligation to preach the Gospel? The authority taken from me, going forth unaccredited who will hear me? Where shall I preach? How can I afford to bring strife and division into the church? I have not had time to think. You have. Advise me.
PHILADELPHIA, PA., May 31, 1883.
My Dear Brother in Christ: —Your favor of 18th instant has interested me greatly, and I seize the earliest opportunity I can find to reply. I can well appreciate your situation, and sympathize with you in the embarrassment of which you speak, for I have passed through the same experience. Your letter is no surprise to me. I have received many such within the last few years, and have, in this way, been brought into delightful correspondence with a large number of dear Christian brethren in this and in other countries, throughout the world; and into more intimate personal acquaintance with many of them. Most of them have passed through similar trials on account of their faith, or are now passing through them. The number of those who, either privately, or more or less openly, accept of Christ as the Life-giver of His people, and the only true Source of eternal life, is already very considerable in all our evangelical denominations, and is rapidly increasing. It is so evidently the teaching of God's Word, that I have no more doubt of the ultimate prevalence of this doctrine, than I have of the prevalence of the Gospel, of which it is, in fact, the real sum and substance, " He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself; he that believeth not God hath made him a liar, because he believeth not the record which God gave of his Son. And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son, hath the life, and he that hath not the Son, hath not the life." (R. V.) 1 John 5: 10-12.
This great doctrine lies everywhere on the very surface of the Scriptures; but through the cunning of the great deceiver, against whose artifices we are so earnestly warned, it been covered up and perverted by a false philosophy; and his original lie, "Ye shall not surely die," "ye shall be as gods, and in spite of sin ye shall be immortal," has been substituted for the truth of God, and in direct contradiction of His Word.
But this delusion has well nigh spent its force. The traditions of a corrupt church, by which it has been sanctioned, are losing their hold on intelligent Christian men. The spirit of inquiry is abroad. Old dogmas, that have long been accepted as axioms in religion, are undergoing searching investigation. The weak points in our hereditary theological systems are being exposed. Thoughtful Christian men are seeing what reproach this dogma of the inalienable immortality of sinners brings upon the wisdom, goodness, and justice of God; and how absolutely incredible are the conclusions to which it logically leads.
Some, through the teaching of the Spirit, have already found the solution of this, and the many other theological difficulties that have their source in the same error, by simply accepting the plain letter of God's Word on this question. " The wages of sin is death [not misery merely, but death, actual death] but the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord." " God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him, should not perish — become extinct — but have everlasting life." Others, still bound in the fetters of a false education, are trying to find their way into the light through the fogs and mists that surround them — some think they have a happy solution of this problem in the hypothesis of a post-mortem probation; others, in the idea of a conversion in transitu, at the moment of dying; others still, in the hope of a universal restoration, and others, alas! are falling away into various other forms of skepticism and unbelief.
We cannot be too thankful for our emancipation from the blinding error, in which so many of our Christian brethren are struggling, and that we have been led to see and accept the simple truth of the Gospel of Christ — a truth so honorable to the wisdom, justice, truth, goodness, and mercy of God, so exalting and glorious to our Savior, and in such harmony with the spirit of the Gospel, and with the teachings of the Divine Word from beginning to end, and so full of light, and comfort, and joy to every believer in Christ, through whom we have redemption from death and life everlasting.
And now, do you ask, " What ought I to do?" "How ought I to preach this glorious Gospel of the blessed God, that has been committed to my charge?" Of course, you will ask this question, first of all, of the great Master, who has sent you forth with His message to your fellow-men — for your commission is primarily from Him, and not from man. No man or body of men can give you authority to preach the Gospel of our salvation, nor take it away from you. Your fellow-men may assume this high prerogative, they may recognize you, or refuse to recognize you, as a true minister of the Gospel; but you are responsible to the Master Himself, for the faithful discharge of your high trust.
The frown or the favor of our fellow-men, of which we are apt to think so much, ought not, for a moment, to be brought into comparison with the judgment of the Master. If He shall say, "Well done, good and faithful servant" — this will be honor and joy enough for any disciple — if He shall judge us unfaithful —alas, the approbation of our fellows will avail us nothing — it will only add to the bitterness of our condemnation.
But as you have asked me, I shall be happy to offer you some such suggestions as I have given to others under similar circumstances.
I It is important that you should clearly apprehend the real question at issue in this discussion.
(1) It is not a question of philosophy nor of interpretation, but simply one of veracity between God and Satan. Which ought we to believe? Which ought our first parents to have believed? God told them that if they disobeyed they should surely die —they should forfeit the immortality which they could only have in the way of holiness.
Satan told them that they should not surely die, should not forfeit their immortality — but that they should be as gods — knowing good and evil, happiness and misery.
So is it now, under the Gospel —eternal life is again offered to us through a Divine Savior, who has himself died to redeem us from death. We are urged to seek for immortality and eternal life through Him: and are assured. most positively, that there is no other possible way of salvation. But the great deceiver .still declares that we are immortal without a Savior; that it is not a question of death and of life eternal, as God says, but simply one of good and evil, happiness and misery; and to give some plausibility to his lie, he tells us that " death " does not mean death, nor " life" life in the Scriptures, but only misery and happiness, and, as sinners and saints are alike immortal, the unsaved must, as a necessary consequence, be forever miserable. This casts such a reproach upon God, and leads to such an incredible conclusion, that thinking men who so understand these words are rejecting the Bible, and the God of the Bible, and trying to find refuge in Universalism or Restorationism, and various other forms of unbelief, of which this doctrine is the fruitful source.
But we on the other hand believe and teach, that God said what He meant, and meant what He said, and that He spoke the truth; and it is God that we are to believe, and not Satan who is a liar.
(2) It is not a question concerning the soul of man, nor the body of man, but concerning the man himself. The deceiver shows his cunning in setting us to discussing philosophical and metaphysical questions concerning the nature of man, and in introducing an ambiguous phraseology, which seems to concede that man may die and still live, that his soul, the real, conscious, sinning, suffering part of man, may live to sin and suffer forever, though the man himself be dead. Now we have nothing to do with philosophy or metaphysics in this matter our simple inquiry is concerning man himself, the man that God created, the man whom He placed under law, the man to whom He said, " THOU shalt surely die," the man whom Christ redeemed and to whom He offers eternal life, by a new birth and a resurrection from the dead — shall he live forever without being saved? or in other words, can we claim our immortality from Adam who forfeited it by sin, or only from Christ as it is offered in the Gospel?
(3) It is not a question of death especially, but rather of life; not a question of punishment, but of salvation, that we are to make prominent in our preaching. The Gospel which we are commissioned to preach is a message of salvation and life eternal. It is good news to dying men. It is this that constitutes it the Gospel. To be sure, the fearful alternative is not to be ignored. If there were no alternative, there would be no Gospel. But the alternative may be so misrepresented as to render the Gospel itself of "none effect."
This is just the evil which the preaching of the traditional doctrine has wrought. The Gospel itself has nearly lost its power over the hearts and lives of men, because they do not believe or feel the danger from which it would save them.
I well remember the embarrassment I used to experience during the first thirty years of my ministry, in preaching this doctrine of eternal torment, which I had been educated to believe was taught in the Scriptures. I could not make the intelligent thinking members of my congregation — especially those who were good moral citizens, honest in their dealings with their fellow-men, kind neighbors and charitable to the poor, and who made no profession of piety, and were destitute of the Christian's hope and evidently had no relish for religious things — believe they were actually in danger of being eternally tormented as our traditional theology teaches; nor that God would be just in inflicting such punishment on them.
But there is nothing incredible or open to any reasonable objection in the true scripture doctrine, as we now understand and preach it, namely: that no child of Adam since the fall is born to an inheritance of immortality, that it is only by a new birth, a second birth, and a resurrection from the dead through Jesus Christ that we come to inherit immortality and eternal life; that however moral or virtuous one may be, this does not entitle him to this boon; that no Christian can claim it on account of his own goodness, it is the peculiar gift of God's grace through Jesus Christ; that no man will be punished for sins of which he is not guilty, nor more than he deserves; that under. the wise government of a just and holy God, everyone enjoys the benefit of his morals and good deeds, but these benefits are naturally and necessarily as transient as the natural life of man, but that the eternal life which is offered to man in the Gospel, is something infinitely higher and better than man can purchase, or earn, or obtain by his own efforts. Thus it is only as one becomes a new creature in Christ Jesus, and becomes united to Him by a living faith, that he can have any ground of hope for this high and holy estate. " Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God."
