We come now to the last class of reasons for disbelieving the

dogma of eternal damnation, namely, those furnished by the

principles of human nature and the truths of human experience. The

doctrine, as we think can be clearly shown, is literally

incredible to the human mind and literally intolerable to the

human heart. In the first place, it is, viewed in the abstract,

absolutely incredible because it is inconceivable: no man can

possibly grasp and appreciate the idea. The nearest approximation

to it ever made perhaps is in De Quincey's gorgeous elaboration of

the famous Hindu myth of an enormous rock finally worn away by the

brushing of a gauze veil; and that is really no approximation at

all, since an incommensurable chasm always separates the finite

and the infinite. John Foster says, "It is infinitely beyond the

highest archangel's faculty to apprehend a thousandth part of the

horror of the doom to eternal damnation." The Buddhists, who

believe that the severest sentence passed on the worst sinner will

be brought to an end and his redemption be attained, use the

following illustration of the staggering periods that will first

elapse. A small yoke is thrown into the ocean and borne about in

every direction by the various winds. Once in a hundred thousand

years a blind tortoise rises to the surface of the water. Will the

time ever come when that tortoise shall so rise up that its neck

shall enter the hole of the yoke? It may, but the time required

cannot be told; and it is equally difficult for the unwise man,

who has entered one of the great hells, to obtain deliverance.

There is a remarkable specimen of the attempt to set forth the

idea of endless misery, by Suso, a mystic preacher who flourished

several centuries ago. It runs thus. "O eternity, what art thou?

Oh, end without end! O father, and mother, and all whom we love!

May God be merciful unto you for evermore! for we shall see you no

more to love you; we must be separated forever! O separation,

everlasting separation, how painful art thou! Oh, the wringing of

hands! Oh, sighing, weeping, and sobbing, unceasing howling and

lamenting, and yet never to be pardoned! Give us a millstone, says

the damned, as large as the whole earth, and so wide in

circumference as to touch the sky all around, and let a little

bird come in a hundred thousand years, and pick off a small

particle of the stone, not larger than the tenth part of a grain

of millet, and after another hundred thousand years let him come

again, so that in ten hundred thousand years he would pick off as

much as a grain of millet, we wretched sinners would desire

nothing but that thus the stone might have an end, and thus our

pains also; yet even that cannot be."23 But, after all the

struggles of reason and all the illustrations of laboring

imagination, the meaning of the phrase "eternal suffering in hell"

remains remote, dim, unrealized, an abstraction in words. If we

could adequately apprehend it, if its full significance should

burst upon us, as sometimes in fearful dreams the spaceless,

timeless, phantasmal, reeling sense of

23 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 210.

the infinite seems to be threatening to break into the brain, an

annihilating shudder would seize and destroy the soul.

We say, therefore, that the doctrine of the eternity of future

punishment is not believed as an intellectually conceived truth,

because that is a metaphysical impossibility. But more: we affirm,

in spite of the general belief in it publicly professed, that it

is actually held by hardly any one as a practical vivid belief

even within the limits wherein, as an intellectual conception, it

is possible. When intellect and imagination do not fail, heart and

conscience do, with sickened faintness and convulsive protest. In

his direful poem on the Last Day, Young makes one of the condemned

vainly beg of God to grant "This one, this slender, almost no,

request: When I have wept a thousand lives away, When torment is

grown weary of its prey, When I have raved of anguish'd years in

fire Ten thousand thousands, let me then expire."

Such a thought, when confronted with any generous holy sentiment

or with any worthy conception of the Divine character, is

practically incredible. The men all around us in whose Church

creed such a doctrine is written down do not truly believe it.

"They delude themselves," as Martineau well says, "with the mere

fancy and image of a belief. The death of a friend who departs

from life in heresy affects them in the same way as the loss of

another whose creed was unimpeachable: while the theoretic

difference is infinite, the practical is virtually nothing." Who

that had a child, parent, wife, brother, or other precious friend,

condemned to be roasted to death by a slow fire, would not be

frantic with agony? But there are in the world literally millions

on millions, some of whose nearest and dearest ones have died

under circumstances which, by their professed creeds, can leave no

doubt that they must roast in the fires of hell in an anguish

unutterably fiercer, and for eternity, and yet they go about as

smilingly, engage in the battle for money, in the race for fame,

in all the vain shows and frivolous pleasures of life, as eagerly

and as gayly as others. How often do we see the literal truth of

this exemplified! It is clear they do not believe in the dogma to

whose technical terms they formally subscribe.

A small proportion of its professors do undeniably believe the

doctrine so far as it can be sanely believed; and accordingly the

world is to them robed in a sable shroud, and life is an awful

mockery, under a flashing surface of sports concealing a

bottomless pit of horror. Every observing person has probably

known some few in his life who, in a degree, really believed the

common notions concerning hell, and out of whom, consequently, all

geniality, all bounding impulses, all magnanimous generosities,

were crushed, and their countenances wore the perpetual livery of

mourning, despair, and misanthropy. We will quote the confessions

of two persons who may stand as representatives of the class of

sincere believers in the doctrine. The first is a celebrated

French preacher of a century and a half ago, the other a very

eminent American divine of the present day. Saurin says, in his

great sermon on Hell, "I sink under the weight of this subject,

and I find in the thought a mortal poison which diffuseth itself

into every period of my life, rendering society tiresome,

nourishment insipid, pleasure disgustful, and life itself a cruel

bitter." Albert Barnes writes, "In the distress and anguish of my

own spirit, I confess I see not one ray to disclose to me the

reason why man should suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a

particle of light thrown on these subjects that has given a

moment's ease to my tortured mind. It is all dark dark dark to my

soul; and I cannot disguise it."

Such a state of mind is the legitimate result of an endeavor

sincerely to grasp and hold the popularly professed belief. So

often as that endeavor reaches a certain degree of success, and

the idea of an eternal hell is reduced from its vagueness to an

embraced conception, the over fraught heart gives way, the brain,

stretched on too high a tension, reels, madness sets in, and one

more case is added to that list of maniacs from religious causes

which, according to the yearly reports of insane asylums, forms so

large a class. Imagine what a vast and sudden change would come

over the spirit and conduct of society if nineteen twentieths of

Christendom believed that at the end of a week a horrible influx

of demons, from some insurgent region, would rush into our world

and put a great majority of our race to death in excruciating

tortures! But the doctrine of future punishment professed by

nineteen twentieths of Christendom is, if true, an evil

incomparably worse than that, though every element of its

dreadfulness were multiplied by millions beyond the power of

numeration; and yet all goes on as quietly, the most of these

fancied believers live as chirpingly, as if heaven were sure for

everybody! Of course in their hearts they do not believe the

terrific formula which drops so glibly from their tongues.

Again: it is a fatal objection to the doctrine in question that if

it be true it must destroy the happiness of the saved and fill all

heaven with sympathetic woe. Jesus teaches that "there is joy in

heaven over every sinner that repenteth." By a moral necessity,

then, there is sorrow in heaven over the wretched, lost soul. That

sorrow, indeed, may be alleviated, if not wholly quenched, by the

knowledge that every retributive pang is remedial, and that God's

glorious design will one day be fully crowned in the redemption of

the last prodigal. But what shall solace or end it if they know

that hell's borders are to be enlarged and to rage with avenging

misery forever? The good cannot be happy in heaven if they are to

see the ascending smoke and hear the resounding shrieks of a hell

full of their brethren, the children of a common humanity, among

whom are many of their own nearest relatives and dearest friends.

True, a long list of Christian writers may be cited as maintaining

that this is to be a principal element in the felicity of the

redeemed, gloating over the tortures of the damned, singing the

song of praise with redoubled emphasis as they see their parents,

their children, their former bosom companions, writhing and

howling in the fell extremities of torture. Thomas Aquinas says,

"That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God

more richly, a perfect sight of the punishment of the damned is

granted to them."24 Especially did the Puritans seem to revel in

this idea, that "the joys of the blessed were to be deepened and

sharpened by constant contrast with the sufferings of the damned."

One of them thus expresses the delectable thought: "The sight of

hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever, as a

sense of the opposite misery always increases the relish of any

pleasure."

