The Roman Catholic Church endorses the representation that the

body must be raised to be punished. In the Catechism of the

Council of Trent, which is an authoritative exposition of Romanist

theology, we read that the "identical body" shall be restored,

though "without deformities or superfluities;" restored that "as

it was a partner in the man's deeds, so it may be a partner in his

punishments." The same Catechism also gives in this connection the

reason why a general judgment is necessary after each individual

has been judged at his death, namely, this: that they may be

punished for the evil which has resulted in the world since they

died from the evil they did in the world while they lived! Is it

not astonishing how these theologians find out so much? A living

Presbyterian divine of note says, "The bodies of the damned in the

resurrection shall be fit dwellings for their vile minds. With all

those fearful and horrid expressions which every base and

malignant passion wakes up in the human countenance stamped upon

it for eternity and burned in by the flaming fury of their own

terrific wickedness, they will be condemned to look upon their own

deformity and to feel their fitting doom." It is therefore urged

that the body must be raised to suffer the just penalty of the

sins man committed while occupying it. Is it not an absurdity to

affirm that nerves and blood, flesh and bones, are responsible,

guilty, must be punished? Tucker, in his "Light of Nature

Pursued," says, "The vulgar notion of a resurrection in the same

form and substance we carry about at present, because the body

being partaker in the deed ought to share in the reward, as well

requires a resurrection of the sword a man murders with, or the

bank note he gives to charitable uses." We suppose an intelligent

personality, a free will, indispensable to responsibleness and

alone amenable to retributions. Besides, if the body must be

raised to undergo chastisement for the offences done in it and by

means of it, this insurmountable difficulty by the same logic

confronts us. The material of our bodies is in a constant change,

the particles becoming totally transferred every few years. Now,

when a man is punished after the general judgment for a certain

crime, he must be in the very body he occupied when that crime was

perpetrated. Since he was a sinner all his days, his resurrection

body must comprise all the matter that ever formed a part of his

corporeity, and each sinner may hereafter be as huge as the

writhing Titan, Tityus, whose body, it was fabled, covered nine

acres. God is able to preserve the integral soul in being, and to

punish it according to justice, without clothing it in flesh. This

fact by itself utterly vacates and makes gratuitous the hypothesis

of a physical resurrection from punitive considerations, an

hypothesis which is also refuted by the truth contained in Locke's

remark to Stillingfleet, "that the soul hath no greater congruity

with the particles of matter which were once united to it, but are

so no longer, than it hath with any other particles of matter."

When the soul leaves the body, it would seem to have done with

that stage of its existence, and to enter upon another and higher

one, leaving the dust to mix with dust forever. The body wants not

the soul again; for it is a senseless clod and wants nothing. The

soul wants not its old body again: it prefers to have the freedom

of the universe, a spirit. Philip the Solitary wrote, in the

twelfth century, a book called "Dioptra," presenting the

controversy between the soul and the body very quaintly and at

length. The same thing was done by Henry Nicholson in a

"Conference between the Soul and Body concerning the Present and

Future State." William Crashaw, an old English poet, translated

from the Latin a poem entitled "The Complaint: a Dialogue between

the Body and the Soul of a Damned Man."17 But any one who will

peruse with intelligent heed the works that have been written on

this whole subject must be amazed to see how exclusively the

doctrine which we are opposing has rested on pure grounds of

tradition and fancy, alike destitute of authority and reason. Some

authors have indeed attempted to support the doctrine with

arguments: for

17 Also see Dialogue inter Corpus et Animam, p. 95 of Latin Poems

attributed to Walter Mapes.

instance, there are two German works, one by Bertram, one by

Pflug, entitled "The Resurrection of the Dead on Grounds of

Reason," in which recourse is had to every possible expedient to

make out a case, not even neglecting the factitious assistance of

Leibnitz's scheme of "Pre established Harmony." But it may be

deliberately affirmed that not one of their arguments is worthy of

respect. Apparently, they do not seek to reach truth, but to

bolster up a foregone conclusion held merely from motives of

tradition.

The Jews had a favorite tradition, developed by their Rabbins in

many passages, that there was one small, almond shaped bone,

(supposed now to have been the bone called by anatomists the os

coccygis,) which was indestructible, and would form the nucleus

around which the rest of the body would gather at the time of the

resurrection. This bone, named Luz, was miraculously preserved

from demolition or decay. Pound it furiously on anvils with heavy

hammers of steel, burn it for ages in the fiercest furnaces, soak

it for centuries in the strongest solvents, all in vain: its magic

structure still remained. So the Talmud tells. "Even as there is a

round dry grain In a plant's skeleton, which, being buried, Can

raise the herb's green body up again; So is there such in man, a

seed shaped bone, Aldabaron, call'd by the Hebrews Luz, Which,

being laid into the ground, will bear, After three thousand years,

the grass of flesh, The bloody, soul possessed weed called man."

The Jews did not, as these singular lines represent, suppose this

bone was a germ which after long burial would fructify by a

natural process and bear a perfect body: they regarded it only as

a nucleus around which the Messiah would by a miracle compel the

decomposed flesh to return as in its pristine life. All that the

Jews say of Luz the Mohammedans repeat of the bone Al Ajib.

This conceit of superstition has been developed by a Christian

author of considerable reputation into a theory of a natural

resurrection. The work of Mr. Samuel Drew on the "Identity and

General Resurrection of the Human Body" has been quite a standard

work on the subject of which it treats. Mr. Drew believes there is

a germ in the body which slowly ripens and prepares the

resurrection body in the grave. As a seed must be buried for a

season in order to spring up in perfect life, so must the human

body be buried till the day of judgment. During this period it is

not idle, but is busily getting ready for its consummation. He

says, "There are four distinct stages through which those parts

constituting the identity of the body must necessarily pass in

order to their attainment of complete perfection beyond the grave.

The first of these stages is that of its elementary principles;

the second is that of an embryo in the womb; the third is that of

its union with an immaterial spirit, and with the fluctuating

portions of flesh and blood in our present state; and the fourth

stage is that of its residence in the grave. All these stages are

undoubtedly necessary to the full perfection of the body: they are

alembics through which its parts must necessarily move to attain

that vigor which shall continue forever."18 To state this figment

is enough. It would be folly to attempt any refutation of a fancy

so obviously a pure contrivance to fortify a preconceived opinion,

a fancy, too, so preposterous, so utterly without countenance,

either from experience, observation, science, reason, or

Scripture. The egg of man's divinity is not laid in the nest of

the grave.

Another motive for believing the resurrection of the body has been

created by the exigencies of a materialistic philosophy. There was

in the early Church an Arabian sect of heretics who were reclaimed

from their errors by the powerful reasonings and eloquence of

Origen.19 Their heresy consisted in maintaining that the soul dies

with the body being indeed only its vital breath and will be

restored with it at the last day. In the course of the Christian

centuries there have arisen occasionally a few defenders of this

opinion. Priestley, as is well known, was an earnest supporter of

it. Let us scan the ground on which he held this belief. In the

first place, he firmly believed that the fact of an eternal life

to come had been supernaturally revealed to men by God through

Christ. Secondly, as a philosopher he was intensely a materialist,

holding with unwavering conviction to the conclusion that life,

mind, or soul, was a concomitant or result of our physical

organism, and wholly incapable of being without it. Death to him

was the total destruction of man for the time. There was therefore

plainly no alternative for him but either to abandon one of his

fundamental convictions as a Christian and a philosopher, or else

to accept the doctrine of a future resurrection of the body into

an immortal life. He chose the latter, and zealously taught always

that death is an annihilation lasting till the day of judgment,

when all are to be summoned from their graves. To this whole

course of thought there are several replies to be made. In the

first place, we submit that the philosophy of materialism is

false: standing in the province of science and reason, it may be

affirmed that the soul is not dependent for its existence on the

body, but will survive it. We will not argue this point, but

merely state it. Secondly, it is certain that the doctrine which

makes soul perish with body finds no countenance in the New

Testament. It is inconsistent with the belief in angelic spirits,

in demoniac possessions, in Christ's descent as a spirit to preach

to the spirits of departed men imprisoned in the under world, and

with other conceptions underlying the Gospels and the Epistles.