When this satanic delusion of the natural inherent immortality of sinners is dispelled and men are made to see that their only hope of eternal life is from Christ the Savior, one of the obstacles to the reception of the Gospel is removed.
If this great Gospel doctrine of eternal life only through Christ be distinctly presented, as it should be, and clearly apprehended by those who hear — the question of future punishment — how many or how few stripes will be inflicted upon the unsaved sinner, and how long the sufferings of the lost will be protracted — need not perplex anyone. These difficulties will settle themselves. Of this we may be sure, that sin always brings misery; and misery accompanies and follows it even to the end. But sin and misery cannot be endlessly perpetuated — for we are assured that " the end of these things is death." " Sin when it is finished, bringeth forth death." This not only seems just and reasonable, but it is what God Himself declares.
It is from this sin, and misery, and final death, that God proposes to save us through Jesus Christ. " Neither is there salvation in any other — for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved."
II This then is the glorious Gospel of the blessed God, which He has sent us to proclaim to our fellowmen. We are to receive it as His messengers, and to preach it as clearly and distinctly as we can. It is not our Gospel but " the Gospel of the grace of God," and woe be to us, if, for the sake of gaining or retaining the favor of our fellow-men, or for any selfish or personal considerations we shall disguise it, or pervert it, or take anything away from it, or add to it anything of our own.
But there is need of wisdom in setting forth even the truth —especially if like this it be unpopular. We are to preach it, not as combatants, nor in the spirit of fault-finding with our Christian brethren who are still blinded, as we were formerly, by prejudice and a false education — but "commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God," " in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves if peradventure, God will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth." I think it especially important at the present time to emphasize the Gospel side of this question, to preach it not as the doctrine of death, but rather as that of life, eternal life in Christ, and only in Him.
And if men can once be brought to see and accept of the testimony of Scripture on this point they will find no difficulty with the other alternative which is death.
But if, with all the wisdom and Christian grace you can exercise, the preaching of the true Gospel shall give offence and excite even your brethren against you, as very possibly it will, the responsibility will be theirs. You can confidently appeal to the Master whose message you are proclaiming. He will take care of all His faithful servants. But then, you should remember that He has never promised them exemption from trials and difficulties or even persecution and death in His service. "The disciple is not above his Master, nor the servant above his Lord. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his Master, and the servant as his Lord. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household." The truth seems to need martyrs in this wicked world. It has always had them in the past, and doubtless will continue to have them till the final victory, and Satan is bound. There is no Gospel doctrine that is more sure to excite the prejudice and opposition of men than this of immortality and eternal life only in Christ. Though it magnifies the grace of God, it humbles the pride of man. Our popular philosophy, our poetry, and our literature of every sort, as well as the traditions of the Church oppose it; and it is hardly to be expected that any man can honestly advocate it at the present day, however peaceably inclined he may be, without being called in some way to suffer for it. I could tell you of the reproaches of friends, of ecclesiastical censure, of the loss of position and of reputation, and of the "great fight of afflictions," which many of us who are in advance of you in the advocacy of this truth have been called to suffer. But I need not dwell upon these experiences. For there is nothing in all this to lead any true disciple to " cast away his confidence which hath great recompense of reward."
This doctrine, though unwelcome, has already conquered a kind of toleration in some of our more liberal orthodox bodies. I could give you the names of many persons who hold this doctrine and advocate it more or less freely, without any disturbance of their ecclesiastical relations. But perhaps the preaching of Christ as the only Source of eternal life, would not be tolerated in your connection; and yet there is nothing in your book of doctrine and discipline that conflicts with it. It is only the popular voice and the traditions of the Church that are against it. And these traditions, if they can be shown to be contrary to the Word of God, you are under no obligation to defend. I would advise you, by all means, to hold on to your ecclesiastical commission and connection, if you can. I know of not a few good Christian ministers of your order who have voluntarily dissolved their Church connection because they were made to believe that honor required it, or for the sake of peace, or that they might feel at liberty to preach this doctrine more freely. But I think they mistook their duty. Their influence would have been much greater within their own denomination than outside of it. If it be impossible to remain, it were better to throw the responsibility of this act of separation upon others. The very disturbance which the effort would occasion, whether successful or not, would tend powerfully to call public attention to this doctrine, and to set people on searching their Bibles. It is so evidently taught in the Scriptures that those who oppose it, especially deprecate any discussion of it.
My ministerial brethren undertook to discipline me for the advocacy of this doctrine in my first book. Under the threat of being disfellowshipped, I was advised to quietly withdraw. This I declined to do, feeling sure that I believed and taught only what I found in the Word of God, to which I made my appeal. A resolution was then offered to disfellowship and silence me on the general charge of HERESY. But I demanded a bill of particulars and specific charges. As not one of their number was willing or able to draw up such an indictment and much less to maintain it, the effort fell through, and I still retain my standing in the ministry of the Congregational Church, and intend to retain it, so long as I am permitted to remain. —This is the advice I give to my ministerial brethren, holding this faith in all the various Evangelical Churches to which they now belong.
But should you be cast out, you need not be cast down, you will not be alone, you will come into the goodly companionship of a large number of Christian brethren of like faith, whom you have only to know that you may love them. I could give you the names of scores of such, and also tell you of many little churches of humble Christians in various parts of the country, who love this Gospel and accept its teachings in the simplicity of their hearts.
I will only add that my first volume entitled The Theological Trilemma, to which you refer, was written more than a dozen years ago, when I was alone in a foreign country, with few books of reference but my Bible, and not having any communication, nor indeed acquaintance with any living person in the wide world holding this truth, and soon after I had come, by faithful study of God's Word to embrace it. The book is quite imperfect, but it has introduced me to a large and increasing circle of Christian brethren, with whom I have had the privilege of comparing views. I have since devoted much time to the study of this question, and have written and published much. My work entitled THE LIFE EVERLASTING: What is it? Whence is it? Whose is it? a volume of eight hundred pages, discusses it more fully in its various relations and is the fruit of many years of study. To it is added a Symposium in which twenty able men in this country and Europe, who hold with me this doctrine, unite in expressing their views in as many valuable articles written for my use, and occupying two hundred pages of the book. I should be glad to have you read it.* And now, my dear brother, praying that you may be guided by the Spirit of God, into all truth, that you may have grace given you to be true to your convictions of duty, and strength to stand in the day of trial, and that yeu may be a faithful and successful minister of this glorious Gospel; I subscribe myself your fellow-laborer in the service of our common Lord, and in the hope of his speedy coming.
J. H. P.
A. still later volume, entitled The Unspeakable Gift, published by L C. Wellcome, Yarmouth, Maine.
The doctrines we advocate are not popular with philosophers, men of science and learning, professors and doctors in theology, and the self-styled literati generally. This is urged against us by those who take their opinions from tradition and from human sources, rather than from the Word of God. They say tauntingly as in the time of Christ, " Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him? But this people who know not the law are cursed." John 7: 48, 49. But, indeed, so far from being any evidence against the soundness of our views, this, to me, is one of the strongest arguments in their favor. This has always been the case with respect to any Christian doctrine.
It is said of Christ, while on earth, that "the common people heard him gladly "; while the elite, the learned, the Scribes and the Pharisees, and the self-conceited priests, all united in rejecting and opposing Him and His doctrines. And so the apostle Paul tells us, 1 Cor. 1: 26, " how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called." They must look after their own respectability, the good opinion of their associates' their position in society and the church, their emoluments and honors. They cannot afford to be turned out of the synagogue, or to risk their own temporal interests by accepting of an unpopular truth. They are too prudent to believe, or to confess, even if they should secretly believe any doctrine, until it shall become safe or respectable to do so.
Religious truth does not usually find its first converts and advocates among the higher classes, so called, and percolate downward, but rather among the common people, the lower ranks of society, as they are termed; it then forces its way upward, in spite of those who are in authority and power, and in spite of the opinions of the learned.
Learning is not to be despised. God uses sanctified learning to carry on His work, and to propagate the truth. But it is not half so necessary to the discovery and reception of the truth as a simple, child-like heart. Indeed, it is too often the chief obstacle in the way of the progress of the true Gospel. And when a pure Gospel is made known and accepted, it is too often perverted to sustain the conceits of men. Hence the warning (Col. 2: 8), " Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the traditions of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ."
When any man brings a philosophy or theory of his own to the Word of God, he is almost sure to find it there; and if the plain teaching of the Scriptures is against his belief, he is too apt to accommodate them to his belief, rather than his belief to the Scriptures.