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

But perhaps Hopkins caps the climax of the diabolical pyramid of

these representations, saying of the wicked, "The smoke of their

torment shall ascend up in the sight of the blessed for ever and

ever, and serve, as a most clear glass always before their eyes,

to give them a bright and most affecting view. This display of the

Divine character will be most entertaining to all who love God,

will give them the highest and most ineffable pleasure. Should the

fire of this eternal punishment cease, it would in a great measure

obscure the light of heaven and put an end to a great part of the

happiness and glory of the blessed."25 That is to say, in plain

terms, the saints, on entering their final state of bliss in

heaven, are converted into a set of unmitigated fiends, out

sataning Satan, finding their chief delight in forever comparing

their own enjoyments with the pangs of the damned, extracting

morsels of surpassing relish from every convulsion or shriek of

anguish they see or hear. It is all an exquisite piece of

gratuitous horror arbitrarily devised to meet a logical exigency

of the theory its contrivers held. When charged that the knowledge

of the infinite woe of their friends in hell must greatly affect

the saints, the stern old theologians, unwilling to recede an inch

from their dogmas, had the amazing hardihood to declare that, so

far from it, on the contrary their wills would so blend with God's

that the contemplation of this suffering would be a source of

ecstasy to them. It is doubly a blank assumption of the most

daring character, first assuming, by an unparalleled blasphemy,

that God himself will take delight in the pangs of his creatures,

and secondly assuming, by a violation of the laws of human nature

and of every principle of morals, that the elect will do so too.

In this world a man actuated by such a spirit would be styled a

devil. On entering heaven, what magic shall work such a demoniacal

change in him? There is not a word, direct or indirect, in the

Scriptures to warrant the dreadful notion; nor is there any

reasonable explanation or moral justification of it given by any

of its advocates, or indeed conceivable. The monstrous hypothesis

cannot be true. Under the omnipotent, benignant government of a

paternal God, each change of character in his chosen children, as

they advance, must be for the better, not for the worse.

We once heard a father say, running his fingers the while among

the golden curls of his child's hair, "If I were in heaven, and

saw my little daughter in hell, should not I be rushing down there

after her?" There spoke the voice of human nature; and that love

cannot be turned to hatred in heaven, but must grow purer and

intenser there. The doctrine which makes the saints pleased with

contemplating the woes of the damned, and even draw much of their

happiness from the contrast, is the deification of the absolute

selfishness of a demon. Human nature, even when left to its

uncultured instincts, is bound to far other and nobler things.

Radbod, one of the old Scandinavian kings, after long resistance,

finally consented to be baptized. After he had put one foot into

the water, he asked the priest if he should meet his forefathers

in heaven. Learning that they, being unbaptized pagans, were

victims of endless misery, he drew his foot back, and refused the

rite, choosing to be with his brave ancestors in hell rather than

to be in heaven with the Christian priests. And, speaking from the

stand point of the highest refinement of feeling and virtue, who

that has a heart in his

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

bosom would not say, "Heaven can be no heaven to me, if I am to

look down on the quenchless agonies of all I have loved here!" Is

it not strictly true that the thought that even one should have

endless woe "Would cast a shadow on the throne of God And darken

heaven"?

If a monarch, possessing unlimited power over all the earth, had

condemned one man to be stretched on a rack and be freshly plied

with incessant tortures for a period of fifty years, and if

everybody on earth could hear his terrible shrieks by day and

night, though they were themselves all, with this sole exception,

blessed with perfect happiness, would not the whole human race,

from Spitzbergen to Japan, from Rio Janeiro to Liberia, rise in a

body and go to implore the king's clemency for the solitary

victim? So, if hell had but one tenant doomed to eternal anguish,

a petition reaching from Sirius to Alcyone, signed by the universe

of moral beings, borne by a convoy of angels representing every

star in space, would be laid and unrolled at the foot of God's

throne, and He would read thereon this prayer: "FORGIVE HIM, AND

RELEASE HIM, WE BESEECH THEE, O GOD." And can it be that every

soul in the universe is better than the Maker and Father of the

universe?

The popular doctrine of eternal torment threatening nearly all our

race is refuted likewise by the impossibility of any general

observance of the obligations morally and logically consequent

from it. In the first place, as the world is constituted, and as

life goes on, the great majority of men are upon the whole happy,

evidently were meant to be happy. But every believer of the

doctrine in debate is bound to be unutterably wretched. If he has

any gleam of generous sentiment or touch of philanthropy in his

bosom, if he is not a frozen petrifaction of selfishness or an

incarnate devil, how can he look on his family, friends,

neighbors, fellow citizens, fellow beings, in the light of his

faith seeing them quivering over the dizzy verge of a blind

probation and momentarily dropping into the lake of fire and

brimstone that burns forever, how can he do this without being

ceaselessly stung with wretchedness and crushed with horror by the

perception? For a man who appreciatingly believes that hell is

directly under our meadows, streets, and homes, and that nine

tenths of the dead are in it, and that nine tenths of the living

soon will be, for such a man to be happy and jocose is as horrible

as it would be for a man, occupying the second story of a house,

to light it up brilliantly with gas, and make merry with his

friends, eating tidbits, sipping wine, and tripping it on the

light fantastic toe to the strains of gay music, while,

immediately under him, men, women, and children, including his own

parents and his own children, were stretched on racks, torn with

pincers, lacerated with surgical instruments, cauterized, lashed

with whips of fire, their half suppressed shrieks and groans

audibly rising through the floor!

Secondly, if the doctrine be true, then all unnecessary worldly

enterprises, labors, and studies should at once cease. One moment

on earth, and then, accordingly as we spend that moment, an

eternity in heaven or in hell: in heaven, if we succeed in

placating God by a sound belief and ritual proprieties; in hell,

if we are led astray by philosophy, nature, and the attractions of

life! On these suppositions, what time have we for any thing but

reciting our creed, meditating on the atonement, and seeking to

secure an interest for ourselves with God by flouting at our

carnal reason, praying in church, and groaning, "Lord, Lord, have

mercy on us miserable sinners"? What folly, what mockery, to be

searching into the motions of the stars, and the occult forces of

matter, and the other beautiful mysteries of science! There will

be no astronomy in hell, save vain speculations as to the distance

between the nadir of the damned and the zenith of the saved; no

chemistry in hell, save the experiments of infinite wrath in

distilling new torture poisons in the alembics of memory and

depositing fresh despair sediments in the crucibles of hope. If

Calvin's doctrine be true, let no book be printed, save the

"Westminster Catechism;" no calculation be ciphered, save how to

"solve the problem of damnation;" no picture be painted, save

"pictures of hell;" no school be supported, save "schools of

theology;" no business be pursued, save "the business of

salvation." What have men who are in imminent peril, who are in

truth almost infallibly sure, of being eternally damned the next

instant, what have they to do with science, literature, art,

social ambition, or commerce? Away with them all! Lures of the

devil to snare souls are they! The world reflecting from every

corner the lurid glare of hell, who can do any thing else but

shudder and pray? "Who could spare any attention for the

vicissitudes of cotton and the price of shares, for the merits of

the last opera and the bets upon the next election, if the actors

in these things were really swinging in his eye over such a verge

as he affects to see?"

Thirdly, those who believe the popular theory on this subject are

bound to live in cheap huts, on bread and water, that they may

devote to the sending of missionaries among the heathen every cent

of money they can get beyond that required for the bare

necessities of life. If our neighbor were perishing of hunger at

our door, it would be our duty to share with him even to the last

crust we had. How much more, then, seeing millions of our poor

helpless brethren sinking ignorantly into the eternal fires of

hell, are we bound to spare no possible effort until the

conditions of salvation are brought within the reach of every one!

An American missionary to China said, in a public address after

his return, "Fifty thousand a day go down to the fire that is not

quenched. Six hundred millions more are going the same road.