But, thirdly, admitting it to be true, then, we affirm, the

legitimate deduction from all the arrayed facts of science and all

the presumptive evidence of appearances is not that a future

resurrection will restore the dead man to life, but that all is

over with him, he has hopelessly perished forever. When the breath

ceases, if nothing survives, if the total man is blotted out, then

we challenge the production of a shadow of proof that he will ever

live again. The seeming injustice and blank awfulness of the fate

may make one turn for relief to the hypothesis of a future

arbitrary miraculous resurrection; but that is an artificial

expedient, without a shadow of justification. Once admit that the

body is all, its dissolution a total death, and you are gone

forever. One intuition of the spirit, seizing the conscious

supports of eternal ideas, casts contempt on "The doubtful

prospects of our painted dust,"

18 Drew on Resurrection, ch. vi. sect. vii. pp. 326-332.

19 Eusebius, Eccl. Hist. lib. vi. cap. xxxvii.

and outvalues all the gross hopes of materialism. Between

nonentity and being yawns the untraversable gulf of infinity. No:

the body of flesh falls, turns to dust and air; the soul,

emancipated, rejoices, and soars heavenwards, and is its own

incorruptible frame, mocking at death, a celestial house, whose

maker and builder is God.

Finally, there remain to be weighed the bearings of the argument

from chemical and physiological science on the resurrection. Here

is the chief stumbling block in the way of the popular doctrine.

The scientific absurdities connected with that doctrine have been

marshalled against it by Celsus, the Platonist philosopher, by

Avicenna, the Arabian physician, and by hundreds more, and have

never been answered, and cannot be answered. As long as man lives,

his bodily substance is incessantly changing; the processes of

secretion and absorption are rapidly going forward. Every few

years he is, as to material, a totally new man. Dying at the age

of seventy, he has had at least ten different bodies. He is one

identical soul, but has lived in ten separate houses. With which

shall he be raised? with the first? or the fifth? or the last? or

with all? But, further, the body after death decays, enters into

combination with water, air, earth, gas, vegetables, animals,

other human bodies. In this way the same matter comes to have

belonged to a thousand persons. In the resurrection, whose shall

it be? We reply, nearly in the language of Christ to the

Sadducees, "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the will of

God: in the resurrection they have not bodies of earthly flesh,

but are spirits, as the angels of God."

The argument against the common theory of a material resurrection,

on account of numerous claimants for the same substance, has of

late derived a greatly increased force from the brilliant

discoveries in chemistry. It is now found that only a small number

of substances ever enter into the composition of animal bodies.20

The food of man consists of nitrogenized and non nitrogenized

substances. The latter are the elements of respiration; the former

alone compose the plastic elements of nutrition, and they are few

in number and comparatively limited in extent. "All life depends

on a relatively small quantity of matter. Over and over again, as

the modeller fashions his clay, are plant and animal formed out of

the same material." The particles that composed Adam's frame may

before the end of the world have run the circuit of ten thousand

bodies of his descendants: "'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been

slave to thousands." To proclaim the resurrection of the flesh as

is usually done, seems a flat contradiction of clear knowledge.21

A late writer on this subject, Dr. Hitchcock, evades the

insuperable difficulty by saying, "It is not necessary that the

resurrection body should contain a single particle of the body

laid in the grave, if it only contain particles of the same kind,

united in the same proportion, and the compound be made to assume

the same form and structure as the natural body." 22 Then two men

who look exactly alike may in the resurrection exchange bodies

without any harm! Here the theory of punishment clashes. Does not

the esteemed author see that this would not be a resurrection of

the old bodies, but a creation of new ones

20 Liebig, Animal Chemistry, sect. xix.

21 The Circulation of Matter, Blackwood's Magazine, May, 1853.

22 The Resurrection of Spring, p. 26.

just like them? And is not this a desertion of the orthodox

doctrine of the Church? If he varies so far from the established

formularies out of a regard for philosophy, he may as well be

consistent and give up the physical doctrine wholly, because it

rests solely on the tradition which he leaves and is every whit

irreconcilable with philosophy. This device is as wilful an

attempt to escape the scientific difficulty as that employed by

Candlish to avoid the scriptural difficulty put in the way of the

doctrine by the apostolic words "Flesh and blood cannot inherit

the kingdom of God." The eminent Scottish divine affirms that

"flesh and bones" that is, these present bodies made

incorruptible can inherit the kingdom of God; although "flesh and

blood" that is, these present bodies subject to decay cannot.23 It

is surely hard to believe that the New Testament writers had such

a distinction in their minds. It is but a forlorn resource

conjured up to meet a desperate exigency.

At the appearing of Christ in glory,

"When the Day of Fire shall have dawn'd, and sent Its deadly

breath into the firmament," as it is supposed, the great earth

cemetery will burst open and its innumerable millions swarm forth

before him. Unto the tremendous act of habeas corpus, then

proclaimed, every grave will yield its prisoner. Ever since the

ascension of Jesus his mistaken followers have been anxiously

expecting that awful advent of his person and his power in the

clouds; but in vain. "All things remain as they were: where is the

promise of his appearing?" As the lookers out hitherto have been

disappointed, so they ever will be. Say not, Lo here! or, Lo

there! for, behold, he is within you. The reason why this carnal

error, Jewish conceit, retains a hold, is that men accept it

without any honest scrutiny of its foundations or any earnest

thought of their own about it. They passively receive the

tradition. They do not realize the immensity of the thing, nor the

ludicrousness of its details. To their imaginations the awful

blast of the trumpet calling the world to judgment, seems no more,

as Feuerbach says, than a tone from the tin horn of a postillion,

who, at the post station of the Future, orders fresh horses for

the Curriculum Vita! President Hitchcock tells us that, "when the

last trumpet sounds, the whole surface of the earth will become

instinct with life, from the charnels of battle fields alone more

than a thousand millions of human beings starting forth and

crowding upwards to the judgment seat." On the resurrection

morning, at the first tip of light over acres of opening monument

and heaving turf, "Each member jogs the other, And whispers, Live

you, brother?"

And how will it be with us then? Will Daniel Lambert, the mammoth

of men, appear weighing half a ton? Will the Siamese twins then be

again joined by the living ligament of their congenital band?

Shall "infants be not raised in the smallness of body in which

they died, but increase by the wondrous and most swift work of

God"? 24

23 Candlish, Life in a Risen Savior: Discourse XV.

24 Augustine, De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. xiv.

Young sings, "Now charnels rattle; scatter'd 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, To distant regions journeying, there to claim

Deserted members and complete the frame."

The glaring melodramatic character, the startling mechanico

theatrical effects, of this whole doctrine, are in perfect keeping

with the raw imagination of the childhood of the human mind, but

in profound opposition to the working philosophy of nature and the

sublime simplicity of God.

Many persons have never distinctly defined their views upon the

subject before us. In the minds even of many preachers and

writers, several different and irreconcilable theories would seem

to exist together in confused mixture. Now they speak as if the

soul were sleeping with the body in the grave; again they appear

to imply that it is detained in an intermediate state; and a

moment afterwards they say it has already entered upon its final

reward or doom. Jocelyn relates, in his Life of St. Patrick, that

"as the saint one day was passing the graves of two men recently

buried, observing that one of the graves had a cross over it, he

stopped his chariot and asked the dead man below of what religion

he had been. The reply was, 'A pagan.' 'Then why was this cross

put over you?' inquired St. Patrick. The dead man answered, 'He

who is buried near me is a Christian; and one of your faith,

coming hither, placed the cross at my head.' The saint stepped out

of his chariot, rectified the mistake, and went his way." Calvin,

in the famous treatise designated "Psychopannychia," which he

levelled against those who taught the sleep of souls until the day

of judgment, maintained that the souls of the elect go immediately

to heaven, the souls of the reprobate to hell. Here they tarry in

bliss and bale until the resurrection; then, coming to the earth,

they assume their bodies and return to their respective places.