The philosophy of Plato, with respect to the necessary immortality of man, has been permitted to throw its dark shadow over the entire Scriptures, and they have been perverted and falsified to sustain a doctrine which is contrary to its plain teaching on almost every page from Genesis to Revelation. Our theologians and our theological schools, and indeed, through the false teaching of these learned guides, almost the whole Christian Church has fallen under its blinding influence. To one who, by the grace of God, has been able to break the fetters of tradition, and from whose eyes this veil has been taken away, it seems astonishing that any man should find, or be able to find in God's Word any other teaching than that man's whole life was forfeited by sin, and is only restored through Christ in the resurrection; that He is our only hope of eternal life, and that all who are not in Him must be utterly and forever destroyed.
But we know how hard it is for one who has been trained from his infancy to take the lie of the tempter —" Ye shall not surely die" — as one of the very fundamental truths of Scripture; who has been taught and drilled in a system of theology that is founded upon it, as an axiomatic truth, and in a theological school where to doubt it would be regarded as a fatal heresy. — to break away from all these influences and to submit himself, as a child, to the simple teaching of God's Word and God's Spirit. We know how hard it is to incur the suspicion, the censure, the scorn, the pity of brethren whose learning we honor, and whose fellowship we desire, for being true to our convictions. But the testimony of a good conscience is all the more precious, and fellowship with the Master Himself is all the more sweet.
We have learned to rely less on the interpretations of the commentators, and the authority of the school-men, than we once did, and more on the simple letter of the Word and the teaching of the Spirit, that is given to the humblest child who sincerely asks it. We would sooner go for instruction in spiritual things to the humble, prayerful student of God's Word, unlettered though he may be, than to the great and learned theologians whom men have honored with their high-sounding titles. " Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" If the clouds of error that now obscure the Gospel are ever dissipated, and the false dogmas that now hinder its progress and dishonor its Author are ever dethroned, and the light of a pure Gospel shall again shine forth, it will not come as the result of human wisdom and learning and philosophy, and the patronage of the rich and powerful, but rather —in spite of all these — because " God hath chosen the ' foolish things of the world to confound the wise; the weak things to confound the things which are mighty; and things which are despised, to bring to naught the things that are."
For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell. Col. 1: 19.
Dr. Blair, a rhetorical English preacher of the last century, and author of a book on rhetoric which some of us have studied in our college days, in one of his sermons apostrophizes virtue somewhat in this way. " O Virtue! if thou could manifest thyself bodily, and we could see thy sweet countenance so lovely and so pure, and all thy beauty, all men would fall down and worship thee." The preacher who came after him said:— Dr. Blair has said, if virtue could be made manifest to us in personal form, and we could see her lovely countenance, all men would fall down and worship her. 1 think he is mistaken. This is just what has been done, and what was the result? We have had manifest in flesh all conceivable virtue, purity, loveliness, and grace infinite, all in human form, and He walked among men, and they heard His kind words, and beheld the beauty of His life, and what did they do? They despised Him; they rejected Him; they scorned Him; they opposed Him; they maligned Him; they persecuted Him ' they spit on Him; and they were not satisfied until they had put Him to death on the cross! That is the way poor, sinful natural man feels toward the embodiment of holiness.
Now, the wicked Jews were no worse than other men, and the people of that day were no worse than the people of the present day. They are all alike in this matter by nature. The natural heart is opposed to God, and its opposition will appear in some way or other.
During the early ages, the opposition of men to the pure Christianity which Christ introduced, was exhibited in brutal persecution, and, in the infliction of pains and penalties upon the bodies of those who followed Him. They were tortured; they were cast out; "they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins"; " they were sawn asunder, were slain with the sword," and yet the Gospel went forward and gained its converts until Christianity attained a place of power among men, Then the practices of the Evil One were only changed in order to defeat the design of the Gospel in the world. Then a sort of patronizing attitude was shown to Christianity. It became unfashionable to say anything against Jesus Christ. He was said to be very good, but false ideas were secretly and insidiously infused into the Gospel so as to corrupt it and render it inefficient. The doctrine of devils" was incorporated into God's Word, and so mixed up with the truth that it was not always easy to distinguish the one from the other, and in this way the real vital power of the Gospel was impaired, the edge of the sword was blunted. Nothing convinces me more of the real vital energy of the Gospel of Jesus Christ than the fact, that with all the adulterations, and all the poisonous errors that have been infused into the Word of God, it yet does seem to have a saving power to a considerable extent. It has been going forth and gaining its disciples from the beginning even till now, but at the present day the Gospel in its simplicity is not relished by the world, nor even by many of those who call themselves Christians. They accept the name, they say, "Lord, Lord," but the real Gospel in its simple truth is discredited, is bidden, is pushed aside, and something else must be put in its place. They do not like to hold up Jesus Christ, or see Him held up as He is held up in the passage I have just read from the apostle Paul; they do not like to exalt Him to the highest pinnacle of glory and power, which is His rightful place. Ah, far from this! They preach about Christ; they will often, perhaps, introduce His name into their discourses, but His glory is very much dimmed. They deny Him the crown which He claims.
This manner of treating our Savior reminds me of the practice of a popular preacher, who, not long ago, was in Boston. It was said of him he preached beautiful sermons, practical sermons, but with very little of Christ in them. One of his good deacons, who longed to hear more of Christ, said to him one day, "I wish you would preach more about Christ." " Well," replied the minister, "that is a good topic. I have preached about Christ, and I will again. He is a good subject." He had not preached Christ as Paul preached Him, and every true minister should, but only introduced His name as a matter of convenience, or to give polish to a popular discourse.
I do not like to say this of my ministerial brethren, but I feel it to be true; I know it to be true of too many of them. I listen from Sabbath to Sabbath, not being able to preach, to discourses that extol virtue, condemn vice. The preacher will tell you all about matters in the Old Testament, and many things in the New. They will tell you how many feet long the bedstead of Og, king of Bashan, was, and how many feet high Goliath was, and the size of his sword; the true value of a penny, and how large the Sea of Galilee was, etc.; for the Bible is full of topics, you know. But alas, there is too little of Christ, and too much mingling of their own speculations, and of many other things of comparatively little importance in the sermons of the day, so that the multitude do not have the Gospel in its fullness nor in its simple purity.
Now I propose, as far as I am physically able, to notice a few of the ways in which this fact appears. The Gospel is diluted and adulterated, and Christ, not slandered or reviled, but brought down and minimized, and made as little as it is conveniently possible to make Him in the estimation of the people, that man may be exalted, that philosophy may be exalted, that human wisdom may be exalted. This is done without seeming at all to oppose Christianity. This is one of the insidious devices of the Evil One, to lead people to speak lightly of Him, and, as the poet says, to " damn him with faint praise."
For instance, suppose there was an orphan boy ,wandering the streets, bare-foot, having nowhere to lodge, begging precariously bits of food here and there, ragged and dirty, and a kind man had compassion on him, took him and washed him, combed out his hair, and put a new dress upon him, took him into his household among his children, and educated him,—did all that a kind father could do for a child. Then suppose the child grows up to manhood, and his benefactor starts him in business, and the orphan feels a sort of obligation, and yet refrains from acknowledging it fully; saying, "Oh! Yes, he was kind to me. He did me a good service one time. Every young man needs some help to start in business, you know, and I got help from him." You say, " That is not the way to treat that benefactor to whom he owed all that he had in this life." It would be very mean.
Again, suppose you are drowning in the sea; you have passed beyond the hope of recovery, and are sinking for the last time, and one rushes in at the peril of his own life and brings you to shore, and with much careful attention you are revived and set on your feet again, and now you say, "That was good in him to lend me a helping hand. I indeed might have got out myself. But I would have had a hard time, but he helped me out, and I am all right now." Do you not see that would show a want of appreciation of his kindness? This is " faint praise." General Washington, when commander of the American armies, received a letter from the British general, directed to George Washington, Esquire. He took it as an insult, and sent it back unopened, and why? Because it did not accord to him the honor due to his rank. Is not our Lord, the Giver of Eternal Life, insulted in the same way?