Should you not think at least once a day of the fifty thousand who

that day sink to the doom of the lost?" The American Board of

Commissioners of Foreign Missions say, "To send the gospel to the

heathen is a work of great exigency. Within the last thirty years

a whole generation of five hundred millions have gone down to

eternal death." Again: the same Board say, in their tract entitled

"The Grand Motive to Missionary Effort," "The heathen are involved

in the ruins of the apostasy, and are expressly doomed to

perdition. Six hundred millions of deathless souls on the brink of

hell! What a spectacle!" How a man who thinks the heathen are thus

sinking to hell by wholesale through ignorance of the gospel can

live in a costly house, crowded with luxuries and splendors,

spending every week more money on his miserable body than he gives

in his whole life to save the priceless souls for which he says

Christ died, is a problem admitting but two solutions. Either his

professed faith is an unreality to him, or else he is as selfish

as a demon and as hard hearted as the nether millstone. If he

really believed the doctrine, and had a human heart, he must feel

it to be his duty to deny himself every indulgence and give his

whole fortune and earnings to the missionary fund. And when he had

given all else, he ought to give himself, and go to pagan lands,

proclaiming the means of grace until his last breath. If he does

not that, he is inexcusable.

Should he attempt to clear himself of this obligation by adopting

the theory of predestination, which asserts that all men were

unconditionally elected from eternity, some to heaven, others to

hell, so that no effort can change their fate, logical consistency

reduces him to an alternative more intolerable in the eyes of

conscience and common sense than the other was. For by this theory

the gates of freedom and duty are hoisted, and the dark flood of

antinomian consequences rushes in. All things are fated. Let men

yield to every impulse and wish. The result is fixed. We have

nothing to do. Good or evil, virtue or crime, alter nothing.

Fourthly, if the common doctrine of eternal damnation be true,

then surely no more children should be brought into the world: it

is a duty to let the race die out and cease. He who begets a

child, forcing him to run the fearful risk of human existence,

with every probability of being doomed to hell at the close of

earth, commits a crime before whose endless consequences of horror

the guilt of fifty thousand deliberate murders would be as

nothing. For, be it remembered, an eternity in hell is an infinite

evil; and therefore the crime of thrusting such a fate on a single

child, with the unasked gift of being, is a crime admitting of no

just comparison. Rather than populate an everlasting hell with

human vipers and worms, a hell whose fires, alive and wriggling

with ghastly shapes of iniquity and anguish, shall swell with a

vast accession of fresh recruits from every generation, rather

than this, let the sacred lights on the marriage altar go out, no

more bounding forms of childhood be seen in cottage or hall, the

race grow old, thin out, and utterly perish, all happy villages be

overgrown, all regal cities crumble down, and this world roll

among the silent stars henceforth a globe of blasted deserts and

rank wildernesses, resonant only with the shrieks of the wind, the

yells of wild beasts, and the thunder's crash.

Fifthly, there is one more conclusion of moral duty deducible from

the prevalent theory of infinite torment. It is this. God ought

not to have permitted Adam to have any children. Let us not seem

presumptuous and irreverent in speaking thus. We are merely

reasoning on the popular theory of the theologians, not on any

supposition of our own or on any truth; and by showing the

absurdity and blasphemy of the moral consequences and duties

flowing from that theory, the absurdity, blasphemy, and

incredibility of the theory itself appear. We are not responsible

for the irreverence, but they are responsible for it who charge

God with the iniquity which we repel from his name. If the sin of

Adam must entail total depravity and an infinite penalty of

suffering on all his posterity, who were then certainly innocent

because not in existence, then, we ask, why did not God cause the

race to stop with Adam, and so save all the needless and cruel woe

that would otherwise surely be visited on the lengthening line of

generations? Or, to go still further back, why did he not,

foreseeing Adam's fall, refrain from creating even him? There was

no necessity laid on God of creating Adam. No positive evil would

have been done by omitting to create him. An infinite evil,

multiplied by the total number of the lost, was done by creating

him. Why, then, was he not left in peaceful nonentity? On the

Augustinian theory we see no way of escaping this awful dilemma.

Who can answer the question which rises to heaven from the abyss

of the damned? "Father of mercies, why from silent earth Didst

thou awake and curse me into birth, Push into being a reverse of

thee, And animate a clod with misery?"

Satan is a sort of sublime Guy Fawkes, lurking in the infernal

cellar, preparing the train of that stupendous Gunpowder Plot by

which he hopes, on the day of judgment, to blow up the world

parliament of unbelievers with a general petard of damnation. Will

the King connive at this nefarious prowler and permit him to carry

out his design?

The doctrine of eternal damnation, as it has prevailed in the

Christian Church, appears to the natural man so unreasonable,

immoral, and harrowingly frightful, when earnestly contemplated,

that there have always been some who have shrunk from its

representations and sought to escape its conclusions. Many of its

strongest advocates in every age have avowed it to be a fearful

mystery, resting on the inscrutable sovereignty of God, and beyond

the power of man's faculties to explain and justify. The dogma has

been eluded in two ways. Some have believed in the annihilation of

the wicked after they should have undergone just punishment

proportioned to their sins. This supposition has had a

considerable number of advocates. It was maintained, among others,

by Arnobius, at the close of the third century, by the Socini, by

Dr. Hammond, and by some of the New England divines.26 All that

need be said in opposition to it is that it is an arbitrary device

to avoid the intolerable horror of the doctrine of endless misery,

unsupported by proof, extremely unsatisfactory in many of its

bearings, and really not needed to achieve the consummation

desired.

Others have more wisely maintained that all will finally be saved:

however severely and long they may justly suffer, they will at

last all be mercifully redeemed by God and admitted to the common

heaven. Defenders of the doctrine of ultimate universal salvation

have appeared from the beginning of Christian history.27 During

the last century and a half their numbers have rapidly

increased.28 A dignified and influential class of theologians,

represented by such names as Tillotson. Bahrdt, and Less, say that

the threats of eternal punishment, in the Scriptures, are

exaggerations to deter men from sin, and that God will not really

execute them, but will mercifully abate and limit them.29 Another

class of theologians, much more free, consistent, and numerous,

base their reception of the doctrine of final restoration on

figurative explanations of the scriptural language seemingly

opposed to it, and on arguments drawn from the character of God,

from reason, and from morals. This view of the subject is

spreading fast. All independent, genial, and cultivated thought

naturally leads to it. The central principles of the gospel

necessitate it. The spirit of the age cries for it. Before it the

old antagonistic dogma must fall and perish from respect. Dr.

Spring says, in reference to the hopeless condemnation of the

wicked to hell, "It puts in requisition all our confidence

26 This theory bas been resuscitated and advocated within a few

years by quite a number of writers, among whom may be specified

the Rev. C. F. Hudson, author of "Debt and Grace," a learned,

earnest, and able work, pervaded by an admirable spirit.

27 Ballou, Ancient History of Universalism.

28 Whittemore, Modern History of Universalism.

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

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

A few devout and powerful minds have sought to avoid the gross

horrors and unreasonableness of the usual view of this subject, by

changing the mechanical and arithmetical values of the terms for

spiritual and religious values. They give the word "eternity" a

qualitative instead of a quantitative meaning. The everlasting woe

of the damned consists not in mechanical inflictions of torture

and numerical increments of duration, but in spiritual discord,

alienation from God, a wretched state of being, with which times

and spaces have nothing to do.31

How much better were it for the advocates of the popular theory,

instead of forcing their moral nature to bear up against the awful

perplexities and misgivings as to the justice and goodness of God

necessarily raised in them whenever they really face the dark

problems of their system of faith,32 resolutely to ask whether

there are any such problems in the actual government of God, or

anywhere else, except in their own "Bodies of Divinity"! It is an

extremely unfortunate and discreditable evasion of responsibility

when any man, especially when a teacher, takes for granted the

received formularies handed down to him, and, instead of honestly

analyzing their genuine significance and probing their foundations

to see if they be good and true, spends his genius in contriving

excuses and supports for them.

It is the very worst policy at this day to strive to fasten the

dogma of eternal misery to the New Testament. If both must be

taken or rejected together, an alternative which we emphatically

deny, what sincere and earnest thinker now, whose will is

unterrifiedly consecrated to truth, can be expected to hesitate

long? The doctrine is sustained in repute at present principally

for two reasons. First, because it has been transmitted to us from

the Church of the past as the established and authoritative

doctrine. It is yet technically current and popular because it has

been so: that is, it retains its place simply by right of

possession. The question ought to be sincerely and universally

raised whether it is true or false. Then it will swiftly lose its

prestige and disappear. Secondly, it is upheld and patronized by

many as a useful instrument for frightening the people and through

their fears deterring them from sin. We have ourselves heard

clergymen of high reputation say that it would never do to admit,

before the people, that there is any chance whatever of penitence

and salvation beyond the grave, because they would be sure to

abuse the hope as a sort of permission to indulge and continue in

sin. Thus to ignore the only solemn and worthy standard of judging

an abstract doctrine, namely, Is it a truth or a falsehood? and

put it solely on grounds of working expediency, is disgraceful,

contemptible, criminal. Watts exposes with well merited rebuke a

gross instance of pious frail in Burnet, who advised preachers to

teach the eternity of future punishment whether they believed it

or not.33 It is by such a course that error and superstition

reign, that truckling conformity, intellectual disloyalty, moral

indifference, vice, and infidelity, abound. It is practical

atheism, debauchery of conscience, and genuine spiritual

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

31 Lange, Positive Dogmatik, sect. 131: Die Aeonen der Verdammten.

Maurice, Theological Essays: Future Punishment.

