13 Lessing, Ueber Leibnitz von den Ewigen Strafen.

employed by the Saviour and the evangelists in conformity with the prevailing thought and customary phraseology of their time, as to conclude that they were derived from an unerring inspiration. The former is a natural and reasonable inference; the latter is a gratuitous hypothesis for which we have never heard of any evidence. If its advocates will honestly attempt really to prove it, we are convinced they will be forced to renounce it. The only way they continue to hold it is by taking it for granted. If, therefore, the strict eternity of future woe be declared in the New Testament, we regard it not as a part of the inspired utterance of Jesus, but as an error which crept in among others from the surrounding notions of a benighted pagan age.

But, in the next place, we do not admit by any means that the literal eternity of future damnation is taught in the Scriptures. On the contrary, we deny such an assertion, for several reasons. First, we argue from the usage of language before the New Testament was written. The Egyptians, Hindus, Greeks, often make most emphatic use of phrases declaring the eternal sufferings of the wicked in hell; but they must have meant by "eternal" only a very long time, because a fundamental portion of the great system of thought on which their religions rested was the idea of recurring epochs, sundered by immense periods statedly arriving, when all things were restored, the hells and heavens vanished away, and God was all in all. If the representations of the eternal punishment of the wicked, made before the New Testament was written, were not significant, with metaphysical severity, of an eternity of duration, but only, with popular looseness, of an extremely long period, the same may be true of the similar expressions found in that record.

Secondly, we argue from the usage of language in and after the New Testament age. The critics have collected, as any one desirous may easily find, and as every theological scholar well knows, scores of instances from the writings of authors contemporary with Christ and his apostles, and succeeding them, where the Greek word for "eternal" is used popularly, not strictly, in a rhetorical, not in a philosophical, sense, not denoting a duration literally endless, but one very prolonged. In all Greek literature the word is undoubtedly used in a careless and qualified sense at least a hundred times where it is used once with its close etymological force. And the same is true of the corresponding Hebrew term. The writer of the "Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs," at the close of every chapter, describing the respective patriarch's death, says, "he slept the eternal sleep," though by "eternal" he can only mean a duration reaching to the time of the resurrection, as plainly appears from the context. Iamblichus speaks of "an eternal eternity of eternities."14 Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, and others, the fact of whose belief in final universal salvation no one pretends to deny, do not hesitate with earnestness and frequency to affirm the "eternal" punishment of the wicked in hell. Now, if the contemporaries of the evangelists, and their successors, often used the word "eternal" popularly, in a figurative, limited sense, then it may be so employed when it occurs in the New Testament in connection with the future pains of the bad.

Thirdly, we argue from the phraseology and other peculiarities of the representation of the future woe of the condemned, given in the New Testament itself, that its authors

14 De Mysteriis Egyptiorum, cap. viii. sect. 10.

did not consciously intend to proclaim the rigid endlessness of that woe.15 "These shall go away into everlasting punishment." Since the word "everlasting" was often used simply to denote a long period, what right has any one to declare that here it must mean an absolutely unending duration? How does any one know that the mind of Jesus dialectically grasped the metaphysical notion of eternity and deliberately intended to express it? Certainly the intrinsic probabilities are all the other way. Such a conclusion is hardly compatible with the highly tropical style of speech employed throughout the discourse. Besides, had he wished to convey the overwhelming idea that the doom of the guilty would be strictly irremediable, their anguish literally infinite, would he not have taken pains to say so in definite, guarded, explained, unmistakable terms? He might easily, by a precise prosaic utterance, by explanatory circumlocutions, have placed that thought beyond possibility of mistake.

Fourthly, we have an intense conviction not only that the leaving of such a doctrine by the Savior in impenetrable obscurity and uncertainty is irreconcilable with the supposition of his deliberately holding it in his belief, but also that a belief in the doctrine itself is utterly irreconcilable with the very essentials of his teachings and spirit, his inmost convictions and life. He taught the infinite and unchangeable goodness of God: confront the doctrine of endless misery with the parable of the prodigal son. He taught the doctrine of unconquerable forgiveness, without apparent qualification: bring together the doctrine of never relenting punishment and his petition on the cross, "Father, forgive them." He taught that at the great judgment heaven or hell would be allotted to men according to their lives; and the notion of endless torment does not rest on the demerit of sinful deeds, which is the standard of judgment that he holds up, but on conceptions concerning a totally depraved nature, a God inflamed with wrath, a vicarious atonement rejected, or some other ethnic tradition or ritual consideration equally foreign to his mind and hostile to his heart.

Fifthly, if we reason on the popular belief that the letter of Scripture teaches only unerring truth, we have the strongest argument of all against the eternal hopelessness of future punishment. The doctrine of Christ's descent to hell underlies the New Testament. We are told that after his death "he went and preached to the spirits in prison." And again we read that "the gospel was preached also to them that are dead." This New Testament idea was unquestionably a vital and important feature in the apostolic and in the early Christian belief. It necessarily implies that there is probation, and that there may be salvation, after death. It is fatal to the horrid dogma which commands all who enter hell to abandon every gleam of hope, utterly and forever. The symbolic force of the doctrine of Christ's descent and preaching in hell is this, as Guder says in his "Appearance of Christ among the Dead," that the deepest and most horrible depth of damnation is not too deep and horrible for the pitying love which wishes to save the lost: even into the veriest depth of hell reaches down the love of God, and his beatific call sounds to the most distant distances. There is no outermost darkness to which his heavenly and all conquering light cannot shine. The book which teaches that Christ went even into hell itself, to seek and to save that which was lost,

15 Corrodi, Ueber die Ewigkeit der Hollenetrafen. In den Beitragen zur Beforderung des Vernunft. Denk. n. s. w. heft vii. ss. 41-72.

does not teach that from the instant of death the fate of the wicked is irredeemably fixed.

Upon the whole, then, we reach the clear conclusion that the Christian Scriptures do not really declare the hopeless eternity of future punishment.16 They speak popularly, not scientifically, speak in metaphors which cannot be analyzed and reduced to metaphysical precision. The subject is left with fearful warnings in an impressive obscurity. There we must either leave it, in awe and faith, undecided; or, if not content to do that, we must examine and decide it on other grounds than those of traditional authority, and with other instruments than those of textual interpretation.

Let us next sift and weigh the arguments from reason by which the dogma of the eternity of future misery is respectively defended and assailed. The advocates of it have sought to support it by four positions, which are such entire assumptions that only a word will be requisite to expose each of them to logical rejection. First, it is said that sin is infinite and deserves an infinite penalty because it is an outrage against an infinite being.17 A more absurd perversion of logic than this, a more glaring violation of common sense, was never perpetrated. It directly reverses the facts and subverts the legitimate inference. Is the sin measured by the dignity of the lawgiver, or by the responsibility of the law breaker? Does justice heed the wrath of the offended, or the guilt of the offender? As well say that the eye of man is infinite because it looks out into infinite space, as affirm that his sin is infinite because committed against an infinite God. That man is finite, and all his acts finite, and consequently not in justice to be punished infinitely, is a plain statement of fact which compels assent. All else is empty quibbling, scholastic jugglery. The ridiculousness of the argument is amusingly apparent as presented thus in an old Miracle Play, wherein Justice is made to tell Mercy "That man, havinge offended God who is endlesse, His endlesse punchement therefore may nevyr seese."

The second device brought forward to sustain the doctrine in question is more ingenious, but equally arbitrary. It is based on the foreknowledge of God. He foresaw that the wicked, if allowed to live on earth immortally in freedom, would go on forever in a course of constant sin. They were therefore constructively guilty of all the sin which they would have committed; but he saved the world the ravages of their actual crimes by hurling them into hell beneath the endless penalty of their latent infinite guilt. In reply to those who argue thus, it is obvious to ask, whence did they learn all this? There is no such scheme drawn up or hinted in Scripture; and surely it is not within the possible discoveries of reason. Plainly, it is not a known premise legitimating a result, not a sound argument proving a conclusion: it is merely a conceit, devised to explain and fortify a theory already embraced from other considerations. It is an imaginative hypothesis without confirmation.

16 Bretschneider, in his Systematische Entwickelung aller in der Dogmatik vorkommenden Begriffe, gives the literature of this subject in a list of thirty six distinct works. Sect. 139, Ewig keit der Hollenstrafen.

17 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, pars iii. suppl. qu. 99, art. 1.