Now, in the first place, Christ does not at the hands of men, receive the honor that belongs to Him by being accorded His true place in the human family. He is often spoken of as a wise man, a great man, and He is ranked with Confucius, with Plato, with Moses and other great men that have lived in the world, and shed light far ahead of their times. Yea, perhaps the greatest and best of them all. It has got to be very common to praise Christ in this way, and His name has gone almost over the world. Why, the Mohammedans put Christ among the few notabilities of this world. The Mormons do the same, and so do all decent infidels, and almost, wherever the name of Christ is known, it is not blasphemed, except in this way of bringing Him down from His true position, and making Him one of us merely. If I understand the Gospel, and who can read this passage without understanding it so? Christ is the sun and center and glory of this world. Why, without Christ introduced into this Adamic race, what would we be like? We might well say, " Lord, wherefore hast thou made, all men in vain?" The successive generations would come and go like the waves beating upon a dark shore, only to fade away and be gone. Christ is " the light of the world." Though He is actually a man, having our form and our feelings, yet He is the " Lord from heaven," God amongst men, and the manifestation of the bright image of His Father's glory. He came among us, not merely to dwell with man and be one on our level, but to lift us up. as it were, to God, to make new creatures of us. Why the Adamic race is the noblest race of creatures upon the earth. We are at the top, and yet we have animal natures and passions. We are weak and frail, and if Adam and Eve had continued without sinning, there is no surety that their descendants would, one after another, have been able, on trial and temptation, to stand before God approved. Oh, how few would have stood the test Adam fell as the sure indication of what all men would do. lie lost an earthly paradise. To have had his life perpetuated here as he was, would have been a boon, but God in His merciful disposition toward us was purposing not merely to perpetuate our lives and give us good things here on earth. His purpose was to lift us up into a higher life, one that is infinitely above our Adamic, earthly life, by a second progenitor from heaven. It was to make new creatures of us, to give us a spiritual body, and a spiritual life, and pleasures that we now cannot even conceive; nor have the things which God hath prepared for His children even entered into the heart of man. Oh! God had a great purpose, and He still hath, toward those who will receive Him, and lay hold of the Life that is offered them in Christ.
Thus the coming of Christ into the world was not an after-thought of God. He did not come merely as a cobbler to repair damages as well as He could and fix up things, although that is the object for which many suppose He came, — to make the world as good as He can, to get as many out of the grasp of the Devil as He can, leaving the scar still upon them, as the best He can do. No, not this; He was a "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." God had it in His plan to make man immortal, to give him eternal life, but not in his Adamic state, nor in the low state in which he was born. The first man, Adam, was psychical, natural, as it is translated, but the last man, the second Adam, is spiritual, from the first. "That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual." This is God's plan toward the human race, and we have meagre conceptions of it when we think that Christ came merely to undo the mischief which Satan had done. He came, not merely to undo this, but to do a thousand-fold more for the race of man. Oh, the glory that He has in reserve for His creatures! It is the opinion of many, and I am inclined to believe, that in the state to come, man will be the nearest to God, the most highly exalted of any of His creation. As the poet hath said: — Nearest the throne and first in song,
Shall man his hallelujah raise,
While wondering angels round him throng,
And swell the chorus of his praise.
Oh! our conceptions are too feeble of what God has provided for them that love Him. We need to elevate our thoughts of divine things, and rejoice in the hope set before us in the Gospel.
Well, there is another way in which Christ is depreciated, and His offices for us; and that is, I think, at the very root of much misbelief. In the very beginning, Satan whispered into the ear of Eve a falsehood concerning the nature of man, and his lying disciples have been repeating it ever since, that man is immortal in his own nature, and he does not need a Savior from heaven, nor any other gift of life from God; he only needs to be made better, he only needs to be made happy, and he will live continuously because of his own nature. This is the philosophy of Plato. It got into the Church very early in the second century, and the Holy Scriptures being against it, they had to be changed, insidiously changed, so as to make them conform to this philosophy. This was easily done, perhaps, among an unsophisticated and uneducated people. Those philosophers that embraced Christianity set themselves to changing the meaning of these terms used in the Bible, so that soul no longer meant the vital principle which was in man; it meant something that was infinite and eternal in its existence. The word death, which is the penalty of sin, did not mean actual death; it meant a state of sin and misery, a state of torment. The word life, which Christ used so emphatically, and which the apostle John and other apostles, but especially the apostle John, used with such constant and wonderful repetition as indicating the eternal life which God shall give to His people, did not mean the gift of Eternal Life, but it meant the gift of happiness, felicity, purity, Why, I have a Greek Lexicon here which is made for the use of students who are studying the Word of God, Greenfield's Lexicon. It is attached to a good many Greek Testaments. I had a curiosity to look at two or three of these words in the lexicon and see how they are interpreted. Now, I shall not detain you long with these foreign words, but will call your attention to a few of them in order to illustrate what I have said about the meaning of words being changed.
The word psyche means life, animal life. The life which we are all born with, the life which other animals have. It is a transient life, and that is just what the word means in the original. But our philosophized lexicographers have got a new theological idea about that, and so they note some passages in the Testament in which this word occurs, and have put their philosophical construction upon them, and given a new interpretation to them in their lexicons, and they say in those passages it means so and so. Now, take this word.
After they have given it the proper meaning, they have said that in Matt. 11: 29; 22: 27; and 26: 38; and so on, it means "the rational soul, mind, that in us which thinks, feels, wills, and renders us immortal." Then take the word Thanatos, death. It means precisely what our word death does, but in these passages which are quoted (I need not refer to them now) they say it means "eternal death, an unchanging state of misery." Where did these men get such definitions? They got them out of their own hearts, or, rather, from the Devil. Now, I will take one word more, the word Zoe. That is the emphatic word used to indicate the principle of life which is in God and which is in Christ, who alone has immortality, and which He gives to His people. " I give unto them eternal life." It is unfortunate that we have not a word in the English language to designate it. We have it translated by the same term used for the translation of psyche, so there is confusion in the minds of ordinary persons, but our lexicographers have made confusion worse confounded by telling us when zoo means life, and when it means something else in certain passages to which they refer. They say it means " happiness, felicity, eternal happiness, the source or principle of happiness." That is, "I give unto them happiness." "I give unto them joy," or "eternal peace." Now this is one of the insidious ways in which the poison of error has been infused into the Scriptures, and men have darkened the Word of God in their commentaries and lexicons by words without knowledge. Alas!
it is so! We live in an age now of adulteration, and, I might say, adultery, but I say adulteration. Men are adulterating everything. You cannot devise ally-thing new and useful, but men will set themselves to work to make a sham resembling it. All our food, all our medical preparations, all our commercial goods, our butter, our milk, our cloth, our precious metals, all are displaced by shoddy and sham substitutes.
By the way, they have a good way of getting the pure milk in some foreign lands. I think it was in Syria where I was traveling, I was somewhat amused to learn how the people obtained pure milk. They make common use of goat's milk, which is very good if pure, but they would not trust the man who sells it to milk the goat at home and bring the milk to their houses, but he must bring the goat right before them and milk her, and then they were sure of getting pure milk. Now, I want the pure milk of the. Word in that way; I want it direct from its source, and not peddled out to me by every commentator who may dilute it to suit his own pleasure.
I sometimes think of Diogenes, the cynical philosopher in the days of Alexander, as he sat basking in the sun in his tub. The great Alexander came along and stood before him, and in a patronizing way said, " Well, what can I do for you?" " Nothing at all, only please get out of my sunshine," said he. That is what he wanted, the sunshine for himself. Alexander only darkened him by his shadow. And I say to those interpreting Alexanders, " Get out of my sunshine! Let me see the sun for myself." Oh! I greatly lament that in all the early years of my ministry I hung with most implicit faith upon some of these good men. They were deluded just as I was, and what they said such a word meant, or such text meant, I believed it meant. I did not take it from its true source. I did not examine carefully for myself. I tell you I got the milk after it had been watered; but I thank God that He has led me, and that was when I was all alone in a foreign country, and I had not any fear of ecclesiastical surveillance, to the study of His Word; and oh! what light burst upon my mind when I saw the truth as it is in Jesus, when I saw that eternal life meant eternal life, and we receive it only from the great Source of life! It throws a new light upon the Word of God. What commends this people to my heart more than anything else is the knowledge that so many of them have their Bibles well thumbed. I take them up, and I see they are marked here and there all through. It is not so, my friends, with ordinary Christians, so-called. I am sorry it is not so. They read their Bibles too often as a task or kind of penance. They do not search the Scriptures, they do not study them as you do.
Now, there is another mischief attending thin Satanic doctrine of the natural immortality of the human soul. It casts such a dreadful imputation upon the government of God. It makes God responsible for the perpetuating of those who are not saved, in a state of endless, hopeless, perpetual misery. That idea of endlessness! It is too vast to realize, but consider it for a moment. and every natural soul must revolt from it. I think the moral character of God in our theology needs reformation very much, and we are coming to it. There is just now an awakening in our great Congregational body on this very question. What becomes of the heathen that are not saved? They have not had the Gospel, nor such opportunities as the people in this and other Christian countries have. Now, is God going to torment them eternally? Well, many say it cannot be possible that he should do it. I sympathize with them in the matter, but I do not sympathize with them in the refuge they take to get away from the difficulty, They say, therefore, there will be another chance for them in another life, or in Hades, and by some book or by crook unrevealed in God's Word, by some back door, they will succeed in getting into heaven at last. I do not slander them in saying this. Very many of them would be willing to confess that they believe in the final restoration of all men. Their preaching indicates it, and you get into conversation with them, and they confess it, and I verily believe a large portion of our intelligent men, so-called Orthodox, are really Universal Restorationists or Universalists.