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

33 World to Come, Disc. XIII.

death. Besides, the course we are characterizing is actually as

inexpedient in practice as it is wrong in theory. Experience and

observation show it to be as pernicious in its result as it is

immoral in its origin. Is a threat efficacious over men in

proportion to its intrinsic terror, or in proportion as it is

personally felt and feared by them? Do the menacing penalties of a

sin deter a man from it in proportion to their awfulness, or in

proportion to his belief in their reality and unavoidableness?

Eternal misery would be a threat of infinite frightfulness, if it

were realized and believed. But it is incredible. Some reject it

with indignation and an impetuous recoil that sends them much too

far towards antinomianism. Others let it float in the spectral

background of imagination, the faint reflection of a disagreeable

and fading dream. To all it is an unreality. An earnest belief in

a sure retribution exactly limited to desert must be far more

effective. If an individual had a profound conviction that for

every sin he committed he must suffer a million centuries of

inexpressible anguish, realizing that thought, would he commit a

sin?

If he cannot appreciate that enormous penalty, much less can he

the infinite one, which is far more likely to shade off and blur

out into a vague and remote nothing. Truth is an expression of

God's will, which we are bound exclusively to accept and employ

regardless of consequences. When we do that, God, the author of

truth, is himself solely responsible for the consequences. But

when, thinking we can devise something that will work better, we

use some theory of our own, we are responsible for the

consequences. Let every one beware how he ventures to assume that

dread responsibility. It is surely folly as well as sin. For

nothing can work so well as truth, the simple, calm, living truth,

which is a chime in the infinite harmony of morals and things. It

is only the morbid melodramatic tastes and incompetencies of an

unfinished culture that make men think otherwise. The magnificent

poetry of the day of judgment an audience of five hundred thousand

millions gathered in one throng as the Judge rises to pronounce

the last oration over a dissolving universe takes possession of

the fancy, and people conceive it so vividly, and are so moved by

it, that they think they see it to be true.

Grant for a moment the truth of the conception of hell as a

physical world of fiery torture full of the damned. Suppose the

scene of probation over, hell filled with its prisoners shut up,

banished and buried in the blackest deeps of space. Can it be left

there forever? Can it be that the roar of its furnace shall rage

on, and the wail of the execrable anguish ascend, eternally?

Endeavor to realize in some faint degree what these questions

mean, and then answer. If anybody can find it in his heart or in

his head to say yes, and can gloat over the idea, and wish to have

it continually brandished in terrorem over the heads of the

people, one feels impelled to declare that he of all men the most

needs to be converted to the Christian spirit. An unmitigated hell

of depravity, pain, and horror, would be Satan's victory and God's

defeat; for the very wish of a Satanic being must be for the

everlasting prevalence of sin and wretchedness. As above the

weltering hosts of the lost, each dreadful second, the iron clock

of hell ticked the thunder word "eternity," how would the devil on

his sulphurous dais shout in triumph! But if such a world of fire,

crowded with the writhing damned, ever existed at all, could it

exist forever?

Could the saved be happy and passive in heaven when the muffled

shrieks of their brethren, faint from the distance, fell on their

ears? In tones of love and pity that would melt the very

mountains, they would plead with God to pardon and free the lost.

Many a mourning lover would realize the fable of the Thracian poet

who wandered into Hades searching for his Eurydice; many a heroic

son would emulate the legend of the Grecian god who burst through

the iron walls of Tartarus and rescued his mother, the unfortunate

Semele, and led her in triumph up to heaven.

Could the angels be contented when they contemplated the far off

lurid orb and knew the agonies that fed its conscious conflagration?

Their gentle bosoms would be racked with commiserating pangs,

they would fly down and hover around that anguished world,

to moisten its parched tongues with the dropping of their sympathetic

tears and to cool its burning brows with the fanning of their wings.

Could Christ be satisfied? he who once was rich but for our sakes

became poor? he whose loving soul breathed itself forth in the

tender words, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy

laden, and I will give you rest"? he who poured his blood on

Judea's awful summit, be satisfied? Not until he had tried the

efficacy of ten thousand fresh crucifixions, on as many new

Calvaries, would he rest.

Could God suffer it? God! with the full rivers of superfluous

bliss rolling around thy throne, couldst thou look down and hear

thy creatures calling thee Father, and see them plunging in a sea

of fire eternally eternally eternally and never speak the

pardoning word? It would not be like thee, it would be like thine

adversary to do that. Not so wouldst thou do. But if Satan had

millions of prodigals, snatched from the fold of thy family, shut

up and tortured in hell, paternal yearnings after them would fill

thy heart. Love's smiles would light the dread abyss where they

groan. Pity's tears would fall over it, shattered by the radiance

into rainbows. And through that illumination THOU wouldst descend,

marching beneath the arch of its triumphal glories to the rescue

of thy children! Therefore we rest in hope, knowing that "Thou

wilt not leave our souls in hell."

CHAPTER V.

THE FIVE THEORETIC MODES OF SALVATION.

THE conceptions and fore feelings of immortality which men have

entertained have generally been accompanied by a sense of

uncertainty in regard to the nature of that inheritance, by a

perception of contingent conditions, yielding a twofold fate of

bliss and woe, poised on the perilous hinge of circumstance or

freedom. Almost as often and profoundly, indeed, as man has

thought that he should live hereafter, that idea has been followed

by the belief that if, on the one hand, salvation gleamed for him

in the possible sky, on the other hand perdition yawned for him in

the probable abyss. Heaven and Hell are the light side and shade

side of the doctrine of a future life. Few questions are more

interesting, as none can be more important, than that inquiry

which is about the salvation of the soul. The inherent reach of

this inquiry, and the extent of its philosophical and literary

history, are great. But, by arranging under certain heads the

various principal schemes of salvation which Christian teachers

have from time to time presented for popular acceptance, and

passing them before the mind in order and in mutual lights, we can

very much narrow the space required to exhibit and discuss them.

When the word "salvation" occurs in the following investigation,

it means unless something different be shown by the context the

removal of the soul's doom to misery beyond the grave, and the

securing of its future blessedness. Heaven and hell are terms

employed with wide latitude and fluctuating boundaries of literal

and figurative meaning; but their essential force is simply a

future life of wretchedness, a future life of joy; and salvation,

in its prevailing theological sense, is the avoidance of that and

the gaining of this. We shall not attempt to present the different

theories of redemption in their historical order of development,

or to give an exhaustive account of their diversified prevalence,

but shall arrange them with reference to the most perspicuous

exhibition of their logical contents and practical bearings.