Thirdly, it has been said that future punishment will be endless because sin will be so. The evil soul, growing ever more evil, getting its habits of vice and passions of iniquity more deeply infixed, and surrounded in the infernal realm with all the incentives to wickedness, will become confirmed in depravity beyond all power of cure, and, sinning forever, be necessarily damned and tortured forever. The same objection holds to this argument as to the former. Its premises are daring assumptions beyond the province of our knowledge. They are assumptions, too, contrary to analogy, probability, the highest laws of humanity, and the goodness of God. Without freedom of will there cannot be sin; and those who retain moral freedom may reform, cease to do evil and learn to do good. There are invitations and opportunities to change from evil to good here: why not hereafter? The will is free now: what shall suddenly paralyze or annihilate that freedom when the soul leaves the body? Why may not such amazing revelations be made, such regenerating motives be brought to bear, in the spiritual world, as will soften the hardest, convince the stubbornest, and, sooner or later, transform and redeem the worst? It is true the law of sinful habit is dark and fearful; but it is frequently neutralized. The argument as the support of a positive dogma is void because itself only hypothetical.

Some have tried to prove eternal condemnation by an assumed necessity of moral gravitation. There is a great deal of loose and hasty talk afloat about the law of affinities distributing souls hereafter in fitted companies. Similar characters will spontaneously come together. The same qualities and grades of sympathy will coalesce, the unlike will fly apart. And so all future existence will be arranged in circles of dead equality on stagnant levels of everlasting hopelessness of change. The law of spiritual attraction is no such force as that, produces no such results. It is broken up by contrasts, changes, multiplicity of other interacting forces. We are not only drawn by affinity to those like ourselves, but often still more powerfully, with rebuking and redeeming effect, to those above us that we may become like them, to those beneath us that we may pity and help them. The law of affinity is not in moral beings a simple force necessitating an endless uniformity of state, but a complex of forces, sometimes mingling the unlike by stimulants of wedded similarity and contrast to bless and advance all, now punishing, now rewarding, but ever finally intended to redeem. Reasoning by sound analogy, the heavens and hells of the future state are not monotonous circles each filled with mutually reflecting personalities, but one fenceless spiritual world of distinctive, ever varying degrees, sympathetic and contrasted life, circulating freshness, variety of attractions and repulsions, divine advancement.

Finally, it is maintained by many that endless misery is the fate of the reprobate because such is the sovereign pleasure of God. This is no argument, but a desperate assertion. It virtually confesses that the doctrine cannot be defended by reason, but is to be thrown into the province of wilful faith. A host of gloomy theologians have taken this ground as the forlorn hope of their belief. The damned are eternally lost because that is the arbitrary decree of God. Those who thus abandon reason for dogmatic authority and trample on logic with mere reiterated assertion can only be met with the flat denial, such is not the arbitrary pleasure of God. Then, as far as argument is concerned, the controversy ends where it began.

These four hypotheses include all the attempted justifications of the doctrine of eternal misery that we have ever seen offered from the stand point of independent thought. We submit that, considered as proofs, they are utterly sophistical.

There are three great arguments in refutation of the endlessness of future punishment, as that doctrine is commonly held. The first argument is ethical, drawn from the laws of right; the second is theological, drawn from the attributes of God; the third is experimental, drawn from the principles of human nature. We shall subdivide these and consider them successively.

In the first place, we maintain that the popular doctrine of eternal punishment is unjust, because it overlooks the differences in the sins of men, launching on all whom it embraces one infinite penalty of undiscriminating damnation. The consistent advocates of the doctrine, the boldest creeds, unflinchingly avow this, and defend it by the plea that every sin, however trivial, is equally an offence against the law of the infinite God with the most terrible crime, and equally merits an infinite punishment. Thus, by a metaphysical quibble, the very basis of morals is overturned, and the child guilty of an equivocation through fear is put on a level with the pirate guilty of robbery and murder through cold blooded avarice and hate. In a hell where all are plunged in physical fire for eternity there are no degrees of retribution, though the degrees of evil and demerit are as numerous and various as the individuals. The Scriptures say, "Every man shall receive according to the deeds done in the body:" some "shall be beaten with many stripes," others "with few stripes."

The first principle of justice exact discrimination of judgment according to deeds and character is monstrously violated and all differences blotted out by the common dogma of hell. A better thought is shown in the old Persian legend which tells that God once permitted Zoroaster to accompany him on a visit to hell. The prophet saw many in grievous torments. Among the rest, he saw one who was deprived of his right foot. Asking the meaning of this, God replied, "Yonder sufferer was a king who in his whole life did but one kind action. Passing once near a dromedary which, tied up in a state of starvation, was vainly striving to reach some provender placed just beyond its utmost effort, the king with his right foot compassionately kicked the fodder within the poor beast's reach. That foot I placed in heaven: the rest of him is here." 18

Again: there is the grossest injustice in the first assumption or fundamental ground on which the theory we are opposing rests. That theory does not teach that men are actually damned eternally on account of their own personal sins, but on account of original sin: the eternal tortures of hell are the transmitted penalty hurled on all the descendants of Adam, save those who in some way avoid it, in consequence of his primal transgression. Language cannot characterize with too much severity, as it seems to us, the injustice, the immorality, involved in this scheme. The belief in a sin, called "original," entailed by one act of one person upon a whole immortal race of countless millions, dooming vast majorities of them helplessly to a hopeless torture prison, can rest only on a sleep of reason and a delirium of

18 Wilson's ed. of Mill's Hist. of British India, vol. i. p. 429, note.

conscience. Such a "sin" is no sin at all; and any penalty inflicted on it would not be the necessary severity of a holy God, but a species of gratuitous vengeance. For sin, by the very essence of ethics, is the free, intelligent, wilful violation of a law known to be right; and every punishment, in order to be just, must be the suffering deserved by the intentional fault, the personal evil, of the culprit himself. The doctrine before us reverses all this, and sends untold myriads to hell forever for no other sin than that of simply having been born children of humanity. Born totally depraved, hateful to God, helpless through an irresistible proclivity to sin and an ineradicable aversion to evangelical truth, and asked to save themselves, asked by a mockery like that of fettering men hand and foot, clothing them in leaden straitjackets, and then flinging them overboard, telling them not to drown! What justice, what justice, is here in this?

Thirdly, the profound injustice of this doctrine is seen in its making the alternative of so unutterably awful a doom hinge upon such trivial particulars and upon merely fortuitous circumstances. One is born of pious, orthodox parents, another of heretics or infidels: with no difference of merit due to them, one goes to heaven, the other goes to hell. One happens to form a friendship with an evangelical believer, another is influenced by a rationalist companion: the same fearful diversity of fate ensues. One is converted by a single sermon: if he had been ill that day, or had been detained from church by any other cause, his fated bed would have been made in hell, heaven closed against him forever. One says, "I believe in the Trinity of God, in the Deity of Christ;" and, dying, he goes to heaven. Another says, "I believe in the Unity of God and in the humanity of Christ:" he, dying, goes to hell. Of two children snatched away by disease when twenty four hours old, one has been baptized, the other not: the angels of heaven welcome that, the demons of hell clutch this. The doctrine of infant damnation, intolerably painful as it is, has been proclaimed thousands of times by authoritative teachers and by large parties in the Church, and is a logical sequence from the popular theology. It is not a great many years since people heard, it is said, the celebrated statement that "hell is paved with the skulls of infants not a span long!" Think of the everlasting bliss or misery of a helpless infant depending on the petty accident of whether it was baptized or not! There are hypothetical cases like the following: If one man had died a year earlier, when he was a saint, he would not have fallen from grace, and renounced his faith, and rolled in crimes, and sunk to hell. If another had lived a year later, he would have been smitten with conviction, and would have repented, and made his peace, and gone to heaven. To the everlasting loss of each, an eternity of bliss against an eternity of woe hung fatally poised on the time appointed for him to die. Oh how the bigoted pride, the exclusive dogmatism of self styled saints, self flatterers equally satisfied of their own election and of the rejection of almost everybody else, ought to sink and fade when they reflect on the slight chances, mere chances of time and place, by which the infinite contingency has been, or is to be, decided! They should heed the impregnable good sense and logic conveyed in the humane hearted poet's satirical humor when he advises such persons to

"Consider well, before, like Hurlothrumbo, They aim their clubs at any creed on earth, That by the simple accident of birth They might have been high priests to Mumbo Jumbo."

It is evidently but the rankest mockery of justice to suspend an infinite woe upon an accident out of the power of the party concerned.