But if the souls live so long in heaven and hell without their

flesh, why need they ever resume it? The cumbrous machinery of the

scheme seems superfluous and unmeaning. As a still further

specimen of the arbitrary thinking the unscientific and

unphilosophical thinking carried into this department of thought

by most who have cultivated it, reference may be made to Bishop

Burnet's work "De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium," which teaches

that at the first resurrection the bodies of the risen will be the

same as the present, but at the second resurrection, after the

millennium, from the rudiments of the present body a new spiritual

body will be developed.

The true idea of man's future destiny appears to be that no

resurrection of the flesh is needed, because the real man never

dies, but lives continuously forever. There are two reasonable

ways of conceiving what the vehicle of his life is when he leaves

his present frame. It may be that within his material system lurks

an exquisite spiritual organization, invisibly pervading it and

constituting its vital power. This ethereal structure is

disengaged at last from its gross envelope, and, unfettered, soars

to the Divine realms of ether and light. This theory of an "inner

body" is elaborately wrought out and sustained in Bonnet's

"Palingenesie Philosophique." Or it may be that there is in each

one a primal germ, a deathless monad, which is the organic

identity of man, root of his inmost stable being, triumphant,

unchanging ruler of his flowing, perishable organism. This spirit

germ, born into the present life, assimilates and holds the

present body around it, out of the materials of this world; born

into the future life, it will assimilate and hold around it a

different body, out of the materials of the future world.25 Thus

there are bodies terrestrial and bodies celestial: the glory of

the terrestrial is one, fitted to this scene of things; the glory

of the celestial is another, fitted to the scene of things

hereafter to dawn. Each spirit will be clothed from the material

furnished by the world in which it resides. Not forever shall we

bear about this slow load of weary clay, this corruptible mass,

heir to a thousand ills. Our body shall rather be such "If

lightning were the gross corporeal frame Of some angelic essence,

whose bright thoughts As far surpass'd in keen rapidity The

lagging action of his limbs as doth Man's mind his clay; with like

excess of speed To animated thought of lightning flies That spirit

body o'er life's deeps divine, Far past the golden isles of

memory."

What man knows constitutes his present world. All beyond that

constitutes another world. He can imagine two modes in which his

desire for a life after death may be gratified, a removal into the

Unknown World, or a return into the Known World. With the latter

supposition the restoration of the flesh is involved.

Upon the whole, our conclusion is, that in the original plan of

the world it was fixed that man should not live here forever, but

that the essence of his life should escape from the flesh and

depart to some other sphere of being, there either to fashion

itself a new form, or to remain disembodied. If those who hold the

common doctrine of a carnal resurrection should carry it out with

philosophical consistency, by extending the scheme it involves to

all existing planetary races as well as to their own, should they

cause that process of imagination which produced this doctrine to

go on to its legitimate completion, they would see in the final

consummation the sundered earths approach each other, and

firmaments conglobe, till at last the whole universe concentred in

one orb. On the surface of that world all the risen races of being

would be distributed, the inhabitants of a present solar system

making a nation, the sum of gigantic nationalities constituting

one prodigious, death exempted empire, its solitary sovereign GOD.

But this is pure poetry, and not science nor philosophy.

25 Lange on the Resurrection of the Body, Studien und Kritiken, 1836.

CHAPTER IV.

DOCTRINE OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT; OR, CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF

A HELL.

A HELL of fire and brimstone has been, perhaps still is, the most

terrible of the superstitions of the world. We propose to give a

historic sketch of the popular representations on this subject,

trace them to their origin, and discuss the merits of the question

itself. To follow the doctrine through all its variations,

illustrating the practical and controversial writings upon it,

would require a large volume; but, by a judicious arrangement, all

that is necessary to a fair understanding of the subject, or

really interesting, may be presented within the compass of an

essay. Any one who should read the literature of this subject

would be astonished at the almost universal prevalence of the

doctrine and at the immense diversity of appalling descriptions of

it, and would ask, Whence arises all this? How have these horrors

obtained such a seated hold in the world?

In the first place, it is to be replied, as soon as reason is in

fair possession of the idea of a continued individual existence

beyond the grave, the moral sense, discriminating the deeds,

tempers, and characters of men, would teach that there must be

different allotments and experiences for them after death. It is

not right, say reason and conscience, for the coward, the idler,

fool, knave, sot, murderer, to enter into the same realm and have

the same bliss with heroes, sages, and saints; neither are they

able to do it. The spontaneous thought and sentiment of humanity

would declare, if the soul survives the body, passing into the

invisible world, its fortunes there must depend somewhat upon its

fitness and deserts, its contained treasures and acquired habits.

Reason, judging the facts of observation according to the

principles of ethics and the working of experienced spiritual

laws, at once decides that there is a difference hereafter between

the fate of the good heart and the bad one, the great soul and the

mean one: in a word, there is, in some sense or other, a heaven

and a hell.

Again: the same belief would be necessitated by the conception, so

deeply entertained by the primitive people of the earth, of

overruling and inspecting gods. They supposed these gods to be in

a great degree like themselves, partial, fickle, jealous,

revengeful. Such beings, of course, would caress their favorites

and torture their offenders. The calamities and blessings of this

life were regarded as tokens, revengeful or loving, of the ruling

deities, now pleased, now enraged. And when their votaries or

victims had passed into the eternal state, how natural to suppose

them still favored or cursed by the passionate wills of these

irresponsible gods! Plainly enough, they who believe in gods that

launch thunderbolts and upheave the sea in their rage and take

vengeance for an insult by sending forth a pestilence, must also

believe in a hell where Ixion may be affixed to the wheel and

Tantalus be tortured with maddening mockeries. These two

conceptions of discriminating justice and of vengeful gods both

lead to the theoretic construction of a hell, and to the growth of

doctrines and parables about it, though in a different sort, the

former illustrating a pervasive law which distributes men

according to their deserts, the latter speaking of beings with

human passions, who inflict outward arbitrary penalties according

to their pleasure.

Thirdly, when the general idea of a hell has once obtained

lodgment, it is rapidly nourished, developed, and ornamented,

carried out into particulars by poets, rhetoricians, and popular

teachers, whose fancies are stimulated and whose figurative views

and pictures act and react both upon the sources and the products

of faith. Representations based only on moral facts, emblems

addressing the imagination, after a while are received in a

literal sense, become physically located and clothed with the

power of horror. A Hindu poet says, "The ungrateful shall remain

in hell as long as the sun hangs in heaven." An old Jewish Rabbi

says that after the general judgment "God shall lead all the

blessed through hell and all the damned through paradise, and show

to each one the place that was prepared for him in each region, so

that they shall not be able to say, 'We are not to be blamed or

praised; for our doom was unalterably fixed beforehand.' Such

utterances are originally moral symbols, not dogmatic assertions;

and yet in a rude age they very easily pass into the popular mind

as declaring facts literally to be believed. A Talmudic writer

says, "There are in hell seven abodes, in each abode seven

thousand caverns, in each cavern seven thousand clefts, in each

cleft seven thousand scorpions; each scorpion has seven limbs, and

on each limb are seven thousand barrels of gall. There are also in

hell seven rivers of rankest poison, so deadly that if one touches

it he bursts." Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, have given minute

descriptions of hell and its agonies, descriptions which have

unquestionably had a tremendous influence in cherishing and

fashioning the world's faith in that awful empire. The poems of

Dante, Milton, and Pollok revel in the most vivid and terrific

pictures of the infernal kingdom and its imagined horrors; and the

popular doctrine of future punishment in Christendom is far more

closely conformed to their revelations than to the declarations of

the New Testament. The English poet's "Paradise Lost" has

undoubtedly exerted an influence on the popular faith comparable

with that of the Genevan theologian's "Institutes of the Christian

Religion." There is a horrid fiction, widely believed once by the

Jewish Rabbins and by the Mohammedans, that two gigantic fiends

called the Searchers, as soon as a deceased person is buried, make

him sit up in the grave, examine the moral condition of his soul,

and, if he is very guilty, beat in his temples with heavy iron

maces. It is obvious to observe that such conceptions are purely

arbitrary, the work of fancy, not based on any intrinsic fitness

or probability; but they are received because unthinking ignorance

and hungry superstition will greedily believe any thing they hear.