The first scheme of Christian salvation to be noticed is the one

by which it is represented that the interference and suffering of

Christ, in itself, unconditionally saved all souls and emptied

hell forever. This theory arose in the minds of those who received

it as the natural and consistent completion of the view they held

concerning the nature and consequences of the fall of Adam, the

cause and extent of the lost state of man. Adam, as the federal

head of humanity, represented and acted for his whole race: the

responsibility of his decision rested, the consequences of his

conduct would legitimately descend, it was thought, upon all

mankind. If he had kept himself obedient through that easy yet

tremendous probation in Eden, he and all his children would have

lived on earth eternally in perfect bliss. But, violating the

commandment of God, the burden of sin, with its terrible penalty,

fell on him and his posterity. Every human being was henceforth to

be alien from the love of goodness and from the favor of God,

hopelessly condemned to death and the pains of hell. The sin of

Adam, it was believed, thoroughly corrupted the nature of man, and

incapacitated him from all successful efforts to save his soul

from its awful doom. The infinite majesty of God's will, the law

of the universe, had been insulted by disobedience. The only just

retribution was the suffering of an endless death. The adamantine

sanctities of God's government made forgiveness impossible. Thus

all men were lost, to be the prey of blackness, and fire, and the

undying worm, through the remediless ages of eternity. Just then

God had pity on the souls he had made, and himself came to the

rescue. In the person of Christ, he came into the world as a man,

and freely took upon himself the infinite debt of man's sins, by

his death on the cross expiated all offences, satisfied the claims

of offended justice, vindicated the inexpressible sacredness of

the law, and, at the same time, opened a way by which a full and

free reconciliation was extended to all. When the blood of Jesus

flowed over the cross, it purchased the ransom of every sinner. As

Jerome says, "it quenched the flaming sword at the entrance of

Paradise." The weary multitude of captives rose from their bed,

shook off the fetters and stains of the pit, and made the cope of

heaven snowy with their white winged ascent. The prison house of

the devil and his angels should be used no more to confine the

guilty souls of men.1 Their guilt was all washed away in the blood

of the Lamb. Their spirits, without exception, should follow to

the right hand of the Father, in the way marked out by the

ascending Redeemer. This is the first form of Universalism, the

form in which it was held by several of the Fathers in the earlier

ages of the Church, and by the pioneers of that doctrine in modern

times. Cyril of Jerusalem says, "Christ went into the under world

alone, but came out with many." 2 Cyril of Alexandria says that

when Christ ascended from the under world he "emptied it, and left

the devil there utterly alone." 3 The opinion that the whole

population of Hades was released, is found in the lists of ancient

heresies.4 It was advanced by Clement, an Irish priest, antagonist

of Boniface the famous Archbishop of Mentz, in the middle of the

eighth century. He was deposed by the Council of Soissons, and

afterwards anathematized by Pope Zachary. Gregory the Great also

refers in one of his letters with extreme severity to two

ecclesiastics, contemporaries of his own, who held the same

belief. Indeed, this conclusion is a necessary result of a

consistent development of the creed of the Orthodox Church, so

called. By the sin of one, even Adam, through the working of

absolute justice, hell became the portion of all, irrespective of

any fault or virtue of theirs; so, by the voluntary sacrifice, the

infinite atonement, of one, even Christ, through the unspeakable

mercy of God, salvation was effected for all, irrespective of any

virtue or fault of theirs. One member of the scheme is the exact

counterpoise of the other; one doctrine cries out for and

necessitates the other. Those who accept the commonly received

dogmas of original sin, total depravity, and universal

condemnation entailed upon all men in lineal descent from Adam,

and the dogmas of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Vicarious

Atonement, are bound, by all the constructions of logic, to accept

the scheme of salvation just set forth, namely, that the death of

Christ secured the deliverance of all unconditionally. We do not

believe that doctrine, only because we do not believe the other

associated doctrines out of which it springs and of whose system

it is the complement.

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

Theolog.

2 Catechesis xis. 9.

3 De Festis Paschalibus, homilia vii.

4 Augustine, De Haresibus, lxxix.

The reasons why we do not believe that our race fell into helpless

depravity and ruin in the sin of the first man are, in essence,

briefly these: First, we have never been able to perceive any

proof whatever of the truth of that dogma; and certainly the onus

probandi rests on the side of such an assumption. It arose

partially from a misinterpretation of the language of the Bible;

and so far as it has a basis in Scripture, we are compelled by

force of evidence to regard it as a Jewish adoption of a pagan

error without authority. Secondly, this doctrinal system seems to

us equally irreconcilable with history and with ethics: it seems

to trample on the surest convictions of reason and conscience, and

spurn the clearest principles of nature and religion, to blacken

and load the heart and doom of man with a mountain of gratuitous

horror, and shroud the face and throne of God in a pall of wilful

barbarity. How can men be guilty of a sin committed thousands of

years before they were born, and deserve to be sent to hopeless

hell for it? What justice is there in putting on one sinless head

the demerits of a world of reprobates, and then letting the

criminal go free because the innocent has suffered? A third

objection to this whole view an objection which, if sustained,

will utterly annihilate it is this: It is quite possible that,

momentous as is the part he has played in theology, the Biblical

Adam is not at all a historical personage, but only a significant

figment of poetry. The common belief of the most authoritative men

of science, that the human race has existed on this earth for a

vastly longer period than the Hebrew statement affirms, may yet be

completely established. It may also yet be acknowledged that each

distinct race of men had its own Adam.5 Then the dogmatic

theology, based on the fall of our entire race into perdition in

its primary representative, will, of course, crumble.

The second doctrine of Christian salvation is a modification and

limitation of the previous one. This theory, like the former,

presupposes that a burden of original sin and natural depravity

transmitted from the first man had doomed, and, unless prevented

in some supernatural manner, would forever press, all souls down

to the realms of ruin and woe; also that an infinite graciousness

in the bosom of the Godhead led Christ to offer himself as an

expiation for the sins, an atoning substitute for the condemnation,

of men. But, according to the present view, this interference

of Christ did not by itself save the lost: it only removed

the otherwise insuperable bar to forgiveness, and presented

to a chosen portion of mankind the means of experiencing

a condition upon the realization of which, in each individual

case, the certainty of salvation depends. That condition is a

mysterious conversion, stirring the depths of the soul through an

inspired faith in personal election by the unchanging decree of

God. The difference, then, in a word, between the two methods of

salvation thus far explained, is this: While both assume that

mankind are doomed to death and hell in consequence of the sin of

Adam, the one asserts that the interference of Christ of itself

saved all souls, the other asserts that that interference cannot

save any soul except those whom God, of his sovereign pleasure,

had from eternity arbitrarily elected.6 This scheme grew directly

out of the dogma of fatalism, which sinks human freedom in Divine

predestination. God having solely of his

5 Burdach, Carus, Oken, Bayrhoffer, Agassiz. See Bunsen,

Christianity and Mankind, vol. iv. p. 28; Mott and Gliddon, Types

of Mankind, p. 338.

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

own will foreordained that a certain number of mankind should be

saved, Christ died in order to pay the penalty of their sins and

render it possible for them to be forgiven and taken into heaven

without violating the awful bond of justice. The benefits of the

atonement, therefore, are limited to the elect. Nor is this to be

regarded as an act of severity; on the contrary, it is an act of

unspeakable benevolence. For by the sin of Adam the whole race of

men, without exception, were hateful to God, and justly sentenced

to eternal damnation. When, consequently, he devised a plan of

redemption by which he could himself bear the guilt, and suffer

the agony, and pay the debt of a few, and thus ransom them from

their doom, the reprobates who were left had no right to complain,

but the chosen were a monument of disinterested love, because all

alike deserved the endless tortures of hell. According to this

conception, all men being by their ancestral act and inherited

nature irretrievably lost, God's arbitrary pleasure was the cause,

Christ's voluntary death was the means, by which a certain number

were to be saved. What individuals should compose this portion of

the race, was determined from eternity beyond all contingencies.

The effect of faith and conversion, and of the new birth, is not

to save the soul, but simply to convince the soul that it is

saved. That is to say, a regenerating belief and love is not the

efficient cause, it is merely the revealed assurance, of

salvation, proving to the soul that feels it, by the testimony of

the Holy Spirit, that it is of the chosen number. The preaching of

the gospel is to be extended everywhere, not for the purpose of

saving those who would otherwise be lost, but because its

presentation will awaken in the elect, and in them alone, that

responsive experience which will reveal their election to them,

and make them sure of it, already foretasting it; though it is

thought that no one can be saved who is ignorant of the gospel: it

is mysteriously ordered that the terms of the covenant shall be

preached to all the elect. There are correlated complexities,

miracles, absurdities, in wrought with the whole theory,

inseparable from it. The violence it does to nature, to thought,

to love, to morals, its arbitrariness, its mechanical form, the

wrenching exegesis by which alone it can be forced from the

Bible,7 its glaring partiality and eternal cruelty, are its

sufficient refutation and condemnation. If the death of Christ has

such wondrous saving efficacy, and nothing else has, what keeps

him from dying again to convince the unbelieving and to save the

lost? What man is there who, if he knew that, after thirty years

of suffering terminated by a fearful death, he should rise again

into boundless bliss and glory while rapt infinitude rung with the

paans of an applauding universe, and that by means of his

humiliation he could redeem countless millions from eternal

torture, would not with a joyous spring undertake the task? And is

a common man better than Christ?