Then there is another traditional doctrine which comes down to us. The larger portion of the people hold to the doctrine of salvation in this life, which I think is the Gospel doctrine; and if men are not saved, then it is said they must spend their eternity somewhere, and if they do not spend it in heaven, they must be in the place of torment. They do not like to defend the doctrine, but they must defend it in order to be true to their principles. Now, we have come in the religious world among educated and intelligent men to this crisis. A controversy is springing up in our American Board of Foreign Missions, and Brother Stockman has allowed me to introduce a little article into the CRISIS touching that point. I sent it to the Congregationalist, but since I beeline a heretic, I cannot get anything into that paper. I am still a congregationalist minister, but I am somewhat discredited. I am after that way they call heresy, but the time has gone by when they can cast me out of the synagogue. I think I can do a little more inside than I can outside. You know an opposer is a great deal more to be feared inside than lie is outside. Well, I am staying there until the providence of God takes me away.
Now this is the mischief that this immortal-souls is working, but I think the providence of God is in it, and discussion is coming up, and it is going to be vigorously discussed, and there cannot be peace until it is secured on the basis of the Scriptures, that men die in Adam, and are only made alive through Jesus Christ. And this eternal life was not begotten in our natural birth, it is begotten by God; it is the gift of God's grace "through Jesus Christ our Lord." To be lost, or to fail of salvation is not to be eternally tormented, but to fail of attaining to eternal life. This is the gift of God through— not Adam— but Jesus Christ our Lord.
The sacrificial work of Christ is also denied by many. He did not die to atone for our sins, they say, nor to redeem us from death. He died as a witness to the truth, as any great hero dies. He died as a martyr. His death was not vicarious, but spectacular, or scenic. Its virtue consists, not in what it does for us, but in what it shows us, in its normal effect on us. He died for us, not actually as a substitute in our place, and to satisfy divine justice, but as any brave soldier dies for his country. Our salvation does not depend at all upon the sacrifice, but upon the effect which His self-denial may produce on our minds. This theory is becoming very popular at the present time. It is held and advocated by the more liberal wing of the Orthodox Church. I cannot stop to show its fallaciousness, nor to quote the multitudes of Scripture passages that contradict it. I can now only say that it seems to me to be at war with the testimony of the Bible from the beginning to the end, to nullify one of the foundation principles of our Christianity.
This doctrine of natural immortality is working mischief to the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Of course, if men live right straight along through and after death, there is no real resurrection of the dead. They may go up; and that may be called a resurrection because they rise higher after they die, somehow or rather. There are various philosophies on that subject, but in denying death they deny the resurrection just as much as Hymenaeus and Philetus denied it. It is becoming quite common when a man or woman of note dies, unless they have been outrageously, scandalously vile in their life, and I scarcely make that an exception, if they have become famous, it is becoming common, I say, for preachers to send them right up straight to heaven. Why, an eminent writer ( I won't name him because it might be deemed personal, I would not say anything against his memory now; he, perhaps, was a very moral man, but I never heard of him in the religious world) died not long since, and the minister who preached the funeral sermon likened him to a captive balloon, fastened to the earth for many years, but at length his last disease cut the last strand that held him, and he went straight up to glory. Well, that is the popular theology of the present day in regard to men in death. In our Sunday-school some time ago the lesson was upon Elijah, and the death of Elijah was commented upon. A large number of our really good orthodox papers said the distinction between the death of Elijah and that of any other good Christian was almost nothing. All Christians at death go up straight as Elijah did transformed to heaven! But where is the Word of God? There we read of one who "was translated that he should not see death." But men have got beyond that, so that they teach death is not death really. Oh! my heart is pained when I see how men ignore the plainest principles of the Gospel. They say, " You plant a seed in the earth, and it will spring up, will it not?" But you do not plant a dead seed, if you do, it will not come up. And man, corrupted by sin and death, planted in the earth, will not spring up' unless Christ shall give him life. There must be a new life in him, if he is going to live again, and forever.
There is a wonderful unwillingness among believers in the necessary immortality of man to admit the supernatural character of the resurrection, or that Christ is the Source of our hope of rising again, in any other sense than that He proved or demonstrated the fact and assured us of it, by His own resurrection. Like Columbus, or Newton, or Franklin, He brought it to light as one of the great fundamental truths of our nature. The Resurrection, they say, is one of the orderly steps in our natural progress; it is in the way of natural development. America existed before Columbus discovered it, and would have continued to exist if he had not made known this continent to his fellow-men. The attraction of gravity was a law of nature before Newton discovered and demonstrated it. We are not indebted to Franklin for electricity, but only for demonstrating its nature and mode of action. But Christ is set before us in the Scriptures not merely as the Source and Foundation of our hope of rising, but of the fact itself. He is the Author, the very Cause, the Giver of this resurrection life. "I am the Resurrection and the Life." " Because I live ye shall also live." He says to His disciples, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." If He had not risen there would have been no resurrection of any man; even "they also which have fallen asleep in Christ are perished " or gone to naught. This then is one of the insidious ways in which the great philosophical error we are combating robs our Lord of His glory and seeks to reduce Him to the human level of the great discoverers and demonstrators of this world, while He is infinitely above them all, as the very Source and Author and Giver to us of the resurrection life, which He procured for us, and demonstrated in His own Resurrection.
Here I desire to touch upon a point already alluded to, but I think it necessary to allude to it again, as some Adventists are carried away with this peculiar notion about the Resurrection, that it is to be of a part only, not of the whole human family. I think they are in error I cannot read. the Word of God, and believe it as they do. The Word of God says, "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." " The hour is coming in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth." The resurrection of the whole human family is as broad as the Adamic sin and death. But what then? That does not bring them to immortal life. Why, my friends, if there were no resurrection of the wicked, I want to know how God is going to punish them? Where is the penalty of sin? Men live here upon the earth, and no matter how they live, no matter whether they are good or bad, they die. Every child of Adam is born to die; he must go down. It is not simply because he is a sinner himself; it is because he belongs to a sinful, fallen, mortal race, and now where is the penalty God has pronounced against each sinful soul? It is in the second death, or else there is no penalty. Otherwise that human fiend, incarnate devil (alas! there are too many of them) who commits all iniquity, possibly murders his wife and family, may snap his figures in God's face, and then cut his throat, and say, " You can't follow me. I shall be out of your reach, I shall be dead," and so escape altogether the penalty for his sin. Swindlers from the United States may, in this way, escape the hand of human justice by running over to Canada with all their ill-gotten gains. But the sinner against God cannot escape Divine Justice by hiding in the grave. No, never! "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment." Then comes the second death. Men shall then stand before the bar of God in their individual capacity, as I understand it, not in the Adamic capacity, and be judged according to the deeds done in the body.
Then again, the universality or unlimited nature of the atonement, that too is cut down to the elect only. That used to be the straight out-and-out theology of a former age, and a large proportion of our old-school theologians still hold it,— Christ died for the salvation of some men; He died to make an atonement for their sins, that is, for the sins of those whom God saves, but they say the atonement is limited, for before God created man, He looked over the whole human race, and of that man and that woman He said, "I am going to atone for him, or her. They shall be saved by the blood of Christ"; but there is no atonement for the sinner not saved. God makes an atonement, but it is limited to a certain number, just as though when a person is going to make a great feast, he sits down beforehand, and makes out a list of those whom he intends to invite, and prepares only for them. The rest are left outside. I do not travesty this doctrine. It has been thus held, and the reason for it is this. It is held that it was not the death of Christ that made the atonement. It was the agony He endured. Christ suffered in His dying agonies just as much pain and torment in His great infinite personality as would have been suffered by everyone who has been elected and saved, had they been sent to hell and tormented eternally. So you see it is simply a problem in arithmetic, and you can easily figure out the result. As for the rest, there is no salvation for them. I think this limited atonement theory is going somewhat out of our theology, but its place is not taken by anything better after all. Nor can it he so long as men hold to the commercial notion of atonement by suffering simply.