Joseph Trapp, an English clergyman, in a long poem thus sets forth

the scene of damnation: "Doom'd to live death and never to expire,

In floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire The damn'd shall

groan, fire of all kinds and forms, In rain and hail, in

hurricanes and storms, Liquid and solid, livid, red, and pale, A

flaming mountain here, and there a flaming vale; The liquid fire

makes seas, the solid, shores; Arch'd o'er with flames, the horrid

concave roars. In bubbling eddies rolls the fiery tide, And

sulphurous surges on each other ride. The hollow winding vaults,

and dens, and caves, Bellow like furnaces with flaming waves.

Pillars of flame in spiral volumes rise, Like fiery snakes, and

lick the infernal skies. Sulphur, the eternal fuel, unconsumed,

Vomits redounding smoke, thick, unillumed."

But all other paintings of the fear and anguish of hell are vapid

and pale before the preternatural frightfulness of those given at

unmerciful length and in sickening specialty in some of the Hindu

and Persian sacred books.1 Here worlds of nauseating disgusts, of

loathsome agonies, of intolerable terrors, pass before us. Some

are hung up by their tongues, or by their eyes, and slowly

devoured by fiery vermin; some scourged with whips of serpents

whose poisonous fangs lacerate their flesh at every blow; some

forced to swallow bowls of gore, hair, and corruption, freshly

filled as fast as drained; some packed immovably in red hot iron

chests and laid in raging furnaces for unutterable millions of

ages. One who is familiar with the imagery of the Buddhist hells

will think the pencils of Dante and Pollok, of Jeremy Taylor and

Jonathan Edwards, were dipped in water. There is just as much

ground for believing the accounts of the former to be true as

there is for crediting those of the latter: the two are

fundamentally the same, and the pagan had earlier possession of

the field.

Furthermore, in the early ages, and among people where castes were

prominent, when the learning, culture, and power were confined to

one class at the expense of others, it is unquestionable that

copious and fearful descriptions of the future state were spread

abroad by those who were interested in establishing such a dogma.

The haughtiness and selfishness of the hierarchic spirit, the

exclusiveness, cruelty, and cunning tyranny of many of the ancient

priesthoods, are well known. Despising, hating, and fearing the

people, whom they held in abject spiritual bondage, they sought to

devise, diffuse, and organize such opinions as would concentrate

power in their own hands and rivet their authority. Accordingly,

in the lower immensity they painted and shadowed forth the lurid

and dusky image of hell, gathering around it all that was most

abominated and awful. Then they set up certain fanciful

conditions, without the strict observance of which no one could

avoid damnation. The animus of a priesthood in the structure of

this doctrine is shown by the glaring fact that in the old

religions the woes of hell were denounced not so much upon bad men

who committed crimes out of a wicked heart, as upon careless men

who neglected priestly guidance and violated the ritual. The

omission of a prayer or an ablution, the neglect of baptism or

confession, a slight thrown upon a priest, a mental conception

differing from the decree of the "Church," would condemn a man far

more surely and deeply into the Egyptian, Hindu, Persian,

Pharisaic, Papal, or Calvinistic hell than any amount of moral

culpability according to the standard of natural ethics.

1 See Pope's translation of the Viraf Nameh. Also the Dabistan,

vol. i. pp. 295-304, of the translation by Shea and Troyer; and

Coleman's Mythology of the Hindus, chapter on the hells.

The popular hells have ever been built on hierarchic selfishness,

dogmatic pride, and personal cruelty, and have been walled around

with arbitrary and traditional rituals. Through the breaches made

in these rituals by neglect, souls have been plunged in. The

Parsee priest describes a woman in hell "beaten with stone clubs

by two demons twelve miles in size, and compelled to continue

eating a basin of putridity, because once some of her hair, as she

combed it, fell into the sacred fire." The Brahmanic priest tells

of a man who, for "neglecting to meditate on the mystic

monosyllable Om before praying, was thrown down in hell on an iron

floor and cleaved with an axe, then stirred in a caldron of molten

lead till covered all over with the sweated foam of torture like a

grain of rice in an oven, and then fastened, with head downwards

and feet upwards, to a chariot of fire and urged onwards with a

red hot goad." The Papal priest declares that the schismatic,

though the kindest and justest man, at death drops hopelessly into

hell, while the devotee, though scandalously corrupt in heart and

life, who confesses and receives extreme unction, treads the

primrose path to paradise. The Episcopalian priest dooms the

dissenter to everlasting woe in spite of every virtue, because he

has not known sacramental baptism in the apostolic line. The

Arminian priest turns the rationalist over to the penal fires of

eternity, because he is in mental error as to the explanation of

the Trinity and the Atonement. In every age it has been the

priestly spirit, acting on ritual considerations, that has

deepened the foundations, enlarged the borders, and apportioned

the victims, of hell. The perversions and excesses of the doctrine

have grown out of cruel ambition and cunning on one side, and been

received by docile ignorance and superstition on the other, and

been mutually fed by traditions and fables between. The excessive

vanity and theocratic pride of the Jews led them to exclude all

the Gentiles, whom they stigmatized as "uncircumcised dogs," from

the Jewish salvation. The same spirit, aggravated if possible,

passed lineally into Christendom, causing the Orthodox Church to

exclude all the heathen, all heretics, and the unbaptized, from

the Christian salvation.

A fifth explanation of the wholesale severity and multiplied

details of horror, which came to be incorporated with the doctrine

of hell, is to be found in the gloomy theories of certain

philosophers whose relentless speculations were tinged and moulded

by their own recluse misanthropy and the prevailing superstitions

of their time. Out of the old asceticism of the East the false

spiritualism which regarded matter as the source of evil and this

life as a penance arose the dogma of metempsychosis. The

consequence of this theory, rigidly carried out, created a

descending congeries of hells, reaching from centre to nadir, in

correspondence to an ascending congeries of heavens, reaching from

centre to zenith. Out of the myth of the Fall sprang the dogma of

total depravity, dooming our whole race to hell forever, except

those saved by the subsequent artifice of the atonement. Theories

conjured up and elaborated by fanciful and bloodless metaphysicians,

in an age when the milk of public human kindness was thinned,

soured, poisoned, by narrow and tyrannical prejudices, might

easily legitimate and establish any conclusions, however

unreasonable and monstrous. The history of philosophy is

the broad demonstration of this. The Church philosophers, (with

exceptions, of course,) receiving the traditions of the common

faith, partaking in the superstitions of their age, banished from

the bosoms of men by their monastic position, and inflamed with

hierarchic pride, with but a faint connection or intercourse

between conscience and intellect or between heart and fancy,

strove to spin out theories which would explain and justify the

orthodox dogmas.

Working with metaphysical tools of abstract reason, not with the

practical faculties of life, dealing with the fanciful materials

of priestly tradition, not with the solid facts of ethical

observation, they would naturally be troubled with but few qualms

and make but few reservations, however overwhelming the results of

horror at which they might arrive. Habituated for years to hair

drawn analyses and superstitious broodings upon the subject,

overshadowed by the supernatural hierarchy in which they lived,

surrounded by a thick night of ignorance, persecution, and

slaughter, it was no wonder they could believe the system they

preached, although in reality it was only a traditional

abstraction metaphysically wrought up and vivified by themselves.

Being thus wrought out and animated by them, who were the sole

depositaries of learning and the undisputed lords of thought, the

mass of the people, lying abjectly in the fetters of authority,

could not help accepting it. Ample illustrations of these

assertions will occur to all who are familiar with the theological

schemes and the dialectic subtleties of the early Church Fathers

and of the later Church Scholastics.