The third general plan of Christian salvation which we are to

consider differs from the foregoing one in several essential

particulars. It affirms the free will of man in opposition to a

fatal predestination. It declares that the atonement is sufficient

to redeem not only a portion of our race, but all who will put

themselves in right spiritual relations with it. In a word, while

it admits that some will actually be lost forever, it asserts that

no one is doomed

7 Schweizer, Die Lehre des Apostels Paulus vom erlosenden Tode

Christi. Theologische Studien und Kritiken, Jahrg. 1858, heft 3.

to be lost, but that the offer of pardon is made to every soul,

and that every one has power to accept or reject it. The sacrifice

of the incarnate Deity vindicated the majesty of the law, appeased

the wrath of God, and purchased his saving favor towards all who,

by a sound and earnest faith, seize the proffered justification,

throw off all reliance on their own works, and present themselves

before the throne of mercy clothed in the righteousness and

sprinkled with the blood of Christ. Here the appropriation of the

merits of Christ, through an orthodox and vivifying faith, is the

real cause as well as the experimental assurance of salvation.

This is free to all. As the brazen serpent was hoisted in the

wilderness, and the scorpion bitten Israelites invited to look on

it and be healed, so the crucified God is lifted up, and all men,

everywhere, are urged to kneel before him, accept his atonement,

and thus enable his righteousness to be imputed to them, and their

souls to be saved. The vital condition of salvation is an

appropriating faith in the vicarious atonement. Without this no

one can be saved. Thus with one word and a single breath whole

nations and races are whiffed into hell. All that the good hearted

Luther could venture to say of Cicero, whom he deeply admired and

loved, was the kind ejaculation, "I hope God will be merciful to

him!" To those who appreciate it with hostility, and look on all

things in its light, the thought that there can be no salvation

except by belief in the expiatory death of Christ, hopelessly

dooming all the heathen,8 and all infant children, unless baptized

in a proxy faith,9 builds an altar of blood among the stars and

makes the universe reek with horror. Other crimes, though stained

through with midnight dyes and heaped up to the brim of outrageous

guilt, may be freely forgiven to him who comes heartily to credit

the vicarious death of the Savior; but he who does not trust in

that, though virtuous as man can be, must depart into the

unappeasable fires. "Why this unintelligible crime of not seeing

the atonement happens to be the only sin for which there is no

atonement, it is impossible to say." Though this view of the

method, extent, and conditions of redemption is less revolting and

incredible than the other, still, it does not seem to us that any

person whose mental and moral nature is unprejudiced, healthy, and

enlightened, and who will patiently study the subject, can

possibly accept either of them. The leading assumed doctrines

common to them, out of which they severally spring, and on which

they both rest, are not only unsupported by adequate proofs, but

really have no evidence at all, and are absurd in themselves,

confounding the broadest distinctions in morals, and subverting

the best established principles of natural religion.10

The fourth scheme of Christian salvation is that which predicates

the power of insuring souls from hell solely of the Church. This

is the sacramental theory. It is assumed that, in the state of

nature subsequent to the transgression and fall of Adam, all men

are alienated from God, and by the universal original sin

universally exposed to damnation, indeed, the helpless victims of

eternal misery. In the fulness of time, Christ appeared, and

offered himself to suffer in their stead to secure their

deliverance. His death cancelled the whole sum of

8 Bretschneider, Entwickelung der Dogmatik, sect. 112, Nos. 37 50.

9 So affirmed by the Council of Carthage, Canon II.

10 The violence done to moral reason by these views is powerfully

exposed in Bushnell's Discourse on the Atonement: God in Christ,

pp. 193-202.

original sin, and only that, thus taking away the absolute

impossibility of salvation, and leaving every man in the world

free to stand or fall, incur hell or win heaven, by his personal

merits. From that time any person who lived a perfectly holy life

which no man could find practically possible thereby secured

eternal blessedness; but the moment he fell into a single sin,

however trivial, he sealed his condemnation: Christ's sacrifice,

as was just said, merely removed the transmitted burden of

original sin from all mankind, but made no provision for their

personal sins, so that practically, all men being voluntary as

well as hereditary sinners, their condition was as bad as before:

they were surely lost. To meet this state of the case, the Church,

whose priests, it is claimed, are the representatives of Christ,

and whose head is the vicegerent of God on earth, was empowered by

the celebration of the mass to re enact, as often as it pleased,

the tragedy of the crucifixion. In this service Christ is supposed

literally to be put to death afresh, and the merit of his

substitutional sufferings is supposed to be placed to the account

of the Church.11 As Sir Henry Wotton says, "One rosy drop from

Jesus' heart Was worlds of seas to quench God's ire."

In one of the Decretals of Clement VI., called "Extravagants," it

is asserted that "one drop of Christ's blood [una guttula

sanguinis] being sufficient to redeem the whole human race, the

remaining quantity which was shed in the garden and on the cross

was left as a legacy to the Church, to be a treasure whence

indulgences were to be drawn and administered by the Roman

pontiffs." Furthermore, saints and martyrs, by their constant self

denial, voluntary sufferings, penances, and prayers, like Christ,

do more good works than are necessary for their own salvation; and

the balance of merit the works of supererogation is likewise

accredited to the Church. In this way a great reserved fund of

merits is placed at the disposal of the priests. At their pleasure

they can draw upon this vicarious treasure and substitute it in

place of the deserved penalties of the guilty, and thus absolve

them and effect the salvation of their souls. All this dread

machinery is in the sole power of the Church. Outside of her pale,

heretics, heathen, all alike, are unalterably doomed to hell. But

whoso will acknowledge her authority, confess his sins, receive

the sacrament of baptism, partake of the eucharist, obey the

priests, shall be infallibly saved. The Church declares that those

who neglect to submit to her power and observe her rites are lost,

by excommunicating such every year just before Easter, thereby

typifying that they shall have no part in the resurrection and

ascension. The scheme of salvation just exhibited we reject as

alike unwarranted by the Scriptures, absurd to reason, absurd to

conscience, fraught with evil practices, and traceable in history

through the gradual and corrupt growths of the dogmatic policy of

an interested body. There is not one text in the Bible which

affords real argument, credit, or countenance to the haughty

pretensions of a Church to retain or absolve guilt, to have the

exclusive control of the tangible keys of heaven and hell. It is

incredible to a free and intelligent mind that the opposing fates

forever of hundreds of millions of men should turn on a mere

accident of time

11 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, Suppl. pars iii. qu. 25, art. 1.

and place, or at best on the moral contingence of their

acknowledging or denying the doubtful authority of a tyrannical

hierarchy, a mere matter of form and profession, independent of

their lives and characters, and of no spiritual worth at all. One

is here reminded of a passage in Plutarch's Essay "How a Young Man

ought to hear Poems." The lines in Sophocles which declare that

the initiates in the Mysteries shall be happy in the future life,

but that all others shall be wretched, having been read to

Diogenes, he exclaimed, "What! Shall the condition of Pantacion,

the notorious robber, be better after death than that of

Epaminondas, merely because he was initiated in the Mysteries?" It

is also a shocking violence to common sense, and to all proper

appreciation of spiritual realities, to imagine the gross

mechanical transference of blame and merit mutually between the

bad and the good, as if moral qualities were not personal, but

might be shifted about at will by pecuniary considerations, as the

accounts in the debt and credit columns of a ledger. The theoretic

falsities of such a scheme are as numerous and evident as its

practical abuses have been enormous and notorious. How ridiculous

this ritual fetch to snatch souls from perdition appears as stated

by Julian against Augustine! "God and the devil, then, have

entered into a covenant, that what is born the devil shall have,

and what is baptized God shall have!"12 We hesitate not to stake

the argument on one question. If there be no salvation save by

believing and accepting the sacraments with the authority of the

Romanist or the Episcopalian Church, then less than one in a

hundred thousand of the world's population thus far can be saved.

Death steadily showers into hell, age after age, an overwhelming

proportion of the souls of all mankind, a rain storm of agonized

drops of immortality to feed and freshen the quenchless fires of

damnation. Who can believe it, knowing what it is that he

believes?