Then, it is supposed to be limited in its efficacy. This brings me back to my text. Christ did a great work for us, they admit. He greatly helped us, — just as a man climbing a ladder is helped by somebody. This is really the view which the Roman Catholic Church takes, put into this concrete form. You must have a certain degree of merit, somehow or other, and then Christ's merits put in with yours will be enough for your salvation. And if you have not enough of your own, why, you know, there is the great treasure-house of the Church, " the communion of saints." A great many saints have been a great deal better than they needed to have been, and the priest sits just as one does who is selling peanuts, and sells their surplus virtue to those persons who have no righteousness of their own. "If you will give me so much money, you shall have so many prayers," so that the righteousness of Christ, and the surplus righteousness of the saints, the works of penance which you may do, will make you finally fit for the kingdom of heaven. That is the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, and it is coming to be the accepted doctrine, though really somewhat in disguise, of Protestants also; for I must say that the Protestants and Catholics, branches of the Church which were once so widely separated, are beginning to coalesce; there is a going back and forth between them, and I think the breach is fast being covered over. Men are more and more coming to believe that after all it is, at least, partly through our own righteousness that we arc saved. We must look out ourselves that we do not fall into the same error. Let me say most emphatically, my dear Christian friends, you do not earn in the least your salvation. You cannot merit eternal life. It is the pure gift of God's grace through Jesus Christ. It is a gift. The wages of sin you can earn, "But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." But now do not say, " Well, then, I can do well enough, if Christ is going to save me." Ah, my friends, God has graciously opened the way for us to lay up treasures in heaven, but I think there will be a great difference in exaltation, in the various ranks of those that are saved. Some, I fear, will go into heaven, as it were, very doubtfully, "scarcely saved." while others will have an open and an abundant entrance ministered unto them into the kingdom of God. We are urged to lay up our treasures there; we are urged continually by the hope of receiving a great reward, and the more you do for Christ, the more humble you are, the more Christ-like you are, the nearer you will be to Him, and the higher in the kingdom of God. God's mercy is great toward those who are weak, he saves them by His grace, as He does us all, but oh! He wants His people here to glorify Him, and be as much like Him as possible while on earth. Let us remember, then, that "It pleased the Father that in Him all fulness should dwell," and seek to be so conformed unto His image, that we may show to others that "of His fulness have all we received."
While those who boast of immortality from their natural birth are so willing to reduce the claims of the Savior to the lowest point, and to rob Him of His chief crown as the Giver of Life Eternal, that they may exalt themselves, surely we, who freely own Him as the Source of all our hopes for time and eternity, cannot be reluctant to exalt His name above every name, and to praise Him to the utmost. Let us not be afraid, nor ashamed to praise Him with all the powers of our being, and to call upon others to exalt the Lord with us. What were we without Him but poor, sinful, dying men! But through His grace we become united, by Him, to God, and partakers of His nature and glory. "It pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell" —fulness of compassion to take our nature that He might raise us up to Himself; fullness of mercy to redeem us from death, by dying for us; fulness of power to rise again victorious over all His enemies, and over our last great enemy, Death; fulness of grace to forgive all our sins; fulness of wisdom to guide us safely through this life; and fulness of life and energy to raise us up from death, and to immortalize us, and constitute us heirs, with Himself of His everlasting kingdom.
This fullness is even now and evermore at our service. We may draw from it freely and welcome, as from an inexhaustible fountain. Standing on the bank of a noble flowing river, we wonder to see how it flows on and on continually, carrying life and fertility everywhere along its course, without exhaustion or diminution, from generation to generation. We behold the sun, high up in the heavens, scattering his rays far and wide, and giving light and heat and life to the whole visible creation from age to age, for thousands of years, and wonder that it is now as full of energy and virtue as ever. But what are these but faint images of the Great Fountain of our life, the glorious Sun of Righteousness, whose life-giving beams are shed upon us, and upon all who look to Him throughout all the ages, without exhaustion or reserve.
And soon this earth shall melt. like snow,
The sun forbear to shine,
But He who called me here below
Shall be forever mine.
O give, give unto the Lord, the glory due to His name. Come, let us exalt His name together, and now begin the song of Praise which we hope to sing forever beyond this life in His kingdom. O that we might even now, more fully resemble Him whom we hope to be like, when we shall see Him as He is! O how we long for that promised appearing! You who are young and fresh may remain to greet with your own eyes Him whom unseen you now love and trust, and be translated together without seeing death. But some of us who have reached and exceeded our three score and ten years and are conscious of our waning strength, may indeed go down into the dark and silent chamber of Hades before that joyful day arrives. We are not anxious to live for the sake of living, nor do we fear to meet the enemy whom He has conquered; for he cannot hold us captive at his will. Indeed, we can say with Paul that we " wot not which to choose," for if a few more years of weary waiting were allowed us, they would be but " labor and sorrow." But there is a third thing we do desire with all our heart— to analusai — the return, or the rapture at the return of our Lord, which would indeed be "far better" than either. Like the child, whose bed-time has come, we would gladly sit up till the expected guest arrives. But we shall not be disappointed,— we shall see Him in the morning. We have the promise that those who remain and are alive at His coming shall not " prevent," — get the advantage of—us who sleep. He will not forget His children in their lowly beds. " For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first; then we [you] who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord." "Even so, come, Lord Jesus, come quickly. Amen."
To THE EDITOR OF THE CONGREGATIONALIST: — My Dear Brother Dexter: —I beg that you will allow one who is heartily with you in your support of the American Board, and in your opposition to the doctrine of a probation beyond this life, and a postmortem salvation for the heathen, to say a few words on this question, in which we are all so much interested, through your excellent paper.
I most fully indorse the sentiments expressed in the timely letters of Prof. Phelps and Dr. Hamlin in this Journal of July 15th and 22d, and in other articles by yourself and others in the same line; and I have especially rejoiced to know that Secretary Alden and a majority of his associates show no signs of yielding to the demands which our neological brethren are making on them in this matter. But it seems to me that you all are overlooking, or keeping in abeyance, the real vital question in this issue — a question that lies at the root of the difficulty, and which must be ventilated and settled before we can hope for peace and union on any secure foundation, namely: What is meant by salvation and its alternative? or in other words, What is the doom to which the unsaved are exposed, and from which they are to be rescued? Is it the perpetuation of a sinful life in a state of hopeless, endless misery in a world beyond the present? or, is it actual and eternal death, after they shall have been judged and found unfit for the life that is eternal? With those who insist on the natural and inevitable immortality of all men —saints and sinners alike—there are but these two alternatives: an endless life of purity and blessedness: or an endless life — or existence if you, will —in sin and misery.
But this latter alternative seems to cast such a reproach upon the Author of our being, and is so shocking to the sensitive nature of most Christian men, when they come to consider what is involved in such a doom, that they feel driven to seek some method of relief for their burdened hearts; and they first begin to hope, and then to believe, that there may be, yea, there must be found in the infinite wisdom and mercy of God, some way—whether revealed in his Word or not—by which " poor immortal sinners" will be rescued from so dreadful a doom. We could have no disposition to reproach them for such sentiments, and would forbear even to oppose them, were not the Scriptures so decidedly against them, and were not their doctrine so evidently misleading and demoralizing in its tendency.
But we do think that those who venture to advance these unwarranted speculations of " another chance hereafter" for sinners who are not saved in this life, especially for the heathen; and you who, on the other hand, would hold us to the traditional doctrine, which I cannot but think to be equally unwarranted and erroneous, of an endless, hopeless future in sin and misery for all the unsaved, are alike blameworthy for so entirely ignoring the third alternative, which lies everywhere on the very surface of all Scripture, and is repeated with such explicit emphasis in the Gospel — of no eternal life whatever apart from Christ its only Source; that Christ came not merely to save from a life of sin and misery on earth, but to fit men for that better, higher life that is eternal, which is made known in the Gospel, and to impart it to them by a renewal of their nature; but that men, failing of this, must not only be miserable as sinners, as long as they continue to live, but that they must necessarily, sooner or later, perish utterly in their own corruption; for a life of sin and misery eternally perpetuated is an impossibility, excepting by a constant miracle of upholding power; that "sin when it is finished bring-eth forth death "; that the only alternative to a life that is eternal is death, absolute and eternal. Such a life does not come by natural generation from Adam, but is only given by regeneration and a new birth through Christ the Life-giver.
No reason can be given why these plain Scriptural terms, Life and Death should not be taken to mean what they literally express but this, viz.: the Grecian philosophy of the deathless, indestructible nature of man, that was so early introduced into the Christian Church, forbids. it and so, to accommodate this heathen philosophy, the great boon of " Life from the dead," " the Life everlasting," " Length of days forever and ever," that is promised to believers as their peculiar portion must be emasculated and so minimized as to mean simply purity and happiness engrafted upon a human life which is already immortal in its own nature; and all these Scripture terms that predicate death and destruction to sinners must be construed in such an ethical, non-natural sense as to leave the sinner in a state of conscious, hopeless, unending misery, even after he has been judicially consigned to death and destruction!