Finally, by the combined power, first, of natural conscience

affirming a future distinction between the good and the bad;

secondly, of imperfect conceptions of God as a passionate avenger;

thirdly, of the licentious fancies of poets drawing awful

imaginative pictures of future woe; fourthly, of the cruel spirit

and the ambitious plans of selfish priesthoods; and fifthly, of

the harsh and relentless theories of conforming metaphysicians,

the doctrine of hell, as a located place of manifold terrific

physical tortures drawing in vast majorities of the human race,

became established in the ruling creeds and enthroned as an

orthodox dogma. In some heathen nations the descriptions of the

poets, in others the accounts of the priestly books, were held to

be inspired revelations. To call them in question was blasphemous.

In Christendom the scriptural representations of the subject,

which were general moral adaptations, incidentally made, of

representations already existing, obtained a literal interpretation,

had the stamp of infallibility put on them and immense perverted

additions joined to them. Thus everywhere the dogma became

associated with the established authority. To deny it was heresy.

Heretics were excommunicated, loaded with pains and penalties,

and, for many centuries, often put to death with excruciating

tortures. From that moment the doctrine was taken out of

the province of natural reason, out of the realm of ethical

truth. The absurdities, wrongs, and barbarities deducible from it

were a part and parcel of it, and not to be considered as any

objection to it. No free thought and honest criticism were

allowed. Because taught by authority, it must be submissively

taken for granted. Henceforth we are not to wonder at the

revolting inhumanity of spirit and horribleness of gloating hatred

shown in connection with the doctrine; for it was not the

independent thought and proper moral spirit of individuals, but

the petrified dogma and irresponsible corporate spirit of that

towering hierarchy, the Church.

The Church set forth certain conditional offers of salvation. When

those offers were spurned or neglected, the Church felt personally

insulted and aggrieved. Her servants hurled on the hated heretics

and heathen the denunciations of bigotry and the threats of rage.

Rugged old Tertullian, in whose torrid veins the fire of his

African deserts seems infused, revels with infernal glee over the

contemplation of the sure damnation of the heathen. "At that

greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment," he

says, "how shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when

I behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of

darkness; so many magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than

they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage

philosophers blushing in red hot fires with their deluded pupils;

so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own

sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish than

ever before from applause."2 Hundreds of the most accredited

Christian writers have shown the same fiendish spirit. Drexel the

Jesuit, preaching of Dives, exclaims, "Instead of a lofty bed of

down on which he was wont to repose himself, he now lies frying in

the flames; his sparkling wine and delicious dainties are taken

from him; he is burnt up with thirst, and has nothing for his food

but smoke and sulphur." Jeremy Taylor3 says, in that discourse on

the "Pains of Hell" where he has lavished all the stores of his

matchless learning and all the wealth of his gorgeous imagination

in multiplying and adorning the paraphernalia of torture with

infinite accompaniments of unendurable pangs and insufferable

abominations, "We are amazed at the inhumanity of Phalaris, who

roasted men in his brazen bull: this was joy in respect of that

fire of hell which penetrates the very entrails without consuming

them;" "husbands shall see their wives, parents shall see their

children, tormented before their eyes;" "the bodies of the damned

shall be crowded together in hell like grapes in a wine press,

which press one another till they burst;" "every distinct sense

and organ shall be assailed with its own appropriate and most

exquisite sufferings." Christopher Love belying his name says of

the damned, "Their cursings are their hymns, howlings their tunes,

and blasphemies their ditties." Calvin writes, "Forever harassed

with a dreadful tempest, they shall feel themselves torn asunder

by an angry God, and transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings,

terrified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by the weight of

his hand, so that to sink into any gulfs would be more tolerable

than to stand for a moment in these terrors." A living divine, Dr.

Gardiner Spring, declares, "When the omnipotent and angry God, who

has access to all the avenues of distress in the corporeal frame

and all the inlets to agony in the intellectual constitution,

undertakes to punish, he will convince the universe that he does

not gird himself for the work of retribution in vain;" "it will be

a glorious deed when He who hung on Calvary shall cast those who

have trodden his blood under their feet, into the furnace of fire,

where there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth."

Thousands of passages like these, and even worse, might easily be

collected from Christian authors, dating their utterance from the

days of St. Irenaus, Bishop of Lyons, who flamed against the

heretics, to the days of Nehemiah Adams, Congregational preacher

of Boston, who says, "It is to be feared the forty two children

that mocked Elisha are now in hell." 4 There is an unmerciful

animus in them, a vindictiveness of thought and feeling, far oh,

how far! removed from the meek and loving

2 De Spectaculis, cap. xxx., Gibbon's trans.

3 Contemplations of the State of Man, ch. 6 8.

4 Friends of Christ, p. 149.

soul of Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem, and loved the

"unevangelical" young lawyer who was "not far from the kingdom of

heaven," and yearned towards the penitent Peter, and from the

tenderness of his immaculate purity said to the adulteress,

"Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." There are some

sectarians in whom the arbitrary narrowness, fierceness, and

rigidity of their received creeds have so demoralized and hardened

conscience and sensibility in their native healthy directions, and

artificially inflamed them in diseased channels, that we verily

believe, if the decision of the eternal destiny of the human race

were placed in their hands, they would with scarcely a twinge of

pain perhaps some of them even with a horrid satisfaction and

triumph doom all except their own dogmatic coterie to hell. They

are bound to do so. They profess to know infallibly that God will

do so: if, therefore, the case being in their arbitration, they

would decide differently, they thereby impeach the action of God,

confess his decrees irreconcilable with reason and justice, and

set up their own goodness as superior to his. Burnet has preserved

the plea of Bloody Mary, which was in these words: "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." Thanks be to the infinite

Father that our fate is in his hands, and not in the hands of men

who are bigots,

"Those pseudo Privy Councillors of God,

Who write down judgments with a pen hard nibb'd:

Ushers of Beelzebub's black rod,

Commending sinners, not to ice thick ribb'd,

But endless flames to scorch them up like flax,

Yet sure of heaven themselves, as if they'd cribb'd

The impression of St. Peter's keys in wax!"

It may be thought that this doctrine and its awful concomitants,

though once promulgated, are now nearly obsolete. It is true that,

in thinking minds and generous hearts, they are getting to be

repudiated. But by no means is it so in the recognised formularies

of the established Churches and in the teachings of the popular

clergy. All through the Gentile world, wherever there is a

prevailing religion, the threats and horrors of a fearful doctrine

of hell are still brandished over the trembling or careless

multitudes. In Christendom, the authoritative announcement of the

Roman and Greek Churches, and the public creeds confessed by every

communicant of all the denominations, save two or three which are

comparatively insignificant in numbers, show that the doctrine is

yet held without mitigation. The Bishop of Toronto, only a year or

two ago, published the authoritative declaration that "every child

of humanity, except the Virgin Mary, is from the first moment of

conception a child of wrath, hated by the blessed Trinity,

belonging to Satan, and doomed to hell!" Indeed, the doctrine, in

its whole naked and frightful extent, is necessarily, in strict

logic, an integral part of the great system of the popular

Christianity, that is, Christianity as falsely interpreted,

paganized, and scholasticized. For if by the sin of Adam the

entire race were totally depraved and condemned to a hopeless

hell, and only those can be saved who personally appropriate by a

realizing faith the benefits of the subsequent artifice carried

out in the atoning blood of the incarnate God, certainly the

extremist advocate of the doctrine concerning hell has not

exceeded the truth, and cannot exceed it. All the necessities of

logic rebuke the tame hearted theologians, and great Augustine's,

great Calvin's, ghost walks unapproached among them, crying out

that they are slow and inefficient in describing the enormous

sweep of the inherited penalty! Many persons who have not taken

pains to examine the subject suppose that the horrifying

descriptions given by Christian authors of the state and

sufferings of the lost were not intended to be literally received,

but were meant as figures of speech, highly wrought metaphors

calculated to alarm and impress with physical emblems corresponding

only to moral and spiritual realities. The progress of

thought and refinement has made it natural that recourse should

often be had to such an explanation; but unquestionably it is a

mistake. The annals of theology, both dogmatic and homiletic, from

the time of the earliest Fathers till now, abound in detailed

accounts of the future punishment of the wicked, whereof the

context, the train of thought, and all the intrinsic characteristics

of style and coherence, do not leave a shadow of doubt that they

were written as faithful, though inadequate, accounts of facts.