We advance next to a system of Christian salvation as remarkable

for its simplicity, boldness, and instinctive benevolence as those

we have previously examined are for complexity, unnaturalness, and

severity. The theory referred to promises the natural and

inevitable salvation of every created soul. It bases itself on two

positions, the denial that men are ever lost, except partially and

temporarily, and the exhibition of the irresistible power, perfect

wisdom, and infinite goodness of God. The advocates of this

doctrine point first to observation and experience, and declare

that no person is totally reprobate, that every one is salvable;

those most corrupt and abandoned to wickedness, unbelief, and

hardness, have yet a spark that may be kindled, a fount that may

be made to gush, unto the illumination and purification of the

whole being. A stray word, an unknown influence, a breath of the

Spirit, is continually effecting such changes, such salvations.

True, there are many fettered by vices, torn by sins, ploughed by

the caustic shares of remorse, lost to peaceful freedom, lost to

spiritual joys, lost to the sweet, calm raptures of religious

belief and love, and, in that sense, plunged in damnation. But

this, they say, is the only hell there is. At the longest, it can

endure but for the night of this life: deliverance and blessedness

come with the morning dawn of a better world. Exact retributions

are awarded to all iniquity here; so

12 Julian, lib. vi. ix.

that at the termination of the present state there is nothing to

prevent the flowing of an equal bliss impartially over all. The

substantive faculties and forces of the soul are always good and

right: only their action is perverted to evil.13 This perversion

will cease with the accidents of the present state; and thus death

is the door to salvation. God's desires and intentions for his

creatures, again they argue, must be purely gracious and blessed;

for Nature, the Bible, and the Soul blend their ultimate teachings

in one affirmation that he is Love. Being omnipotent and of

perfect wisdom, nothing can withstand his decrees or thwart his

plans. His purpose, of course, must be fulfilled. There is every

thing to prove, and nothing, rightly understood, to disprove, that

that purpose is the eternal blessedness of all his intelligent

offspring after death. Therefore, they think they are justified in

concluding, the laws of nature, God's regular habits and course of

government, the normal arrangement and process of things, will of

themselves work out the inevitable salvation of all mankind. After

the uproar and darkness, the peril and fear, of a tempestuous

night, the all embracing smile of daylight gradually spreads over

the world, and the turmoil silently subsides, and the scene

sleeps. So after the sins and miseries, the condemnation and hell,

of this state of existence, shall succeed the redemption, the

holiness and happy peace, of heaven, into which all pass by the

order of nature, the original and undisturbed arrangement of the

creative Father. This view is advanced by some on grounds both of

revelation and reason. It is the doctrine of those Beghards who

taught that "there is neither hell nor purgatory; that no one is

damned, neither Jew nor Saracen, because on the death of the body

the soul returns to God."14 But the proper doctrine of the

Universalist denomination is founded directly on Scripture, and

seems now to be simply the absolute certainty of final salvation

for all. Balfour held that Christ, in obedience to the will of

God, secures eternal life for all men in the most literal manner,

by causing the resurrection of the dead from their otherwise

endless sleep in the grave, a doctrine nearly or quite fossil

now.15

It will be noticed that by this view salvation is an unlimited

necessity, not a contingency, a boon thrown to all, and which no

one has power to reject:

"The road to heaven is broader than the world,

And deeper than the kingdoms of the dead;

And up its ample paths the nations tread

With all their banners furl'd."

This theory contains elements, it seems to us, both of truth and

falsehood. It casts off gross mistakes, announces some fundamental

realities, overlooks, perverts, exaggerates, some essential facts

in the case. There is so much in it that is grateful and beautiful

that we cannot wonder at its reception where the tender instincts

of the heart are stronger than the stern decisions of the

conscience, where the kindly sentiments usurp the province of the

critical reason and sit in judgment upon evidence for the

construction of a dogmatic creed. We

13 Universalist Quarterly Review, vol. x. art. xvi.: Character and

its Predicates.

14 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, sect. 209, note 14.

15 See Ballou, Examination of the Doctrine of Future Punishment,

pp. 152-157. Williamson, Exposition of Universalism, Sermon XL:

Nature of Salvation. Cobb, Compend. of Divinity, ch. ix. sect. 3.

cannot accept it as a whole, cannot admit its great unqualified

conclusion, not only because there is no direct evidence for it,

but because there are many potent presumptions against it. It is

not built upon the facts of our consciousness and present

experience, but is resolutely constructed in defiance of them by

an arbitrary process of assumption and inference; for since God's

perfections are as absolute now as they ever can be, and he now

permits sin and misery, there is no impossibility that they will

be permitted for a season hereafter. If they are necessary now,

they may be necessary hereafter. An experience of salvation by

all, regardless of what they do or what they leave undone, would

also defeat what we have always considered the chief final cause

of man, namely, the self determined resistance of Evil and choice

of Good, the free formation of virtuous character. The plan of a

necessary and indiscriminate redemption likewise breaks the

evident continuity of life, ignores the lineal causative power of

experience, whereby each moment partially produces and moulds the

next, destroys the probationary nature of our lot, and palsies the

strength of moral motive. It is furthermore the height of

injustice, awarding to all men the same condition, remorselessly

swallowing up their infinite differences, making sin and virtue,

sloth and toil, exactly alike in the end. Whose earnestly embraces

the theory, and meditates much upon it, and reasons closely, will

be likely to become an Antinomian. It overlooks the loud,

omnipresent hints which tell us that the present state is

incomplete and dependent, the part of a great whole, the visible

segment of a circle whose complement overarches the invisible

world to come, where future correspondences and fulnesses will

satisfy and complete present claims and deficiencies. We reject

this scheme, as to its distinctive feature, for all those reasons

which lead us to accept that final view to which we now turn.

The theory of Christian redemption which seems to us correct,

represents the good and evil forces of personal character,

harmonious or discordant with the mind of God, as the conditions

of salvation or of reprobation. Swedenborg, who teaches that man

in the future state is the son of his own deeds in the present

state, says he once saw Melancthon in hell, writing, "Faith alone

saves," the words fading out as fast as written, because

expressive of a falsehood! It is not belief, but love, that

dominates the soul, not a mental act, but a spiritual substance.

According as the realities of the soul are what they should be,

just and pure, or what they should not be, perverted and corrupt,

and according as the realities of the soul are in right relations

with truth, beauty, goodness, or in vitiated relations with them,

so, and to that extent, is the soul saved or lost. This is not a

matter of arbitrary determination on one hand; and of helpless

submission on the other: it is a matter of Divine permission on

one hand, and of free, though sometimes unintelligent and

mistaken, choice on the other. The only perdition is to be out of

tune with the right constitution and exercise of things and rules.

That, of itself, makes a man the victim of guilt and wretchedness.