Still further: there is a tremendous injustice even in that form of the doctrine of endless punishment, the most favorable of all, which says that no one is absolutely foreordained to hell, but that all are free, and that life is a fixed season of probation wherein the means of salvation are offered to all, and if they neglect or spurn them the fault is their own, and eternal pain their merited portion. The perfectly apparent inconsistency of this theory with known facts is fatal to it, since out of every generation there are millions on millions of infants, idiots, maniacs, heathen, within whose hearing or power the means of salvation by a personal appropriation of the atoning merit of Christ's blood were never brought; so that life to them is no scene of Christian probation. But, waiving that, the probation is not a fair one to anybody. If the indescribable horror of an eternal damnation be the consequence that follows a certain course while we are on trial in this life, then a knowledge of that fact in all its bearings ought to be given us, clear, explicit, beyond any possibility of mistake or doubt. Otherwise the probation is not fair. To place men in the world, as millions are constantly placed, beset by allurements of every sort within and without, led astray by false teachings and evil examples, exposed in ignorance, bewildered with uncertainties of conflicting doubts and surmises, either never hearing of the way of salvation at all, or hearing of it only in terms that seem absurd in themselves and unaccompanied by sufficient, if by any, proof, and then, if under these fearful hazards they waver from strict purity of heart, rectitude of conduct, or orthodoxy of belief, to condemn them to a world of everlasting agony, would be the very climax of cruelty, with no touch of mercy or color of right.

Beneath such a rule the universe should be shrouded in the blackness of despair, and God be thought of with a convulsive shudder. Such a "probation" would be only like that on which the Inquisitors put their victims who were studiously kept ignorant in their dungeons, waiting for the rack and the flame to be made ready. Few persons will deny that, as the facts now are, a good, intelligent, candid man may doubt the reality of an endless punishment awaiting men in hell. But if the doctrine be true, and he is on probation under it, is it fair that he should be left honestly in ignorance or doubt about it? No: if it be true, it ought to be burned into his brain and crushed into his soul with such terrific vividness and abiding constancy of impression as would deter him ever from the wrong path, keep him in the right. A distinguished writer has represented a condemned delinquent, suffering on, and still interminably on, in hell, thus complaining of the unfairness of his probation: "Oh, had it been possible for me to conceive even the most diminutive part of the weight and horror of this doom, I should have shrunk from every temptation to sin, with the most violent recoil."19

19 John Foster, Letter on the Eternity of Future Punishments.

If an endless hell is to be the lot of the sinner, he ought to have an infallible certainty of it, with all possible helps and incentives to avoid it. Such is not the case; and therefore, since God is just and generous, the doctrine is not true.

Finally, the injustice of the dogma of everlasting punishment is most emphatically shown by the fact that there is no sort of correspondence or possible proportion between the offence and the penalty, between the moment of sinning life and the eternity of suffering death. If a child were told to hold its breath thirty seconds, and, failing to do it, should be confined in a dark solitary dungeon for seventy years amidst loathsome horrors and speechless afflictions, and be frightfully scourged six times a day for that entire period, there would be just proportion nay, an inexpressibly merciful proportion between the offence and the punishment, in comparison with that which, being an absolutely infinite disproportion, does not really admit of any comparison, the sentence to an eternal abode in hell as a penalty for the worst kind and the greatest amount of crime a man could possibly crowd into a life of a thousand years. Think, then, of passing such a sentence on one who has struggled hard against temptation, and yielded but rarely, and suffered much, and striven to do as well as he could, and borne up courageously, with generous resolves and affections, and died commending his soul to God in hope.

"Fearfully fleet is this life," says one, "and yet in it eternal life is lost or won: profoundly wretched is this life, yet in it eternal bliss is lost or won." Weigh the words adequately, and say how improbable is the thought, and how terribly unjust. Perhaps there have already lived upon this earth, and died, and passed into the invisible world, two hundred thousand millions of men, the everlasting doom of every one of whom, it is imagined, was fixed unalterably during the momentary period of his mortal transit from cradle to grave. In respect of eternity, six thousand years and this duration must be reduced to threescore years and ten, since that is all that each generation enjoyed is the same as one hour. Suppose, now, that all these two hundred thousand millions of men were called into being at once; that they were placed on probation for one hour; that the result of their choice and action in that hour was to decide their irrevocable fate, actually forever, to ecstatic bliss or to ecstatic woe; that during that hour they were left, as far as clear and stable conviction goes, in utter ignorance and uncertainty as to the great realities of their condition, courted by opposing theories and modes of action; and that, when the clock of time knelled the close of that awful, that most evanescent hour, the roaring gulf of torture yawned, and its jaws of flame and blackness closed over ninety nine hundredths of them for eternity! That is a fair picture of the popular doctrine of temporal probation and eternal punishment, when examined in the light of the facts of human life. Of course, no man at this day, who is in his senses and thinks honestly upon the subject, can credit such a doctrine, unless indeed he believes that a lawless fiend sits on the throne of the universe and guides the helm of destiny. And lives there a man of unperverted soul who would not decidedly prefer to have no God rather than to have such a one? Ay, "Rather than so, come FATE into the list And champion us to the utterance."

Let us be atheists, and bow to mortal Chance, believe there is no pilot at all at the rudder of Creation's vessel, no channel before the prow, but the roaring breakers of despair to right and left, and the granite bluff of annihilation full in front!

In the next place, then, we argue against the doctrine of eternal damnation that it is incompatible with any worthy idea of the character of God. God is love; and love cannot consent to the useless torture of millions of helpless souls for eternity. The gross contradiction of the common doctrine of hell to the spirit of love is so obvious that its advocates, unable to deny or conceal it, have often positively proclaimed it, avowing that, in respect to the wicked, God is changed into a consuming fire full of hatred and vengeance. But that is unmitigated blasphemy. God is unchangeable, his very nature being disinterested, immutable goodness. The sufferings of the wicked are of their own preparation. If a pestilential exhalation is drawn from some decaying substance, it is not the fault of any alteration in the sunlight. But a Christian writer assures us that when "the damned are packed like brick in a kiln, so bound that they cannot move a limb nor even an eyelid, God shall blow the fires of hell through them for ever and ever."

And another writer says, "All in God is turned into fury: in hell he draws out into the field all his forces, all his attributes, whereof wrath is the leader and general."20 Such representations may be left without a comment. Every enlightened mind will instantly reject with horror the doctrine which necessitates a conception of God like that here pictured forth. God is a being of infinite forgiveness and magnanimity. To the wandering sinner, even while a great way off, his arms are open, and his inviting voice, penetrating the farthest abysses, says, "Return." His sun shines and his rain falls on the fields of the unjust and unthankful. What is it, the instant mortals pass the line of death, that shall transform this Divinity of yearning pity and beneficence into a devil of relentless hate and cruelty? It cannot be. We shall find him dealing towards us in eternity as he does here. An eminent theologian says, "If mortal men kill the body temporally in their anger, it is like the immortal God to damn the soul eternally in his." "God holds sinners in his hands over the mouth of hell as so many spiders; and he is dreadfully provoked, and he not only hates them, but holds them in utmost contempt, and he will trample them beneath his feet with inexpressible fierceness, he will crush their blood out, and will make it fly so that it will sprinkle his garments and stain all his raiment."21 Oh, ravings and blasphemies of theological bigotry, blinded with old creeds, inflamed with sectarian hate, soaked in the gall of bitterness, encompassed by absurd delusions, you know not what you say!

A daring writer of modern times observes that God can never say from the last tribunal, in any other than a limited and metaphorical sense, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire," because that would not be doing as he would be done by. Saving the appearance of irreverence, we maintain his assertion to be just, based on impregnable morality. A recent religious poet describes Jesus, on descending into hell after his crucifixion,

20 For these and several other quotations we are indebted to the Rev. T. J. Sawyer's work, entitled "Endless Punishment: its Origin and Grounds Examined."

21 Edwards's works, vol. vii. p. 499.

meeting Judas, and when he saw his pangs and heard his stifled sobs, "Pitying, Messiah gazed, and had forgiven, But Justice her eternal bar opposed." 22

The instinctive sentiment is worthy of Jesus, but the deliberate thought is worthy of Calvin. Why is it so calmly assumed that God cannot pardon, and that therefore sinners must be given over to endless pains? By what proofs is so tremendous a conclusion supported? Is it not a gratuitous fiction of theologians? The exemplification of God's character and conduct given in the spirit, teachings, and deeds of Christ is full of a free mercy, an eager charity that rushes forward to forgive and embrace the sinful and wretched wanderers. He is a very different being whom the evangelist represents saying of Jesus, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," from Him whom Professor Park describes "drawing his sword on Calvary and smiting down his Son!"

Why may not pardon from unpurchased grace be vouchsafed as well after death as before? What moral conditions alter the case then? Ah! it is only the metaphysical theories of the theologians that have altered the case in their fancies and made it necessary for them to limit probation. The attributes of God are laws, his modes of action are the essentialities of his being, the same in all the worlds of boundless extension and all the ages of endless duration. How far some of the theologians have perverted the simplicity of the gospel, or rather how utterly they have strayed from it, may be seen when we remember that Christ said concerning little children, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven," and then compare with this declaration such a statement as this: "Reprobate infants are vipers of vengeance which Jehovah will hold over hell in the tongs of his wrath, till they writhe up and cast their venom in his face." We deliberately assert that no depraved, insane, pagan imagination ever conceived of a fiend malignant and horrible enough to be worthily compared with this Christian conception of God. Edwards repeatedly says, in his two sermons on the "Punishment of the Wicked" and "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," "You cannot stand an instant before an infuriated tiger even: what, then, will you do when God rushes against you in all his wrath?" Is this Christ's Father?