The Church, the immense bulk of Christendom, has in theory always

regarded hell and its dire concomitants as material facts,

and not as merely spiritual experiences.

Tertullian says, "The damned burn eternally without consuming, as

the volcanoes, which are vents from the stored subterranean fire

of hell, burn forever without wasting." 5 Cyprian declares that

"the wretched bodies of the condemned shall simmer and blaze in

those living fires." Augustine argues at great length and with

ingenious varieties of reasoning to show how the material bodies

of the damned may withstand annihilation in everlasting fire.6

Similar assertions, which cannot be figuratively explained, are

made by Irenaus, Jerome, Athanasius, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura,

Gerson, Bernard, and indeed by almost all the Christian writers.

Origen, who was a Platonist, and a heretic on many points, was

severely condemned for saying that the fire of hell was inward and

of the conscience, rather than outward and of the body. For the

strict materiality of the fire of hell we might adduce volumes of

authorities from nearly every province of the Church. Dr. Barrow

asserts that "our bodies will be afflicted continually by a

sulphurous flame, piercing the inmost sinews." John Whitaker

thinks "the bodies of the damned will be all salted with fire, so

tempered and prepared as to burn the more fiercely and yet never

consume." Jeremy Taylor teaches that "this temporal fire is but a

painted fire in respect of that penetrating and real fire in

hell." Jonathan Edwards soberly and believingly writes thus: "The

world will probably be converted into a great lake or liquid globe

of fire, a vast ocean of fire, in which the wicked shall be

overwhelmed, which will always be in tempest, in which they shall

be tost to and fro, having no rest day or night, vast waves or

billows of fire continually rolling over their heads, of which

they shall forever be full of a quick sense within and without:

their heads, their eyes, their tongues, their hands, their feet,

their loins, and their vitals shall forever be full of a glowing,

melting fire, fierce enough to melt the very rocks and elements;

and also they shall eternally be full of the most quick and lively

sense

5 Apol. cap. 47-48.

6 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxi. cap. 2 4.

to feel the torments; not for one minute, nor for one day, nor for

one age, nor for two ages, nor for a hundred ages, nor for ten

thousands of millions of ages one after another, but for ever and

ever, without any end at all, and never, never be delivered." 7

Calvin says, "Iterum quaro, unde factum est, ut tot gentes una cum

liberis eorum infantibus aterna morti involveret lapsus Ada absque

remedio, nisi quia Deo ita visum est? Decretum horribile fateor."

8 Outraged humanity before the contemplation cries, "O God, horror

hath overwhelmed me, for thou art represented as an omnipotent

Fiend." It is not the Father of Christ, but his Antagonist, whose

face glares down over such a scene as that! The above diabolical

passage at the recital of which from the pulpit, Edwards's

biographers tell us, "whole congregations shuddered and

simultaneously rose to their feet, smiting their breasts, weeping

and groaning" is not the arbitrary exaggeration of an individual,

but a fair representation of the actual tenets and vividly held

faith of the Puritans. It is also, in all its uncompromising

literality, a direct and inevitable part of the system of doctrine

which, with insignificant exceptions, professedly prevails

throughout Christendom at this hour. We know most persons will

hesitate at this statement; but let them look at the logic of the

case in the light of its history, and they must admit the

correctness of the assertion. Weigh the following propositions,

the accuracy of which no one, we suppose, will question, and it

will appear at once that there is no possibility of avoiding the

conclusion.

First, it is the established doctrine of Christendom that no one

can be saved without a supernatural regeneration, or sincere faith

in the vicarious atonement, or valid reception of sacramental

grace at the hands of a priest, conditions which it is not

possible that one in a hundred thousand of the whole human race

has fulfilled. Secondly, it is the established doctrine of

Christendom that there will be a general day of judgment, when all

men will be raised in the same bodies which they originally

occupied on earth, when Christ and his angels will visibly descend

from heaven, separate the elect from the reprobate, summon the

sheep to the blissful pastures on the right hand, but "Proclaim

The flocks of goats to folds of flame."

The world is to be burnt up, and the damned, restored to their

bodies, are to be driven into the everlasting fire prepared for

them. The resurrection of the body, still held in all Christendom,

taken in connection with the rest of the associated scheme,

necessitates the belief in the materiality of the torments of

hell. That eminent living divine, Dr. Gardiner Spring, says, "The

souls of all who have died in their sins are in hell; and there

their bodies too will be after the resurrection." 9 Mr. Spurgeon

also, in his graphic and fearful sermon on the "Resurrection of

the Dead," uses the following language: "When thou diest, thy soul

will be tormented alone; that will be a hell for it: but at the

day of judgment thy body will join thy soul, and then thou wilt

have twin hells, thy soul sweating drops of blood, and thy body

suffused with agony. In fire exactly like that which we have on

earth thy body will lie,

7 Edwards's Works, vol. viii. p. 166.

8 Instit., lib. iii. cap. xxiii. sect. 7.

9 The Glory of Christ, vol. ii. p. 258.

asbestos like, forever unconsumed, all thy veins roads for the

feet of pain to travel on, every nerve a string on which the devil

shall forever play his diabolical tune of Hell's Unutterable

Lament!" And, if this doctrine be true, no ingenuity, however

fertile in expedients and however fiendish in cruelty, can

possibly devise emblems and paint pictures half terrific enough to

present in imagination and equal in moral impression what the

reality will be to the sufferers. It is easy to speak or hear the

word "hell;" but to analyze its significance and realize it in a

sensitive fancy is difficult; and whenever it is done the fruit is

madness, as the bedlams of the world are shrieking in testimony at

this instant. The Revivalist preachers, so far from exaggerating

the frightful contents latent in the prevalent dogma concerning

hell, have never been able and no man is able to do any thing like

justice to its legitimate deductions. Edwards is right in

declaring, "After we have said our utmost and thought our utmost,

all that we have said and thought is but a faint shadow of the

reality." Think of yourselves, seized, just as you are now, and

flung into the roaring, glowing furnace of eternity; think of such

torture for an instant, multiply it by infinity, and then say if

any words can convey the proper force of impression. It is true

these intolerable details are merely latent and unappreciated by

the multitude of believers; and when one, roused to fanaticism by

earnest contemplation of his creed, dares to proclaim its logical

consequences and to exhort men accordingly, they shrink, and

charge him with excess. But they should beware ere they repudiate

the literal horrors of the historic orthodox doctrine for any

figurative and moral views accommodated to the advanced reason and

refinement of the times, beware how such an abandonment of a part

of their system affects the rest.

Give up the material fire, and you lose the bodily resurrection.

Renounce the bodily resurrection, and away goes the visible coming

of Christ to a general judgment. Abandon the general judgment, and

the climacteric completion of the Church scheme of redemption is

wanting. Mar the wholeness of the redemption plan, and farewell to

the incarnation and vicarious atonement. Neglect the vicarious

atonement, and down crumbles the hollow and broken shell of the

popular theology helplessly into its grave. The old literal

doctrine of a material hell, however awful its idea, as it has

been set forth in flaming views and threats by all the accredited

representatives of the Church, must be uncompromisingly clung to,

else the whole popular system of theology will be mutilated,

shattered, and lost from sight. The theological leaders understand

this perfectly well, and for the most part they act accordingly.

We have now under our hand numerous extracts, from writings

published within the last five years by highly influential

dignitaries in the different denominations, which for frightfulness

of outline and coloring, and for unshrinking assertions of

literality, will compare with those already quoted.

Especially read the following description of this kind from John

Henry Newman: "Oh, terrible moment for the soul, when it suddenly

finds itself at the judgment seat of Christ, when the Judge speaks

and consigns it to the jailers till it shall pay the endless debt

which lies against it! 'Impossible! I a lost soul? I separated

from hope and from peace forever? It is not I of whom the Judge so

spake! There is a mistake somewhere; Christ, Savior, hold thy

hand: one minute to explain it! My name is Demas: I am but Demas,

not Judas, or Nicholas, or Alexander, or Philetus, or Diotrephes.