True, there is a sense in which Christ is the Savior of all men; for He has redeemed the entire race of Adam from that natural death that comes upon all his posterity irrespective of their individual deserts; but this only brings them by a resurrection before the bar of God, to answer for the deeds done in the body — their own sins as individuals; and no one has any warrant for saying or believing that there has been, or will be any way of escape from that "second death " to which all sinners are exposed, excepting by repentance and faith, and a personal acceptance of the terms of salvation now offered in the gospel. Indeed, the Scriptures, explicitly declare that "As many as have sinned without law shall also perish, without law; and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law "; that " the heathen are without excuse." They also declare " There is none other Name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved." "God so loved the world, that Ile gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." "But how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? How shall they hear without a preacher? How shall they preach except they be sent?" Hence the necessity of missions to the heathen. We are also told that even Cornelius, who was "a devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, and gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God always," needed to have Peter sent to him to tell him words whereby he and all his house should be saved (have life — Syriac version). Acts 10: 2; 11: 14. How much more they who "hold the truth in unrighteousness."
It is inexpressibly sad to see so-called Christian men, in the face of the plainest teaching of God's Word, trying to show how the better sort of heathen, and even the rejectors of Christ and His Gospel in Christian lands — as, for example, in the case of Sir Moses Montefiore — may be saved by their own moral goodness; and all this because, under the stress of their false philosophy of the imperishable nature of man, they cannot believe it would be just in God to consign such men to a doom of endless misery. But why should they believe this? It is not a question of degree of guilt, but of unmerited grace. The simple question is, Have they been born again? which is the inexorable condition of entrance into the kingdom of God. Have they attained to eternal life through repentance and faith which unites mortal men to Him who is the only source of this new life? If not, they are still mortal, perishable creatures, however moral they may be. They have no eternal life abiding in them.
This then is the Gospel which our Lord has enjoined us to preach in all the world to every creature, no matter how high or low in the scale of civilization; for all are alike under one common doom of mortality, through sin, and there is none other name given under heaven among men whereby any one can be saved but that of Jesus Christ. What is this Gospel, but a proclamation of salvation from sin and death, its fatal result, through an atoning Savior? a proclamation of Life from the dead; another Life, a higher and better Life ' a Life that is eternal for mortal perishing men, and of the way of attaining to it, — an offer of an unmerited boon, as a free gift to everyone who will receive it as such, by repentance and faith in a Divinely provided Savior, — a Gospel of which Paul was not ashamed in his day, and of which no missionary need be ashamed, or need feel embarrassed to preach in all its fulness and freedom, and with all the earnestness of his soul throughout the whole world, to the most corrupt and degraded, as well as to the most refined and cultivated of mankind.
It is a Gospel that is honorable alike to the justice and mercy of God, and which reflects infinite glory on Christ the Savior of mortal men; a Gospel which commends itself to the conscience of every man, whether Christian or heathen, and which may be boldly preached to perishing men everywhere as the wisdom of God and the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth; a Gospel that offers no tough, severe points that need to be concealed or apologized for; a Gospel which is indeed humbling to the pride of man who claims with arrogance to be as immortal as his Maker, but which shows him a way, the only way, of attaining to that endless life which all men desire.
It is not my purpose to argue this matter in your columns, — indeed, I am net permitted to do it;* but may I not hope to be permitted, as one who loves the American Board and the cause of missions to which it is devoted, and who would fain see its supporters multiplied, and all united in prosecuting its indispensable work in harmony and with increasing success, to call their attention to this important aspect of the case in your valuable paper?
I am very sincerely yours in the faith of the Gospel, as the only hope of perishing men.
J. H. PETTINGELL, July, 1886. Late Dist. Sec. A. B. C. F. M.
NOTE.
The foregoing letter, excepting a few words since added, was sent to the " Congregationalist " for publication some few weeks before the late meeting of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, at Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 5th, 1886, with some hope, — though but a faint one, — that it would be admitted into the columns of that paper. As the subject to which it relates was then under active discussion, especially on its traditional and popular side, it was thought that some light might he thrown upon it, and the cause of truth subserved, by calling attention to the real vital point which seemed to lie back of the discussion, as it was then carried on, and which more than anything else is the prime cause of the divergence of those who were engaged in it. But the article was rejected; for it has long been the settled policy of this popular paper and of the other recognized organs of our various "orthodox bodies " to ignore and keep out of sight, and of free discussion, this main question, viz: What is the doom of the heathen world and of sinners generally, from which they are to be saved, and consequently, when and how this Gospel is to be made effectual to their salvation?
The crisis, which was anticipated in this Board, has come — and passed; the great debate occupying one entire day, and the speeches of those who, on the ono hand would sustain the Board in its time honored policy of insisting on the perishing need of the heathen, and of the hopeless condition of those who die unsaved, and of those who, on the other, demand a greater latitude of hope and of speculation as to another and better chance hereafter, have been made and given to the public, and our papers, both secular and religious, are filled with criticisms pro and con., on the merits of the performance and of the action then taken.
It will be observed that the cleft between these brethren is not radical; it does not reach to the bottom of the question; they differ only as to matters of speculation, of expediency, as to freedom of thought and action on the part of our missionaries. Both parties start from one common assumption —an assumption which has nothing to justify it either in sound philosophy or in Scripture, which indeed is manifestly in opposition to the teaching of Scripture, if its language is to be taken in its common literal sense, viz: The natural and indefeasible immortality of all men, saints and sinners alike, and that the only difference between the saved and the lost is one. of character and condition in a life beyond. With the one it is a state of purity and blessedness, and with the other, a state of sin and misery, in both cases eternally perpetuated. Starting thus from a false assumption they are both led to conclusions that are alike untenable as well as antagonistic and cannot be reconciled with each other or with truth. I have failed to detect one hint in all these speeches, or in the newspaper criticisms on this debate, that any other alternative is possible or supposable than the two just named. Through the overshadowing influence of the Platonic philosophy of the nature of man, which has dominated the Christian world from the time of the apostacy of the church from its early faith till now, the natural and indefeasible immortality of all men from Adam has been held to be one of the fundamental principles of the Christian faith—an axiom not to be denied or questioned under such penalties as it has been in the power of the Church to inflict.
Under the weight of such a dogma as this how can it be otherwise than that intelligent, thoughtful men with human—not to say Christian — hearts should seek for some way of relieving Our Heavenly Father of the fearful charge of injustice and cruelty toward those who go down to death from heathen, and indeed from all lands, in their sins with no knowledge of the Savior He has provided for them. Must their short, miserable lives on earth be followed by a long eternity of deeper wretchedness and utter despair? Is there no hope for them beyond this life? they ask with anxious desire to commend Him to their own hearts, and to the hearts of their fellow-men as worthy of love and confidence, as a God of love and mercy. Is He no better than the pitiless monsters of cruelty that are now worshiped in these dark places of the earth?
If the whole human race has been condemned to a state of unending wretchedness and misery in a life beyond this life by their Maker, foil the sin of their first progenitor, as our theology teaches,* then the provision He has made for their recovery in the Gospel is not an act of grace but of justice, which every child of Adam may well claim at His hands. But not only this, but that every opportunity should be offered him to escape from such a doom. But the idea that He has foredoomed myriads of millions, yea, by far the greater part of the race, among whom this Gospel has never as yet been made known to such a hopeless lot, because they were created at the outset with an inextinguishable life; that they cannot be destroyed, and cease to be, or because He has determined to uphold them in being forever for the very purpose of tormenting them, would seem to be too monstrous to have been tolerated even in the darkest ages of the Church, yet so it was. But surely it cannot be imposed on intelligent Christian men in the present age. They will not, they cannot, they ought not to try to credit it or to teach it to others.
But what authority have those teachers of the New Theology for assuming as they do that such an indefeasible deathless nature has been given to man, otherwise than the authority of Satan to Eve, in direct contradiction of the Word of God, and renewed again in the philosophy of Socrates and Plato, and imposed upon an apostatizing Church as a dogma not to be questioned? Why should the most explicit and oft repeated declarations of Scripture, with respect to the death and everlasting destruction that follow upon sin, and with respect to the boon of an eternal Life as the gift of God's grace only through a Divine Savior, be changed from the plain literal sense to some unreal, uncertain, imaginary, figurative sense to accommodate this philosophy?