The God we worship is "the Father of lights, with whom there is neither variableness nor shadow of turning, from whom cometh down every good and every perfect gift." It is the Being referred to by the Savior when he said, in exultant trust and love, "I am not alone; for the Father is with me." It is the infinite One to whom the Psalmist says, "Though I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there." If God is in hell, there must be mercy and hope there, some gleams of alleviation and promise there, surely; even as the Lutheran creed says that "early on Easter morning, before his resurrection, Christ showed himself to the damned in hell." If God is in hell, certainly it must be to soothe, to save. "Oh, no," says the popular theologian. Let us quote his words. "Why is God here? To keep the tortures of the damned freshly plied, and to see that no one ever escapes!" Can the climax of horror and

22 Lord, Christ in Hades.

blasphemy any further go? How much more reasonable, more moral and Christ like, to say, with one of the best authors of our time,

"What hell may be I know not: this I know: I cannot lose the presence of the Lord: One arm humility takes hold upon His dear Humanity; the other love Clasps his Divinity: so, where I go He goes; and better fire wall'd Hell with him Than golden gated Paradise without."

The irreconcilableness of the common doctrine of endless misery with any worthy idea of God is made clear by a process of reasoning whose premises are as undeniable as its logic is irrefragable and its conclusion consolatory. God is infinite justice and goodness. His purpose in the creation, therefore, must be the diffusion and triumph of holiness and blessedness. God is infinite wisdom and power. His design, therefore, must be fulfilled. Nothing can avail to thwart the ultimate realization of all his intentions. The rule of his omnipotent love pervades infinitude and eternity as a shining leash of law whereby he holds every child of his creation in ultimate connection with his throne, and will sooner or later bring even the worst soul to a returning curve from the career of its wildest orbit. In the realm and under the reign of a paternal and omnipotent God every being must be salvable. Remorse itself is a recoil which may fling the penitent into the lap of forgiving love. Any different thought appears narrow, cruel, heathen. The blackest fiend that glooms the midnight air of hell, bleached through the merciful purgation of sorrow and loyalty, may become a white angel and be drawn into heaven.

Lavater writes of himself, and the same is true of many a good man, "I embraced in my heart all that is called man, past, present, and future times and nations, the dead, the damned, even Satan. I presented them all to God with the warmest wishes that he would have mercy upon all." This is the true spirit of a good man. And is man better than his Maker? We will answer that question, and leave this head of the discussion, by presenting an Oriental apologue.

God once sat on his inconceivable throne, and far around him, rank after rank, angels and archangels, seraphim and cherubim, resting on their silver wings and lifting their dazzling brows, rose and swelled, with the splendors of an illimitable sea of immortal beings, gleaming and fluctuating to the remotest borders of the universe. The anthem of their praise shook the pillars of the creation, and filled the vault of heaven with a pulsing flood of harmony. When, as they closed their hymn, stole up, faint heard, as from some most distant region of all space, in dim accents humbly rising, a responsive "Amen." God asked Gabriel, "Whence comes that Amen?" The hierarchic peer replied, "It rises from the damned in hell." God took, from where it hung above his seat, the key that unlocks the forty thousand doors of hell, and, giving it to Gabriel, bade him go release them. On wings of light sped the enraptured messenger, rescued the millions of the lost, and, just as they were, covered all over with the traces of their sin, filth, and woe, brought them straight up into the midst of heaven. Instantly they were transformed, clothed in robes of glory, and placed next to the throne; and henceforth, for evermore, the dearest strain to God's ear, of all the celestial music, was that borne by the choir his grace had ransomed from hell. And, because there is no envy or other selfishness in heaven, this promotion sent but new thrills of delight and gratitude through the heights and depths of angelic life.

We come now to the last class of reasons for disbelieving the dogma of eternal damnation, namely, those furnished by the principles of human nature and the truths of human experience. The doctrine, as we think can be clearly shown, is literally incredible to the human mind and literally intolerable to the human heart. In the first place, it is, viewed in the abstract, absolutely incredible because it is inconceivable: no man can possibly grasp and appreciate the idea. The nearest approximation to it ever made perhaps is in De Quincey's gorgeous elaboration of the famous Hindu myth of an enormous rock finally worn away by the brushing of a gauze veil; and that is really no approximation at all, since an incommensurable chasm always separates the finite and the infinite. John Foster says, "It is infinitely beyond the highest archangel's faculty to apprehend a thousandth part of the horror of the doom to eternal damnation." The Buddhists, who believe that the severest sentence passed on the worst sinner will be brought to an end and his redemption be attained, use the following illustration of the staggering periods that will first elapse. A small yoke is thrown into the ocean and borne about in every direction by the various winds. Once in a hundred thousand years a blind tortoise rises to the surface of the water. Will the time ever come when that tortoise shall so rise up that its neck shall enter the hole of the yoke? It may, but the time required cannot be told; and it is equally difficult for the unwise man, who has entered one of the great hells, to obtain deliverance. There is a remarkable specimen of the attempt to set forth the idea of endless misery, by Suso, a mystic preacher who flourished several centuries ago. It runs thus. "O eternity, what art thou? Oh, end without end! O father, and mother, and all whom we love! May God be merciful unto you for evermore! for we shall see you no more to love you; we must be separated forever! O separation, everlasting separation, how painful art thou! Oh, the wringing of hands! Oh, sighing, weeping, and sobbing, unceasing howling and lamenting, and yet never to be pardoned! Give us a millstone, says the damned, as large as the whole earth, and so wide in circumference as to touch the sky all around, and let a little bird come in a hundred thousand years, and pick off a small particle of the stone, not larger than the tenth part of a grain of millet, and after another hundred thousand years let him come again, so that in ten hundred thousand years he would pick off as much as a grain of millet, we wretched sinners would desire nothing but that thus the stone might have an end, and thus our pains also; yet even that cannot be."23 But, after all the struggles of reason and all the illustrations of laboring imagination, the meaning of the phrase "eternal suffering in hell" remains remote, dim, unrealized, an abstraction in words. If we could adequately apprehend it, if its full significance should burst upon us, as sometimes in fearful dreams the spaceless, timeless, phantasmal, reeling sense of

23 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 210.

the infinite seems to be threatening to break into the brain, an annihilating shudder would seize and destroy the soul.

We say, therefore, that the doctrine of the eternity of future punishment is not believed as an intellectually conceived truth, because that is a metaphysical impossibility. But more: we affirm, in spite of the general belief in it publicly professed, that it is actually held by hardly any one as a practical vivid belief even within the limits wherein, as an intellectual conception, it is possible. When intellect and imagination do not fail, heart and conscience do, with sickened faintness and convulsive protest. In his direful poem on the Last Day, Young makes one of the condemned vainly beg of God to grant "This one, this slender, almost no, request: When I have wept a thousand lives away, When torment is grown weary of its prey, When I have raved of anguish'd years in fire Ten thousand thousands, let me then expire."

Such a thought, when confronted with any generous holy sentiment or with any worthy conception of the Divine character, is practically incredible. The men all around us in whose Church creed such a doctrine is written down do not truly believe it. "They delude themselves," as Martineau well says, "with the mere fancy and image of a belief. The death of a friend who departs from life in heresy affects them in the same way as the loss of another whose creed was unimpeachable: while the theoretic difference is infinite, the practical is virtually nothing." Who that had a child, parent, wife, brother, or other precious friend, condemned to be roasted to death by a slow fire, would not be frantic with agony? But there are in the world literally millions on millions, some of whose nearest and dearest ones have died under circumstances which, by their professed creeds, can leave no doubt that they must roast in the fires of hell in an anguish unutterably fiercer, and for eternity, and yet they go about as smilingly, engage in the battle for money, in the race for fame, in all the vain shows and frivolous pleasures of life, as eagerly and as gayly as others. How often do we see the literal truth of this exemplified! It is clear they do not believe in the dogma to whose technical terms they formally subscribe.

A small proportion of its professors do undeniably believe the doctrine so far as it can be sanely believed; and accordingly the world is to them robed in a sable shroud, and life is an awful mockery, under a flashing surface of sports concealing a bottomless pit of horror. Every observing person has probably known some few in his life who, in a degree, really believed the common notions concerning hell, and out of whom, consequently, all geniality, all bounding impulses, all magnanimous generosities, were crushed, and their countenances wore the perpetual livery of mourning, despair, and misanthropy. We will quote the confessions of two persons who may stand as representatives of the class of sincere believers in the doctrine. The first is a celebrated French preacher of a century and a half ago, the other a very eminent American divine of the present day. Saurin says, in his great sermon on Hell, "I sink under the weight of this subject, and I find in the thought a mortal poison which diffuseth itself into every period of my life, rendering society tiresome, nourishment insipid, pleasure disgustful, and life itself a cruel bitter." Albert Barnes writes, "In the distress and anguish of my own spirit, I confess I see not one ray to disclose to me the reason why man should suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects that has given a moment's ease to my tortured mind. It is all dark dark dark to my soul; and I cannot disguise it."