What! eternal pain for me? Impossible! it shall not be!' And the

poor soul struggles and wrestles in the grasp of the mighty demon

which has hold of it, and whose every touch is torment. 'Oh,

atrocious!' it shrieks, in agony, and in anger too, as if the

very keenness of the infliction were a proof of its injustice.

'A second! and a third! I can bear no more! Stop, horrible fiend!

give over: I am a man, and not such as thou! I am not food for

thee, or sport for thee! I have been taught religion; I have had

a conscience; I have a cultivated mind; I am well versed in science

and art; I am a philosopher, or a poet, or a shrewd observer of men,

or a hero, or a statesman, or an orator, or a man of wit and humor.

Nay, I have received the grace of the Redeemer; I have attended the

sacraments for years; I have been a Catholic from a child; I died

in communion with the Church: nothing, nothing which I have ever

been, which I have ever seen, bears any resemblance to thee, and

to the flame and stench which exhale from thee: so I defy thee,

and abjure thee, O enemy of man!'

"Alas! poor soul! and, whilst it thus fights with that destiny

which it has brought upon itself and those companions whom it has

chosen, the man's name perhaps is solemnly chanted forth, and his

memory decently cherished, among his friends on earth. Men talk of

him from time to time; they appeal to his authority; they quote

his words; perhaps they even raise a monument to his name, or

write his history. 'So comprehensive a mind! such a power of

throwing light on a perplexed subject and bringing conflicting

ideas or facts into harmony!' 'Such a speech it was that he made

on such and such an occasion: I happened to be present, and never

shall forget it;' or, 'A great personage, whom some of us knew;'

or, 'It was a rule with a very worthy and excellent friend of

mine, now no more;' or, 'Never was his equal in society, so just

in his remarks, so lively, so versatile, so unobtrusive;' or, 'So

great a benefactor to his country and to his kind;' or, 'His

philosophy so profound.' 'Oh, vanity! vanity of vanities! all is

vanity! What profiteth it? What profiteth it? His soul is in hell,

O ye children of men! While thus ye speak, his soul is in the

beginning of those torments in which his body will soon have part,

and which will never die!" 10

Some theologians do not hesitate, even now, to say that "in hell

the bodies of the damned shall be nealed, as we speak of glass, so

as to endure the fire without being annihilated thereby." "Made of

the nature of salamanders," they shall be "immortal kept to feel

immortal fire." Well may we take up the words of the Psalmist and

cry out of the bottomless depths of disgust and anguish, "I am

overwhelmed with horror!"

Holding this abhorrent mass of representations, so grossly carnal

and fearful, up in the free light of to day, it cannot stand the

test of honest and resolute inquiry. It exists only by timid,

unthinking sufferance. It is kept alive, among the superstitious

vestiges of the outworn and out grown past, only by the power of

tradition, authority, and custom. In refutation of it we shall not

present here a prolonged detail of learned researches and logical

processes; for that would be useless to those who are enslaved to

the foregone conclusions of a creed and possessed by invulnerable

prejudices, while those who are thoughtful and candid can make

10 Sermon on "Neglect of Divine Calls and warnings."

such investigations themselves. We shall merely state, in a few

clear and brief propositions, the results in which we suppose all

free and enlightened minds who have adequately studied the subject

now agree, leaving the reader to weigh these propositions for

himself, with such further examination as inclination and

opportunity may cause him to bestow upon the matter.

We reject the common belief of Christians in a hell which is a

local prison of fire where the wicked are to be tortured by

material instruments, on the following grounds, appealing to God

for the reverential sincerity of our convictions, and appealing to

reason for their truth. First, the supposition that hell is an

enormous region in the hollow of the earth is a remnant of ancient

ignorance, a fancy of poets who magnified the grave into Hades, a

thought of geographers who supposed the earth to be flat and

surrounded by a brazen expanse bright above and black beneath.

Secondly, the soul, on leaving the body, is a spiritual substance,

if it be any substance at all, eluding our senses and all the

instruments of science. Therefore, in the nature of things, it

cannot be chained in a dungeon, nor be cognizant of suffering from

material fire or other physical infliction, but its woes must be

moral and inward; and the figment that its former fleshly body is

to be restored to it is utterly incredible, being an absurdity in

science, and not affirmed, as we believe, in Scripture. Thirdly,

the imagery of a subterranean hell of fire, brimstone, and undying

worms, as used in the Scriptures of the New Testament, is the same

as that drawn from heathen sources with modifications and employed

by the Pharisees before the time of Christ and his disciples; and

we must therefore, since neither Persians nor Pharisees were

inspired, either suppose that this imagery was adopted by the

apostles figuratively to convey moral truths, or else that they

were left, in common with their countrymen, at least partially

under the dominion of the errors of their time. Thus in every

alternative we deny that the interior of the earth is, or ever

will be, an abode of souls, full of fire, a hell in which the

damned are to be confined and physically tormented.

The elements of the popular doctrine of future punishment which we

thus reject are the falsities contributed by superstition and the

priestly spirit. The truths remaining in the doctrine, furnished

by conscience, reason, and Scripture, we will next exhibit, in

order not to dismiss this head, on the nature of future

punishment, with negations. What is the real character of the

retributions in the future state? We do not think they are

necessarily connected with any peculiar locality or essentially

dependent on any external circumstances. As Milton says, when

speaking of the best theologians, "To banish forever into a local

hell, whether in the air, or in the centre, or in that uttermost

and bottomless gulf of chaos deeper from holy bliss than the

world's diameter multiplied, they thought not a punishment so

proper and proportionate for God to inflict as to punish sin with

sin."

God does not arbitrarily stretch forth his arm, like an enraged

and vindictive man, and take direct vengeance on offenders; but by

his immutable laws, permeating all beings and governing all

worlds, evil is, and brings, its own punishment. The intrinsic

substances and forces of character and their organized

correlations with the realities of eternity, the ruling

principles, habits, and love of the soul, as they stand affected

towards the world to which they go, these are the conditions on

which experience depends, herein is the hiding of retribution.

"Each one," as Origen says, "kindles the flame of his own

appropriate fire." Superior spirits must look on a corrupted human

soul with a sorrow similar, though infinitely profounder, to that

with which the lapidary contemplates a splendid pearl with a dark

flaw in its centre. The Koran says, "Men sleep while they live,

and when they die they wake." The sudden infliction of pain in the

future state comes from the sudden unveiling of secrets,

quickening of the moral consciousness, and exposure of the naked

soul's fitnesses to the spiritual correspondences of its deserts.

It is said, "Death does Away disguise: souls see each other

clear, At one glance, as two drops of rain in air Might look into

each other had they life."

The quality of the soul's character decides the elements of the

soul's life; and, as this becomes known on crossing the death

drawn line of futurity, conscious retribution then arises in the

guilty. This is a retribution which is reasonable, moral,

unavoidable, before which we may well pause and tremble. The great

moral of it is that we should not so much dread being thrust into

an eternal hell as we should fear carrying a hell with us when we

go into eternity. It is not so bad to be in hell as to be forced

truly to say, "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell."

If these general ideas are correct, it follows even as all common

sense and reflection affirm that every real preparation for death

and for what is to succeed must be an ingrained characteristic,

and cannot consist in a mere opinion, mood, or act. Here we strike

at one of the shallowest errors, one of the most extensive and

rooted superstitions, of the world. Throughout the immense

kingdoms of the East, where the Brahmanic and Buddhist religions

hold sway over six hundred millions of men, the notion of

yadasanna that is, the merit instantaneously obtained when at the

point of death fully prevails. They suppose that in that moment,

regardless of their former lives and of their present characters,

by bringing the mind and the heart into certain momentary states

of thought and feeling, and meditating on certain objects or

repeating certain sacred words, they can suddenly obtain exemption

from punishment in their next life.11 The notion likewise obtains

almost universally among Christians, incredible as it may seem.