But granting as we do that in consequence of redemption by Christ, this Adamic death, which comes upon all men alike is not final, but that we are all to he raised from the dead, that each man may answer for his own deeds done in the body, and that it is in the second death only that the unsaved pay the penalty of their own sins, and the righteous in a second birth enter upon the endless life which by repentance and faith they have secured as the gift of God's grace; what authority have these brethren for assuming that this state of death is a period of consciousness and activity? The Scriptures call it a "sleep." They teach us that the dead know nothing; that there is no wisdom, no labor, no device in the grave to which we all go; that it is a region of darkness and silence; that it is only in the morning of the resurrection that we wake to life and consciousness. This used to be the belief of our most orthodox fathers; but the spiritualistic notions of the present age have transformed even death into a condition of higher life, and in this way have nullified the Scriptural doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, or at least vacated it of all reason or necessity for it.
But even were death no interruption to our consciousness — a position that is justified neither by science, Scripture nor sound reason,—what reason is there for supposing that moral changes are possible in a disembodied state? It is while in the flesh that we are put to the test; our temptations come to us almost wholly through our physical natures. It is here, in this corporeal state that our characters are formed, and is it not probable that they are here ultimate for good or evil? We are here subjected to a great variety of motives and influences, and our conduct is the result of choice, and in this way our characters are formed, and is there not reason to suppose that they become unchangeably fixed in this life and that our conduct hereafter results not from the balancing of motives but is spontaneous and automatic? But if this may not be so, it is to be confessed that the Word of God gives no valid ground for the belief that there is to be another probation for any of our race, and the hope that our brethren are inclined to entertain in this regard, seems to be founded purely on sentiment, and not on any direct teaching of Scripture. Indeed, the hints that they contrive to draw from it are at best but very vague, and are found in only a few, very few, obscure and difficult passages. Thus taking for their foundation the unproved and anti-scriptural dogma of the deathless nature of all sinners, and laying on this one hypothesis after another without any show of evidence, these brethren contrive to build their fanciful hope of another chance hereafter, which like the baseless fabric of a dream, is only to be dissipated when the morning light shall break upon it.
But what else can they do while borne down by the weight of the traditional dogma that either eternal happiness or eternal misery must be the portion of every child of Adam? For evidently such a state of blessedness cannot be the portion of anyone who is not made fit for it either in this life or in the life to come.
On the other hand, all honor to our brethren of the Old Theology for their loyalty to the Word of God and to our Lord's last great command to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature. He certainly would not have laid this injunction upon His disciples with such explicitness and urgency unless all men had been in perishing need of this Gospel. They do right to be well on their guard against such speculations or insinuations whether open or covert, of these brethren of "the larger hope" as it is termed, as tending most evidently to weaken the force of Gospel, and to delude dying sinners with the siren hope of another chance hereafter.
But we find on the part of all these brethren an increasing reserve when speaking of the doom of the heathen, and their perishing need of the Gospel. They seem to shrink from any explicit declaration of what they mean by the terms they use. Their thought is expressed in very general terms. There are very few of them at the present day who are willing to accept of the phraseology of the Westminster Catechism though it be the recognized standard of orthodoxy, viz.: "The wicked shall be cast into hell, to be punished with unspeakable torment both of body and soul with the devil and his angels forever," (Question or to adopt the fearful language of Edwards and Hopkins and Jeremy Taylor and the orthodox fathers of a former generation. And why is this? Do they not believe what these words express? What then do they believe? Let them plainly tell us. Are they not conscious that their theological sys- tern leads them inevitably to conclusions that are repellant to the moral sense of the Christian world, and such as they know not how to excuse or justify to themselves or others? Surely this ought to lead them to inquire whether there may not be some error in the premises from which they start.
It would seem that the Providence of God is plainly calling upon these Christian brethren of both schools in view of their conscientious differences with regard to the policy to be pursued in prosecuting our missions, to examine anew the real main question that lies at the bottom of the whole subject, and seriously to inquire, What is the death which is threatened to all men as the final result of unpardoned sin? and what is this boon of Eternal Life which is promised to all who will accept of it as offered in the Gospel? Whether it may not after all, be true that this literal death, that is actual extinction of being, is the final portion of all who fail of attaining to Eternal Life, as the Scriptures would seem so explicitly to declare; and whether actual immortality, and Eternal Life, and length of days forevermore is, or can be, the portion of any who are not brought into harmony with their Maker and into union with Him through a Divine Savior. And yet there seems to be a wonderful reluctance, on the part of our religious teachers, to consider this question, or to permit it to be discussed before them, or even to look at it, as having any claim on them. But it cannot be possible that they should be able to shut out from their own minds or the minds of those who look to them for religious instruction, the light that is pressing upon them from all sides, on this subject. It is becoming more and more evident that no satisfactory theodicy can be built —as indeed none ever has been—on this lie of the devil—as the Scriptures expressly declare it to be — this figment of Grecian philosophy, this dogma of the Schoolmen of the Dark Ages — the natural and inevitable immortality of all men, saints and sinners alike — and the consequent doom of hopeless and eternal misery of the lost. The moral character of God must be above any reproach of cruelty or injustice, or we cannot either love and trust Him ourselves as we should, nor commend Him to the confidence of sinners, whether in Christian or heathen lands.
There is, however, nothing unworthy of the character of a just and holy God, that He should constitute man at the outset neither mortal nor immortal, but only a candidate for immortality, if he should prove himself worthy of so great a boon, and when he had proved himself as yet unfit for it, that He should redeem him from the death to which he had been condemned by sin, and vain offer him immortality as a gift of grace under better and more secure conditions by a new birth from above. And this, as we understand the Scriptures, is just what He has done. It reflects infinite credit upon both His wisdom and goodness. Redemption instead of being an act of simple justice, becomes an act of mercy and grace. When we consider what it is that He has done for our poor sinful, mortal race, and what He proposes to do for everyone who will seek His favor and accept of His forgiving grace, we may well exclaim with the Apostle, "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom anil knowledge of God." "Thanks be unto Him for His unspeakable gift," — the gift of Eternal Life through the incarnation, death and resurrection of our Divine Savior.
This dogma of the natural immortality of all men, and consequently of the doom of endless suffering for the lost, is not simply one item or article in the creed of the Christian Church touching it at only one or two points, as superficial thinkers often suppose—but is radical, underlying the whole system of theology; like a fatal cancer stretching out its poisonous tendrils into every part and bringing the whole directly or indirectly under its baleful influence. It throws infinite reproach upon the wisdom and goodness of God; it transforms His mercy, in our redemption, into an act of simple justice; it travesties the atonement made by Christ into a. commercial exchange or transfer of a certain definite amount of suffering from one party to another; it denies to our Lord His chief crown of glory as the author and source of Eternal Life to all His people, and reduces Him to the level of a mere discoverer or demonstrator of the fact that all men are immortal in their own right; it discredits the great and glorious doctrine of the resurrection altogether, or transforms it into an unmeaning parade, and vacates the doctrine of the Second Advent, and the issues of the general judgment of all their meaning and force; in short it necessitates such metaphorical and spiritualistic interpretation of the Scriptures of all those terms that relate to the nature an destiny of man as to bring doubt and discredit on the reliability of their testimony as a revelation of divine truth.
Could my dear Christian brethren be made to see—as I have been led to see — the infinite mischief which this cunning falsehood of the adversary has wrought in the Church and in the world — and must ever work till it is extirpated; the dark and dismal cloud in which it veils the face of our Heavenly Father; the doubt and perplexity it works in the minds of those who would love and trust Him with all their hearts, and commend Him to others as worthy of their love and trust; how it dims the luster of the Gospel, and hinders its free progress in the world; how it is leading multitudes into skepticism and unbelief; how it furnishes scoffers with their chief objection to the Scriptures, that are said to teach it, and on our holy religion; and in short, how it is " strengthening the hand of the wicked, that he should not turn from his wicked way, by promising him Life" they would no longer regard with suspicion, or pity or contumely my earnest and persistent effort to call their attention to it. Indeed, they would not be able to see how, as a faithful servant of my Divine Lord, and as a witness to His truth, I could do otherwise. And now once more — though in great weakness and distress from a wasting disease, from my sick chamber— and with a profound sense of responsibility to Him, before whom I must shortly appear, I am constrained to urge them again to consider well the witness or testimony which the Divine Spirit has so explicitly given in His word to the doctrine of Eternal Life only in Christ, for which I contend. For it is said, " He that believeth not God hath made Him a liar, because he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son. And this is the record that God hath given to us Eternal Life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son hath not life." (1 John 5: 11, 12.)
NEW HAVEN, CT., December, 1886.