Such a state of mind is the legitimate result of an endeavor sincerely to grasp and hold the popularly professed belief. So often as that endeavor reaches a certain degree of success, and the idea of an eternal hell is reduced from its vagueness to an embraced conception, the over fraught heart gives way, the brain, stretched on too high a tension, reels, madness sets in, and one more case is added to that list of maniacs from religious causes which, according to the yearly reports of insane asylums, forms so large a class. Imagine what a vast and sudden change would come over the spirit and conduct of society if nineteen twentieths of Christendom believed that at the end of a week a horrible influx of demons, from some insurgent region, would rush into our world and put a great majority of our race to death in excruciating tortures! But the doctrine of future punishment professed by nineteen twentieths of Christendom is, if true, an evil incomparably worse than that, though every element of its dreadfulness were multiplied by millions beyond the power of numeration; and yet all goes on as quietly, the most of these fancied believers live as chirpingly, as if heaven were sure for everybody! Of course in their hearts they do not believe the terrific formula which drops so glibly from their tongues.

Again: it is a fatal objection to the doctrine in question that if it be true it must destroy the happiness of the saved and fill all heaven with sympathetic woe. Jesus teaches that "there is joy in heaven over every sinner that repenteth." By a moral necessity, then, there is sorrow in heaven over the wretched, lost soul. That sorrow, indeed, may be alleviated, if not wholly quenched, by the knowledge that every retributive pang is remedial, and that God's glorious design will one day be fully crowned in the redemption of the last prodigal. But what shall solace or end it if they know that hell's borders are to be enlarged and to rage with avenging misery forever? The good cannot be happy in heaven if they are to see the ascending smoke and hear the resounding shrieks of a hell full of their brethren, the children of a common humanity, among whom are many of their own nearest relatives and dearest friends.

True, a long list of Christian writers may be cited as maintaining that this is to be a principal element in the felicity of the redeemed, gloating over the tortures of the damned, singing the song of praise with redoubled emphasis as they see their parents, their children, their former bosom companions, writhing and howling in the fell extremities of torture. Thomas Aquinas says, "That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more richly, a perfect sight of the punishment of the damned is granted to them."24 Especially did the Puritans seem to revel in this idea, that "the joys of the blessed were to be deepened and sharpened by constant contrast with the sufferings of the damned." One of them thus expresses the delectable thought: "The sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever, as a sense of the opposite misery always increases the relish of any pleasure."

24 Summa, pars iii., Suppl. Qu. 93, art. i.

But perhaps Hopkins caps the climax of the diabolical pyramid of these representations, saying of the wicked, "The smoke of their torment shall ascend up in the sight of the blessed for ever and ever, and serve, as a most clear glass always before their eyes, to give them a bright and most affecting view. This display of the Divine character will be most entertaining to all who love God, will give them the highest and most ineffable pleasure. Should the fire of this eternal punishment cease, it would in a great measure obscure the light of heaven and put an end to a great part of the happiness and glory of the blessed."25 That is to say, in plain terms, the saints, on entering their final state of bliss in heaven, are converted into a set of unmitigated fiends, out sataning Satan, finding their chief delight in forever comparing their own enjoyments with the pangs of the damned, extracting morsels of surpassing relish from every convulsion or shriek of anguish they see or hear. It is all an exquisite piece of gratuitous horror arbitrarily devised to meet a logical exigency of the theory its contrivers held. When charged that the knowledge of the infinite woe of their friends in hell must greatly affect the saints, the stern old theologians, unwilling to recede an inch from their dogmas, had the amazing hardihood to declare that, so far from it, on the contrary their wills would so blend with God's that the contemplation of this suffering would be a source of ecstasy to them. It is doubly a blank assumption of the most daring character, first assuming, by an unparalleled blasphemy, that God himself will take delight in the pangs of his creatures, and secondly assuming, by a violation of the laws of human nature and of every principle of morals, that the elect will do so too. In this world a man actuated by such a spirit would be styled a devil. On entering heaven, what magic shall work such a demoniacal change in him? There is not a word, direct or indirect, in the Scriptures to warrant the dreadful notion; nor is there any reasonable explanation or moral justification of it given by any of its advocates, or indeed conceivable. The monstrous hypothesis cannot be true. Under the omnipotent, benignant government of a paternal God, each change of character in his chosen children, as they advance, must be for the better, not for the worse.

We once heard a father say, running his fingers the while among the golden curls of his child's hair, "If I were in heaven, and saw my little daughter in hell, should not I be rushing down there after her?" There spoke the voice of human nature; and that love cannot be turned to hatred in heaven, but must grow purer and intenser there. The doctrine which makes the saints pleased with contemplating the woes of the damned, and even draw much of their happiness from the contrast, is the deification of the absolute selfishness of a demon. Human nature, even when left to its uncultured instincts, is bound to far other and nobler things. Radbod, one of the old Scandinavian kings, after long resistance, finally consented to be baptized. After he had put one foot into the water, he asked the priest if he should meet his forefathers in heaven. Learning that they, being unbaptized pagans, were victims of endless misery, he drew his foot back, and refused the rite, choosing to be with his brave ancestors in hell rather than to be in heaven with the Christian priests. And, speaking from the stand point of the highest refinement of feeling and virtue, who that has a heart in his

25 Park, Memoir of Hopkins, pp. 201, 202.

bosom would not say, "Heaven can be no heaven to me, if I am to look down on the quenchless agonies of all I have loved here!" Is it not strictly true that the thought that even one should have endless woe "Would cast a shadow on the throne of God And darken heaven"?

If a monarch, possessing unlimited power over all the earth, had condemned one man to be stretched on a rack and be freshly plied with incessant tortures for a period of fifty years, and if everybody on earth could hear his terrible shrieks by day and night, though they were themselves all, with this sole exception, blessed with perfect happiness, would not the whole human race, from Spitzbergen to Japan, from Rio Janeiro to Liberia, rise in a body and go to implore the king's clemency for the solitary victim? So, if hell had but one tenant doomed to eternal anguish, a petition reaching from Sirius to Alcyone, signed by the universe of moral beings, borne by a convoy of angels representing every star in space, would be laid and unrolled at the foot of God's throne, and He would read thereon this prayer: "FORGIVE HIM, AND RELEASE HIM, WE BESEECH THEE, O GOD." And can it be that every soul in the universe is better than the Maker and Father of the universe?

The popular doctrine of eternal torment threatening nearly all our race is refuted likewise by the impossibility of any general observance of the obligations morally and logically consequent from it. In the first place, as the world is constituted, and as life goes on, the great majority of men are upon the whole happy, evidently were meant to be happy. But every believer of the doctrine in debate is bound to be unutterably wretched. If he has any gleam of generous sentiment or touch of philanthropy in his bosom, if he is not a frozen petrifaction of selfishness or an incarnate devil, how can he look on his family, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens, fellow beings, in the light of his faith seeing them quivering over the dizzy verge of a blind probation and momentarily dropping into the lake of fire and brimstone that burns forever, how can he do this without being ceaselessly stung with wretchedness and crushed with horror by the perception? For a man who appreciatingly believes that hell is directly under our meadows, streets, and homes, and that nine tenths of the dead are in it, and that nine tenths of the living soon will be, for such a man to be happy and jocose is as horrible as it would be for a man, occupying the second story of a house, to light it up brilliantly with gas, and make merry with his friends, eating tidbits, sipping wine, and tripping it on the light fantastic toe to the strains of gay music, while, immediately under him, men, women, and children, including his own parents and his own children, were stretched on racks, torn with pincers, lacerated with surgical instruments, cauterized, lashed with whips of fire, their half suppressed shrieks and groans audibly rising through the floor!