With the Romanists, who are three fourths of the Christian world,

it is a most prominent doctrine, everywhere vehemently proclaimed

and acted on: that is the meaning of the sacrament of extreme

unction, whereby, on submission to the Church and confession to a

priest, the venal sins of the dying man are forgiven, purgatory

avoided or lessened, and heaven made sure. The ghost of the King

of Denmark complains most of the unwarned suddenness of his

murder, not of the murder itself, but of its suddenness, which

left him no opportunity to save his soul: "Sleeping, was I by a

brother's hand Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,

11 Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 489.

Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd; No reckoning made, but sent to

my account With all my imperfections on my head."

Hamlet, urged by supernatural solicitings to vengeance, finds his

murderous uncle on his knees at prayer. Stealing behind him with

drawn sword, he is about to strike the fatal blow, when the

thought occurs to him that the guilty man, if killed when at his

devotions, would surely go to heaven; and so he refrains until a

different opportunity. For to send to heaven the villain who had

slain his father,

"That would be hire and salary, not revenge. He took my father

grossly full of bread, With all his crimes broad blown, as flush

as May; And how his audit stands who knows save Heaven? But, in

our circumstance and course of thought, 'Tie heavy with him. And

am I then revenged To take him in the purging of his soul, When he

is fit and season'd for his passage? No; but when he is drunk,

asleep, enraged, Or in the incestuous pleasures of his bed, At

gaming, swearing, or about some act That has no relish of

salvation in't: Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,

And that his soul may be as damn'd and black As hell, whereto it

goes."

This, though poetry, is a fair representation of the mediaval

faith held by all Christendom in sober prose. The same train of

thought latently underlies the feelings of most Protestants too,

though it is true any one would now shrink from expressing it with

such frankness and horrible gusto. But what else means the minute

morbid anatomy of death beds, the prurient curiosity to know how

the dying one bore himself in the solemn passage? How commonly, if

one dies without physical anguish, and with the artificial

exultations of a fanatic, rejoiceful auguries are drawn! if he

dies in physical suffering, and with apparent regret, a gloomy

verdict is rendered! It is superstition, absurdity, and injustice,

all. Not the accidental physical conditions, not the transient

emotions, with which one passes from the earth, can decide his

fate, but the real good or evil of his soul, the genuine fitness

or unfitness of his soul, his soul's inherent merits of bliss or

bale. There is no time nor power in the instant of death, by any

magical legerdemain, to turn away the impending retributions of

wickedness and guilt. What is right, within the conditions of

Infinite wisdom and goodness, will be done in spite of all

traditional juggles and spasmodic spiritual attitudinizations.

What can it avail that a most vile and hardened wretch, when

dying, convulsed with fright and possessed with superstition,

compels, or strives to compel, a certain sentiment into his soul,

conjures, or tries to conjure, his mind into the relation of

belief towards a certain ancient and abstract dogma?

"Yet I've seen men who meant not ill, Compelling doctrine out of

death, With hell and heaven acutely poised Upon the turning of a

breath."

Cruelly racking the soul with useless probes of theological

questions and statements, they stand by the dying to catch the

words of his last breath, and, in perfect consistence with their

faith, they pronounce sentence accordingly. If, as the pallid lips

faintly close, they hear the magic words, "I put my trust in the

atoning blood of Christ," up goes the soul to heaven. If they hear

the less stereotyped words, "I have tried to do as well as I

could: I hope God will be merciful towards me and receive me,"

down goes the soul to hell. Strange and cruel superstition, that

imagines God to act towards men only according to the evanescent

temper and technical phrase with which they leave the world! The

most popular English preacher of the present day, the Rev. Mr.

Spurgeon, after referring to the fable that those before whom

Perseus held the head of Medusa were turned into stone in the very

act and posture of the moment when they saw it, says, "Death is

such a power. What I am when death is held before me, that I must

be forever. When my spirit goes, if God finds me hymning his

praise, I shall hymn it in heaven: doth he find me breathing out

oaths, I shall follow up those oaths in hell. As I die, so shall I

live eternally!" 12

No: the true preparation for death and the invisible realm of

souls is not the eager adoption of an opinion, the hurried

assumption of a mood, or the frightened performance of an outward

act: it is the patient culture of the mind with truth, the pious

purification of the heart with disinterested love, the consecrated

training of the life in holiness, the growth of the soul in habits

of righteousness, faith, and charity, the organization of divine

principles into character. Every real preparation of the soul for

death must be a characteristic rightly related to the immortal

realities to which death is the introduction of the soul. An evil

soul is not thrust into a physical and fiery hell, fenced in and

roofed over from the universal common; but it is revealed to

itself, and consciously enters on retributive relations. In the

spiritual world, whither all go at death, we suppose that like

perceives like, and thus are they saved or damned, having, by the

natural attraction and elective seeing of their virtues or vices,

the beatific vision of God, or the horrid vision of iniquity and

terror.

It cannot be supposed that God is a bounded shape so vast as to

fill the entire circuits of the creation. Spirit transcends the

categories of body, and it is absurd to apply the language of

finite things to the illimitable One, except symbolically. When we

die, we do not sink or soar to the realm of spirits, but are in

it, at once, everywhere; and the resulting experience will depend

on the prevailing elements of our moral being. If we are bad, our

badness is our banishment from God; if we are good, our goodness

is our union with God. In every world the true nature and law of

retribution lie in the recoil of conduct on character, and the

assimilated results ensuing. Take a soul that is saturated with

the rottenness of depravity into the core of heaven, and it is in

the heart of hell still. Take a soul that is compacted of divine

12 Sermons, 3d Series. Sermon XIV., Thoughts on the Last Battle.

realities to the very bottom of hell, and heaven is with it there.

We are treading on eternity, and infinitude is all around us. Now,

as well as hereafter, to us, the universe is action, the soul is

reaction, experience is the resultant. Death but unveils the

facts. Pass that great crisis, in the passage becoming conscious

of universal realities and of individual relations to them, and

the Father will say to the discordant soul, "Alienated one,

incapable of my embrace, change and come to me;" to the harmonious

soul, "Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine."

Having thus considered the question as to the nature of future

punishments, it now remains to discuss the question concerning

their duration. The fact of a just and varied punishment for souls

we firmly believe in. The particulars of it in the future, or the

degrees of its continuance, we think, are concealed from the

present knowledge of man. These details we do not profess to be

able to settle much about. We have but three general convictions

on the subject. First, that these punishments will be experienced

in accordance with those righteous and inmost laws which

indestructibly express the mind of God and rule the universe, and

will not be vindictively inflicted through arbitrary external

penalties. Secondly, that they will be accurately tempered to the

just deserts and qualifications of the individual sufferers. And

thirdly, that they will be alleviated, remedial, and limited, not

unmitigated, hopeless, and endless.

Upon the first of these thoughts perhaps enough has already been

said, and the second and third may be discussed together. Our

business, therefore, in the remainder of this dissertation, is to

disprove, if truth in the hands of reason and conscience will

enable us to disprove, the popular dogma which asserts that the

state of the condemned departed is a state of complete damnation

absolutely eternal. Against that form of representing future

punishment which makes it unlimited by conceiving the destiny of

the soul to be an eternal progress, in which their initiative

steps of good or evil in this life place different souls under

advantages or disadvantages never relatively to be lost, we have

nothing to object. It is reasonable, in unison with natural law,

and not frightful.13 But we are to deal, if we fairly can, a

refutation against the doctrine of an intense endless misery for

the wicked, as that doctrine is prevailingly taught and received.

The advocates of eternal damnation primarily plant themselves upon

the Christian Scriptures, and say that there the voice of an

infallible inspiration from heaven asserts it. First of all, let

us examine this ground, and see if they do not stand there only

upon erroneous premises sustained by prejudices. In the beginning,

then, we submit to candid minds that, if the literal eternity of

future torment be proclaimed in the New Testament, it is not a

part of the revelation contained in that volume; it is not a truth

revealed by inspiration; and that we maintain for this reason. The

same representations of the everlasting duration of future

punishment in hell, the same expressions for an unlimited

duration, which occur in the New Testament, were previously

employed by the Hindus, Greeks, and Pharisees, who were not

inspired, but must have drawn the doctrine from fallible sources.

Now, to say the least, it is as reasonable to suppose that these

expressions, when found in the New Testament, were

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.