Secondly, if the doctrine be true, then all unnecessary worldly enterprises, labors, and studies should at once cease. One moment on earth, and then, accordingly as we spend that moment, an eternity in heaven or in hell: in heaven, if we succeed in placating God by a sound belief and ritual proprieties; in hell, if we are led astray by philosophy, nature, and the attractions of life! On these suppositions, what time have we for any thing but reciting our creed, meditating on the atonement, and seeking to secure an interest for ourselves with God by flouting at our carnal reason, praying in church, and groaning, "Lord, Lord, have mercy on us miserable sinners"? What folly, what mockery, to be searching into the motions of the stars, and the occult forces of matter, and the other beautiful mysteries of science! There will be no astronomy in hell, save vain speculations as to the distance between the nadir of the damned and the zenith of the saved; no chemistry in hell, save the experiments of infinite wrath in distilling new torture poisons in the alembics of memory and depositing fresh despair sediments in the crucibles of hope. If Calvin's doctrine be true, let no book be printed, save the "Westminster Catechism;" no calculation be ciphered, save how to "solve the problem of damnation;" no picture be painted, save "pictures of hell;" no school be supported, save "schools of theology;" no business be pursued, save "the business of salvation." What have men who are in imminent peril, who are in truth almost infallibly sure, of being eternally damned the next instant, what have they to do with science, literature, art, social ambition, or commerce? Away with them all! Lures of the devil to snare souls are they! The world reflecting from every corner the lurid glare of hell, who can do any thing else but shudder and pray? "Who could spare any attention for the vicissitudes of cotton and the price of shares, for the merits of the last opera and the bets upon the next election, if the actors in these things were really swinging in his eye over such a verge as he affects to see?"

Thirdly, those who believe the popular theory on this subject are bound to live in cheap huts, on bread and water, that they may devote to the sending of missionaries among the heathen every cent of money they can get beyond that required for the bare necessities of life. If our neighbor were perishing of hunger at our door, it would be our duty to share with him even to the last crust we had. How much more, then, seeing millions of our poor helpless brethren sinking ignorantly into the eternal fires of hell, are we bound to spare no possible effort until the conditions of salvation are brought within the reach of every one! An American missionary to China said, in a public address after his return, "Fifty thousand a day go down to the fire that is not quenched. Six hundred millions more are going the same road. Should you not think at least once a day of the fifty thousand who that day sink to the doom of the lost?" The American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions say, "To send the gospel to the heathen is a work of great exigency. Within the last thirty years a whole generation of five hundred millions have gone down to eternal death." Again: the same Board say, in their tract entitled "The Grand Motive to Missionary Effort," "The heathen are involved in the ruins of the apostasy, and are expressly doomed to perdition. Six hundred millions of deathless souls on the brink of hell! What a spectacle!" How a man who thinks the heathen are thus sinking to hell by wholesale through ignorance of the gospel can live in a costly house, crowded with luxuries and splendors, spending every week more money on his miserable body than he gives in his whole life to save the priceless souls for which he says Christ died, is a problem admitting but two solutions. Either his professed faith is an unreality to him, or else he is as selfish as a demon and as hard hearted as the nether millstone. If he really believed the doctrine, and had a human heart, he must feel it to be his duty to deny himself every indulgence and give his whole fortune and earnings to the missionary fund. And when he had given all else, he ought to give himself, and go to pagan lands, proclaiming the means of grace until his last breath. If he does not that, he is inexcusable.

Should he attempt to clear himself of this obligation by adopting the theory of predestination, which asserts that all men were unconditionally elected from eternity, some to heaven, others to hell, so that no effort can change their fate, logical consistency reduces him to an alternative more intolerable in the eyes of conscience and common sense than the other was. For by this theory the gates of freedom and duty are hoisted, and the dark flood of antinomian consequences rushes in. All things are fated. Let men yield to every impulse and wish. The result is fixed. We have nothing to do. Good or evil, virtue or crime, alter nothing.

Fourthly, if the common doctrine of eternal damnation be true, then surely no more children should be brought into the world: it is a duty to let the race die out and cease. He who begets a child, forcing him to run the fearful risk of human existence, with every probability of being doomed to hell at the close of earth, commits a crime before whose endless consequences of horror the guilt of fifty thousand deliberate murders would be as nothing. For, be it remembered, an eternity in hell is an infinite evil; and therefore the crime of thrusting such a fate on a single child, with the unasked gift of being, is a crime admitting of no just comparison. Rather than populate an everlasting hell with human vipers and worms, a hell whose fires, alive and wriggling with ghastly shapes of iniquity and anguish, shall swell with a vast accession of fresh recruits from every generation, rather than this, let the sacred lights on the marriage altar go out, no more bounding forms of childhood be seen in cottage or hall, the race grow old, thin out, and utterly perish, all happy villages be overgrown, all regal cities crumble down, and this world roll among the silent stars henceforth a globe of blasted deserts and rank wildernesses, resonant only with the shrieks of the wind, the yells of wild beasts, and the thunder's crash.

Fifthly, there is one more conclusion of moral duty deducible from the prevalent theory of infinite torment. It is this. God ought not to have permitted Adam to have any children. Let us not seem presumptuous and irreverent in speaking thus. We are merely reasoning on the popular theory of the theologians, not on any supposition of our own or on any truth; and by showing the absurdity and blasphemy of the moral consequences and duties flowing from that theory, the absurdity, blasphemy, and incredibility of the theory itself appear. We are not responsible for the irreverence, but they are responsible for it who charge God with the iniquity which we repel from his name. If the sin of Adam must entail total depravity and an infinite penalty of suffering on all his posterity, who were then certainly innocent because not in existence, then, we ask, why did not God cause the race to stop with Adam, and so save all the needless and cruel woe that would otherwise surely be visited on the lengthening line of generations? Or, to go still further back, why did he not, foreseeing Adam's fall, refrain from creating even him? There was no necessity laid on God of creating Adam. No positive evil would have been done by omitting to create him. An infinite evil, multiplied by the total number of the lost, was done by creating him. Why, then, was he not left in peaceful nonentity? On the Augustinian theory we see no way of escaping this awful dilemma. Who can answer the question which rises to heaven from the abyss of the damned? "Father of mercies, why from silent earth Didst thou awake and curse me into birth, Push into being a reverse of thee, And animate a clod with misery?"

Satan is a sort of sublime Guy Fawkes, lurking in the infernal cellar, preparing the train of that stupendous Gunpowder Plot by which he hopes, on the day of judgment, to blow up the world parliament of unbelievers with a general petard of damnation. Will the King connive at this nefarious prowler and permit him to carry out his design?

The doctrine of eternal damnation, as it has prevailed in the Christian Church, appears to the natural man so unreasonable, immoral, and harrowingly frightful, when earnestly contemplated, that there have always been some who have shrunk from its representations and sought to escape its conclusions. Many of its strongest advocates in every age have avowed it to be a fearful mystery, resting on the inscrutable sovereignty of God, and beyond the power of man's faculties to explain and justify. The dogma has been eluded in two ways. Some have believed in the annihilation of the wicked after they should have undergone just punishment proportioned to their sins. This supposition has had a considerable number of advocates. It was maintained, among others, by Arnobius, at the close of the third century, by the Socini, by Dr. Hammond, and by some of the New England divines.26 All that need be said in opposition to it is that it is an arbitrary device to avoid the intolerable horror of the doctrine of endless misery, unsupported by proof, extremely unsatisfactory in many of its bearings, and really not needed to achieve the consummation desired.

Others have more wisely maintained that all will finally be saved: however severely and long they may justly suffer, they will at last all be mercifully redeemed by God and admitted to the common heaven. Defenders of the doctrine of ultimate universal salvation have appeared from the beginning of Christian history.27 During the last century and a half their numbers have rapidly increased.28 A dignified and influential class of theologians, represented by such names as Tillotson. Bahrdt, and Less, say that the threats of eternal punishment, in the Scriptures, are exaggerations to deter men from sin, and that God will not really execute them, but will mercifully abate and limit them.29 Another class of theologians, much more free, consistent, and numerous, base their reception of the doctrine of final restoration on figurative explanations of the scriptural language seemingly opposed to it, and on arguments drawn from the character of God, from reason, and from morals. This view of the subject is spreading fast. All independent, genial, and cultivated thought naturally leads to it. The central principles of the gospel necessitate it. The spirit of the age cries for it. Before it the old antagonistic dogma must fall and perish from respect. Dr. Spring says, in reference to the hopeless condemnation of the wicked to hell, "It puts in requisition all our confidence

26 This theory bas been resuscitated and advocated within a few years by quite a number of writers, among whom may be specified the Rev. C. F. Hudson, author of "Debt and Grace," a learned, earnest, and able work, pervaded by an admirable spirit.

27 Ballou, Ancient History of Universalism.

28 Whittemore, Modern History of Universalism.

29 Knapp, Christian Theology, Woods's translation, sect. 158.

in God to justify this procedure of his government."30

A few devout and powerful minds have sought to avoid the gross horrors and unreasonableness of the usual view of this subject, by changing the mechanical and arithmetical values of the terms for spiritual and religious values. They give the word "eternity" a qualitative instead of a quantitative meaning. The everlasting woe of the damned consists not in mechanical inflictions of torture and numerical increments of duration, but in spiritual discord, alienation from God, a wretched state of being, with which times and spaces have nothing to do.31

How much better were it for the advocates of the popular theory, instead of forcing their moral nature to bear up against the awful perplexities and misgivings as to the justice and goodness of God necessarily raised in them whenever they really face the dark problems of their system of faith,32 resolutely to ask whether there are any such problems in the actual government of God, or anywhere else, except in their own "Bodies of Divinity"! It is an extremely unfortunate and discreditable evasion of responsibility when any man, especially when a teacher, takes for granted the received formularies handed down to him, and, instead of honestly analyzing their genuine significance and probing their foundations to see if they be good and true, spends his genius in contriving excuses and supports for them.

It is the very worst policy at this day to strive to fasten the dogma of eternal misery to the New Testament. If both must be taken or rejected together, an alternative which we emphatically deny, what sincere and earnest thinker now, whose will is unterrifiedly consecrated to truth, can be expected to hesitate long? The doctrine is sustained in repute at present principally for two reasons. First, because it has been transmitted to us from the Church of the past as the established and authoritative doctrine. It is yet technically current and popular because it has been so: that is, it retains its place simply by right of possession. The question ought to be sincerely and universally raised whether it is true or false. Then it will swiftly lose its prestige and disappear. Secondly, it is upheld and patronized by many as a useful instrument for frightening the people and through their fears deterring them from sin. We have ourselves heard clergymen of high reputation say that it would never do to admit, before the people, that there is any chance whatever of penitence and salvation beyond the grave, because they would be sure to abuse the hope as a sort of permission to indulge and continue in sin. Thus to ignore the only solemn and worthy standard of judging an abstract doctrine, namely, Is it a truth or a falsehood? and put it solely on grounds of working expediency, is disgraceful, contemptible, criminal. Watts exposes with well merited rebuke a gross instance of pious frail in Burnet, who advised preachers to teach the eternity of future punishment whether they believed it or not.33 It is by such a course that error and superstition reign, that truckling conformity, intellectual disloyalty, moral indifference, vice, and infidelity, abound. It is practical atheism, debauchery of conscience, and genuine spiritual

30 Glory of Christ, vol. ii. p. 268.

31 Lange, Positive Dogmatik, sect. 131: Die Aeonen der Verdammten. Maurice, Theological Essays: Future Punishment.

32 See Beecher's Conflict of Ages, b. ii. ch. 4, 13.

33 World to Come, Disc. XIII.

death. Besides, the course we are characterizing is actually as inexpedient in practice as it is wrong in theory. Experience and observation show it to be as pernicious in its result as it is immoral in its origin. Is a threat efficacious over men in proportion to its intrinsic terror, or in proportion as it is personally felt and feared by them? Do the menacing penalties of a sin deter a man from it in proportion to their awfulness, or in proportion to his belief in their reality and unavoidableness? Eternal misery would be a threat of infinite frightfulness, if it were realized and believed. But it is incredible. Some reject it with indignation and an impetuous recoil that sends them much too far towards antinomianism. Others let it float in the spectral background of imagination, the faint reflection of a disagreeable and fading dream. To all it is an unreality. An earnest belief in a sure retribution exactly limited to desert must be far more effective. If an individual had a profound conviction that for every sin he committed he must suffer a million centuries of inexpressible anguish, realizing that thought, would he commit a sin?

If he cannot appreciate that enormous penalty, much less can he the infinite one, which is far more likely to shade off and blur out into a vague and remote nothing. Truth is an expression of God's will, which we are bound exclusively to accept and employ regardless of consequences. When we do that, God, the author of truth, is himself solely responsible for the consequences. But when, thinking we can devise something that will work better, we use some theory of our own, we are responsible for the consequences. Let every one beware how he ventures to assume that dread responsibility. It is surely folly as well as sin. For nothing can work so well as truth, the simple, calm, living truth, which is a chime in the infinite harmony of morals and things. It is only the morbid melodramatic tastes and incompetencies of an unfinished culture that make men think otherwise. The magnificent poetry of the day of judgment an audience of five hundred thousand millions gathered in one throng as the Judge rises to pronounce the last oration over a dissolving universe takes possession of the fancy, and people conceive it so vividly, and are so moved by it, that they think they see it to be true.

Grant for a moment the truth of the conception of hell as a physical world of fiery torture full of the damned. Suppose the scene of probation over, hell filled with its prisoners shut up, banished and buried in the blackest deeps of space. Can it be left there forever? Can it be that the roar of its furnace shall rage on, and the wail of the execrable anguish ascend, eternally? Endeavor to realize in some faint degree what these questions mean, and then answer. If anybody can find it in his heart or in his head to say yes, and can gloat over the idea, and wish to have it continually brandished in terrorem over the heads of the people, one feels impelled to declare that he of all men the most needs to be converted to the Christian spirit. An unmitigated hell of depravity, pain, and horror, would be Satan's victory and God's defeat; for the very wish of a Satanic being must be for the everlasting prevalence of sin and wretchedness. As above the weltering hosts of the lost, each dreadful second, the iron clock of hell ticked the thunder word "eternity," how would the devil on his sulphurous dais shout in triumph! But if such a world of fire, crowded with the writhing damned, ever existed at all, could it exist forever?

Could the saved be happy and passive in heaven when the muffled shrieks of their brethren, faint from the distance, fell on their ears? In tones of love and pity that would melt the very mountains, they would plead with God to pardon and free the lost. Many a mourning lover would realize the fable of the Thracian poet who wandered into Hades searching for his Eurydice; many a heroic son would emulate the legend of the Grecian god who burst through the iron walls of Tartarus and rescued his mother, the unfortunate Semele, and led her in triumph up to heaven.

Could the angels be contented when they contemplated the far off lurid orb and knew the agonies that fed its conscious conflagration? Their gentle bosoms would be racked with commiserating pangs, they would fly down and hover around that anguished world, to moisten its parched tongues with the dropping of their sympathetic tears and to cool its burning brows with the fanning of their wings.

Could Christ be satisfied? he who once was rich but for our sakes became poor? he whose loving soul breathed itself forth in the tender words, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest"? he who poured his blood on Judea's awful summit, be satisfied? Not until he had tried the efficacy of ten thousand fresh crucifixions, on as many new Calvaries, would he rest.

Could God suffer it? God! with the full rivers of superfluous bliss rolling around thy throne, couldst thou look down and hear thy creatures calling thee Father, and see them plunging in a sea of fire eternally eternally eternally and never speak the pardoning word? It would not be like thee, it would be like thine adversary to do that. Not so wouldst thou do. But if Satan had millions of prodigals, snatched from the fold of thy family, shut up and tortured in hell, paternal yearnings after them would fill thy heart. Love's smiles would light the dread abyss where they groan. Pity's tears would fall over it, shattered by the radiance into rainbows. And through that illumination THOU wouldst descend, marching beneath the arch of its triumphal glories to the rescue of thy children! Therefore we rest in hope, knowing that "Thou wilt not leave our souls in hell."

CHAPTER V.

THE FIVE THEORETIC MODES OF SALVATION.

THE conceptions and fore feelings of immortality which men have entertained have generally been accompanied by a sense of uncertainty in regard to the nature of that inheritance, by a perception of contingent conditions, yielding a twofold fate of bliss and woe, poised on the perilous hinge of circumstance or freedom. Almost as often and profoundly, indeed, as man has thought that he should live hereafter, that idea has been followed by the belief that if, on the one hand, salvation gleamed for him in the possible sky, on the other hand perdition yawned for him in the probable abyss. Heaven and Hell are the light side and shade side of the doctrine of a future life. Few questions are more interesting, as none can be more important, than that inquiry which is about the salvation of the soul. The inherent reach of this inquiry, and the extent of its philosophical and literary history, are great. But, by arranging under certain heads the various principal schemes of salvation which Christian teachers have from time to time presented for popular acceptance, and passing them before the mind in order and in mutual lights, we can very much narrow the space required to exhibit and discuss them. When the word "salvation" occurs in the following investigation, it means unless something different be shown by the context the removal of the soul's doom to misery beyond the grave, and the securing of its future blessedness. Heaven and hell are terms employed with wide latitude and fluctuating boundaries of literal and figurative meaning; but their essential force is simply a future life of wretchedness, a future life of joy; and salvation, in its prevailing theological sense, is the avoidance of that and the gaining of this. We shall not attempt to present the different theories of redemption in their historical order of development, or to give an exhaustive account of their diversified prevalence, but shall arrange them with reference to the most perspicuous exhibition of their logical contents and practical bearings.

The first scheme of Christian salvation to be noticed is the one by which it is represented that the interference and suffering of Christ, in itself, unconditionally saved all souls and emptied hell forever. This theory arose in the minds of those who received it as the natural and consistent completion of the view they held concerning the nature and consequences of the fall of Adam, the cause and extent of the lost state of man. Adam, as the federal head of humanity, represented and acted for his whole race: the responsibility of his decision rested, the consequences of his conduct would legitimately descend, it was thought, upon all mankind. If he had kept himself obedient through that easy yet tremendous probation in Eden, he and all his children would have lived on earth eternally in perfect bliss. But, violating the commandment of God, the burden of sin, with its terrible penalty, fell on him and his posterity. Every human being was henceforth to be alien from the love of goodness and from the favor of God, hopelessly condemned to death and the pains of hell. The sin of Adam, it was believed, thoroughly corrupted the nature of man, and incapacitated him from all successful efforts to save his soul from its awful doom. The infinite majesty of God's will, the law of the universe, had been insulted by disobedience. The only just retribution was the suffering of an endless death. The adamantine sanctities of God's government made forgiveness impossible. Thus all men were lost, to be the prey of blackness, and fire, and the undying worm, through the remediless ages of eternity. Just then God had pity on the souls he had made, and himself came to the rescue. In the person of Christ, he came into the world as a man, and freely took upon himself the infinite debt of man's sins, by his death on the cross expiated all offences, satisfied the claims of offended justice, vindicated the inexpressible sacredness of the law, and, at the same time, opened a way by which a full and free reconciliation was extended to all. When the blood of Jesus flowed over the cross, it purchased the ransom of every sinner. As Jerome says, "it quenched the flaming sword at the entrance of Paradise." The weary multitude of captives rose from their bed, shook off the fetters and stains of the pit, and made the cope of heaven snowy with their white winged ascent. The prison house of the devil and his angels should be used no more to confine the guilty souls of men.1 Their guilt was all washed away in the blood of the Lamb. Their spirits, without exception, should follow to the right hand of the Father, in the way marked out by the ascending Redeemer. This is the first form of Universalism, the form in which it was held by several of the Fathers in the earlier ages of the Church, and by the pioneers of that doctrine in modern times. Cyril of Jerusalem says, "Christ went into the under world alone, but came out with many." 2 Cyril of Alexandria says that when Christ ascended from the under world he "emptied it, and left the devil there utterly alone." 3 The opinion that the whole population of Hades was released, is found in the lists of ancient heresies.4 It was advanced by Clement, an Irish priest, antagonist of Boniface the famous Archbishop of Mentz, in the middle of the eighth century. He was deposed by the Council of Soissons, and afterwards anathematized by Pope Zachary. Gregory the Great also refers in one of his letters with extreme severity to two ecclesiastics, contemporaries of his own, who held the same belief. Indeed, this conclusion is a necessary result of a consistent development of the creed of the Orthodox Church, so called. By the sin of one, even Adam, through the working of absolute justice, hell became the portion of all, irrespective of any fault or virtue of theirs; so, by the voluntary sacrifice, the infinite atonement, of one, even Christ, through the unspeakable mercy of God, salvation was effected for all, irrespective of any virtue or fault of theirs. One member of the scheme is the exact counterpoise of the other; one doctrine cries out for and necessitates the other. Those who accept the commonly received dogmas of original sin, total depravity, and universal condemnation entailed upon all men in lineal descent from Adam, and the dogmas of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Vicarious Atonement, are bound, by all the constructions of logic, to accept the scheme of salvation just set forth, namely, that the death of Christ secured the deliverance of all unconditionally. We do not believe that doctrine, only because we do not believe the other associated doctrines out of which it springs and of whose system it is the complement.

1 Doederlein, De Redemptione a Potestate Diaboli. In Opuse. Theolog.

2 Catechesis xis. 9.

3 De Festis Paschalibus, homilia vii.

4 Augustine, De Haresibus, lxxix.

The reasons why we do not believe that our race fell into helpless depravity and ruin in the sin of the first man are, in essence, briefly these: First, we have never been able to perceive any proof whatever of the truth of that dogma; and certainly the onus probandi rests on the side of such an assumption. It arose partially from a misinterpretation of the language of the Bible; and so far as it has a basis in Scripture, we are compelled by force of evidence to regard it as a Jewish adoption of a pagan error without authority. Secondly, this doctrinal system seems to us equally irreconcilable with history and with ethics: it seems to trample on the surest convictions of reason and conscience, and spurn the clearest principles of nature and religion, to blacken and load the heart and doom of man with a mountain of gratuitous horror, and shroud the face and throne of God in a pall of wilful barbarity. How can men be guilty of a sin committed thousands of years before they were born, and deserve to be sent to hopeless hell for it? What justice is there in putting on one sinless head the demerits of a world of reprobates, and then letting the criminal go free because the innocent has suffered? A third objection to this whole view an objection which, if sustained, will utterly annihilate it is this: It is quite possible that, momentous as is the part he has played in theology, the Biblical Adam is not at all a historical personage, but only a significant figment of poetry. The common belief of the most authoritative men of science, that the human race has existed on this earth for a vastly longer period than the Hebrew statement affirms, may yet be completely established. It may also yet be acknowledged that each distinct race of men had its own Adam.5 Then the dogmatic theology, based on the fall of our entire race into perdition in its primary representative, will, of course, crumble.

The second doctrine of Christian salvation is a modification and limitation of the previous one. This theory, like the former, presupposes that a burden of original sin and natural depravity transmitted from the first man had doomed, and, unless prevented in some supernatural manner, would forever press, all souls down to the realms of ruin and woe; also that an infinite graciousness in the bosom of the Godhead led Christ to offer himself as an expiation for the sins, an atoning substitute for the condemnation, of men. But, according to the present view, this interference of Christ did not by itself save the lost: it only removed the otherwise insuperable bar to forgiveness, and presented to a chosen portion of mankind the means of experiencing a condition upon the realization of which, in each individual case, the certainty of salvation depends. That condition is a mysterious conversion, stirring the depths of the soul through an inspired faith in personal election by the unchanging decree of God. The difference, then, in a word, between the two methods of salvation thus far explained, is this: While both assume that mankind are doomed to death and hell in consequence of the sin of Adam, the one asserts that the interference of Christ of itself saved all souls, the other asserts that that interference cannot save any soul except those whom God, of his sovereign pleasure, had from eternity arbitrarily elected.6 This scheme grew directly out of the dogma of fatalism, which sinks human freedom in Divine predestination. God having solely of his

5 Burdach, Carus, Oken, Bayrhoffer, Agassiz. See Bunsen, Christianity and Mankind, vol. iv. p. 28; Mott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, p. 338.

6 Confession of Faith of Westminster Divines, ch. iii. sect. 3.

own will foreordained that a certain number of mankind should be saved, Christ died in order to pay the penalty of their sins and render it possible for them to be forgiven and taken into heaven without violating the awful bond of justice. The benefits of the atonement, therefore, are limited to the elect. Nor is this to be regarded as an act of severity; on the contrary, it is an act of unspeakable benevolence. For by the sin of Adam the whole race of men, without exception, were hateful to God, and justly sentenced to eternal damnation. When, consequently, he devised a plan of redemption by which he could himself bear the guilt, and suffer the agony, and pay the debt of a few, and thus ransom them from their doom, the reprobates who were left had no right to complain, but the chosen were a monument of disinterested love, because all alike deserved the endless tortures of hell. According to this conception, all men being by their ancestral act and inherited nature irretrievably lost, God's arbitrary pleasure was the cause, Christ's voluntary death was the means, by which a certain number were to be saved. What individuals should compose this portion of the race, was determined from eternity beyond all contingencies. The effect of faith and conversion, and of the new birth, is not to save the soul, but simply to convince the soul that it is saved. That is to say, a regenerating belief and love is not the efficient cause, it is merely the revealed assurance, of salvation, proving to the soul that feels it, by the testimony of the Holy Spirit, that it is of the chosen number. The preaching of the gospel is to be extended everywhere, not for the purpose of saving those who would otherwise be lost, but because its presentation will awaken in the elect, and in them alone, that responsive experience which will reveal their election to them, and make them sure of it, already foretasting it; though it is thought that no one can be saved who is ignorant of the gospel: it is mysteriously ordered that the terms of the covenant shall be preached to all the elect. There are correlated complexities, miracles, absurdities, in wrought with the whole theory, inseparable from it. The violence it does to nature, to thought, to love, to morals, its arbitrariness, its mechanical form, the wrenching exegesis by which alone it can be forced from the Bible,7 its glaring partiality and eternal cruelty, are its sufficient refutation and condemnation. If the death of Christ has such wondrous saving efficacy, and nothing else has, what keeps him from dying again to convince the unbelieving and to save the lost? What man is there who, if he knew that, after thirty years of suffering terminated by a fearful death, he should rise again into boundless bliss and glory while rapt infinitude rung with the paans of an applauding universe, and that by means of his humiliation he could redeem countless millions from eternal torture, would not with a joyous spring undertake the task? And is a common man better than Christ?