The only salvation is the restoration of the balance and normal

efficiency of the faculties, the restoration of their harmony with

the moral law, the recommencement of their action in unison with

the will of God. When a soul, through its exposure and freedom,

becomes and experiences what God did not intend and is not pleased

with, what his creative and executive arrangements are not

purposely ordered for, it is, for the time, and so far forth,

lost. It is saved, when knowledge of truth illuminates the mind,

love of goodness warms the heart, energy, purity, and aspiration

fill and animate the whole being. Then, having realized in its

experience the purposes of Christ's mission, the original aims of

its existence, it rejoices in the favor of God. In the harmonious

fruition of its internal efficiencies and external relations, all

things work together for good unto it, and it basks in the beams

of the sun of immortality. Perdition and hell are the condemnation

and misery instantaneously deposited in experience whenever and

wherever a perverted and corrupt soul touches its relations with

the universe. The meeting of its consciousness with the alienated

mournful faces of things, with the hostile retributive forces of

things, produces unrest and suffering with the same natural

necessity that the meeting of certain chemical substances deposits

poison and bitterness. Perdition being the degradation and

wretchedness of the soul through ingrained falsehood, vice,

impurity, and hardness, salvation is the casting out of these

evils, and the replacing them with truth, righteousness, a holy

and sensitive life. To ransom from hell and translate to heaven is

not, then, so much to deliver from a local dungeon of gnawing

fires and worms, and bear to a local paradise of luxuries, as it

is to heal diseases and restore health. Hell is a wrong, diseased

condition of the soul, its indwelling wretchedness and

retribution, wherever it may be, as when the light of day tortures

a sick eye. Heaven is a right, healthy condition of the soul, its

indwelling integrity and concord, in whatever realms it may

reside, as when the sunshine bathes the healthy orb of vision with

delight. Salvation is nothing more nor less than the harmonious

blessedness of the soul by the fruition of all its right powers

and relations. Remove a man who is writhing in the agonies of some

physical disease, from his desolate hut on the bleak mountain side

to a gorgeous palace in a delicious tropical clime. He is just as

badly off as before. He is still, so to speak, in hell, wherever

he may be in location. Cure his sickness, and then he is, so to

speak, saved, in heaven. It is so with the soul. The conditions of

salvation and reprobation are not arbitrary, mechanical, fickle,

but are the interior and unalterable laws of the soul and of the

universe. "Every devil," Sir Thomas Browne says, "holds enough of

torture in his own ubi, and needs not the torture of circumference

to afflict him." If there are, as there may be, two entirely

separate regions in space, whose respective boundaries enclose

hell and heaven, banishment into the one, or admission into the

other, evidently is not what constitutes the essence of perdition

or of salvation, is not the all important consideration; but the

characteristic condition of the soul, which produces its

experience and decides its destination, that is the essential

thing. The mild fanning of a zephyr in a summer evening is

intolerable to a person in the convulsions of the ague, but most

welcome and delightful to others. So to a wicked soul all objects,

operations, and influences of the moral creation become hostile

and retributive, making a hell of the whole universe. Purify the

soul, restore it to a correct condition, and every thing is

transfigured: the universal hell becomes universal heaven.

We may gather up in a few propositions the leading principles of

this theory of salvation. First, Perdition is not an experience to

which souls are helplessly born, not a sentence inflicted on them

by an arbitrary decree, but is a result wrought out by free

agency, in conformity to the unalterable laws of the spiritual

world. Secondly, heaven and hell are not essentially particular

localities into which spirits are thrust, nor states of

consciousness produced by outward circumstances, but are an outward

reflection from, and a reciprocal action upon, internal character.

Thirdly, condemnation, or justification, is not absolute and

complete, equalizing all on each side of a given line, but is a

thing of degrees, not exactly the same in any two individuals,

or in the same person at all times. Fourthly, we have no reason

to suppose that probation closes with the closing of the

present life; but every relevant consideration leads us to

conclude that the same great constitution of laws pervades all

worlds and reigns throughout eternity, so that the fate of souls

is not unchangeably fixed at death. No analogy indicates that

after death all will be thoroughly different from what it is

before death. Rather do all analogies argue that the hell and

heaven of the future will be the aggravation, or mitigation, or

continuation, of the perdition and salvation of the present. It is

altogether a sentence of exact right according to character, a

matter of personal achievement depending upon freedom, an

experience of inward elements and states, a thing of degrees, and

a subject of continued probation.

The condition of the heathen nations in reference to salvation is

satisfactory only in the light of the foregoing theory. If a

person is what God wishes, as shown by his revealed will in the

model of Christ, pure, loving, devout, wise, and earnest, he is

saved, whether he ever heard of Christ or not. Are Plato and

Aristides, Cato and Antoninus, to be damned, while Pope Alexander

VI. and King Philip II are saved, because those glorious

characters merely lived at the then height of attainable

excellence, but these fanatic scoundrels made a technical

profession of Christianity? The "Athanasian" creed asserts that

whoever doth not fully believe its dogmas "shall without doubt

perish everlastingly." And the eighteenth article in the creed of

the Church of England declares "them accursed who presume to say

that any man can be saved by diligently framing his life according

to the law or sect which he professeth, and the light of

nature."16

Another particular in which the present view of salvation is

satisfactory, in opposition to the other theories, is in leaving

the personal nature of sin clear, the realm of personal

responsibility unconfused. Why should a system of thought be set

up and adhered to in religion that would be instantly and

universally scouted at if applied to any other subject? 17 "No one

dreams that the sin of an unexercised intellect, of gross

ignorance, can be pardoned only through faith in the sacrifice of

some incarnation of the Perfect Reason. No one expects to be told

that the violation of the bodily laws can be forgiven by the

Infinite Creator only on the ground that some perfect physician

honors them by obedience and death. It is by opening the mind to

God's published truth, and by conformity to the discovered

philosophical

16 Arnauld, Emes, Goeze, and others, have written volumes to prove

the indiscriminate damnation of the heathen. On the contrary,

Muller, in his "Diss. de Paganorum poet Mortem Conditione," and

Marmontel, in his "Belisaire," take a more favorable view of the

fate of the ethnic world. The best work on the subject a work of

great geniality and ability is Eberhard's "Neue Apologie des

Socrates." Also see Knapp's Christian Theology, sect. lxxxviii.

17 Martineau, Studies of Christianity, pp. 153-176: Mediatorial

Religion. Ibid. pp. 468-477: Sin What it is, What it is not.

order, or the reception of the adopted remedy, that the mind and

the frame experience new life. And our souls are redeemed, not by

any expiation on account of which penalties are lifted, but by

reception of spiritual truth and consecration of will, which push

away penalties by wholesome life." 18

The awful inviolability of justice is shown by the eternal course

of God's laws bringing the exactly deserved penalty upon every

soul that sinneth. Whoever breaks a Divine decree puts all sacred

things in antagonism to him, and the precise punishment of his

offences not the worth of worlds nor the blood of angels can

avert. The boundless mercy of God, his atoning love, is shown by

the absence of all vindictiveness from his judgments, their

restorative aim and tendency. Whenever the sinner repents,

reforms, puts himself in a right attitude, God is waiting to

pardon and bless him, the sun shines and the happy heart is glad

as at first, the cloudy screen of sin and fear and retributive

alienation being removed. This view, when appreciated, affords as

impressive a sanction to law, and as affecting an exhibition of

love, as are theoretically ascribed to the doctrine of vicarious

expiation. The infinite sanctity of justice and the fathomless

love of God are certainly much more plainly and satisfactorily

shown by the righteous nature and beneficent operation of the law,

than by its terrible severity and arbitrary subversion. According

to the present view, the relation of Christ to human redemption is

as simple and rational as it is divinely appointed and perfectly

fulfilled. Accredited with miraculous seals, presenting the most

pathetic and inspiring motives, he reveals the truths and

exemplifies the virtues which, when adopted, regenerate the

springs of faith and character, rectify the lines of conduct, and

change men from sinful and wretched to saintly and blessed. He

stirs the stagnant soul, that man may replunge into his native

self, and rise redeemed.

For the more distinct comprehension and remembrance of the schemes

of Christian salvation we have been considering, it may be well to

recapitulate them.

The first theory is this: When, by the fall of Adam, all men were

utterly lost and doomed to hell forever, the vicarious sufferings

of Christ cancelled sin, and unconditionally purchased and saved

all. This was the original development of Universalism. It sprang

consistently from Augustinian grounds. It was taught by a party in

the Church of the first centuries, was afterwards repeatedly

condemned as a heresy by popes and by councils, and was revived by

Kelly, Murray, and others. We are not aware that it now has any

avowed disciples.

The second conception is, in substance, that God, foreseeing from

eternity the fall of Adam and the consequent damnation of his

posterity, arbitrarily elected a portion of them to salvation,

leaving the rest to their fate; and the vicarious sufferings of

Christ were the only possible means of carrying that decree into

effect. This is the Augustinian and Calvinistic theology, and has

had a very extensive prevalence among Christians. Many church

creeds still embody the doctrine; but in its original,

uncompromising form it is rapidly fading from belief. Even now few

persons can be found to profess it without essential modifications,

so

18 T. S. King, Endless Punishment Unchristian and Unreasonable, p.

65.

qualifying it as to destroy its identity.

The third plan of delivering souls from the doom supposed to rest

on them attributes to the vicarious sufferings of Christ a

conditional efficacy, depending upon personal faith. Every one who

will heartily believe in the substitutional death of Christ, and

trust in his atoning merits, shall thereby be saved. This was the

system of Pelagius, Arminius, Luther. It prevails now in the so

called Evangelical Churches more generally than any other system.

The fourth received method of salvation, assuming the same

premises which the three foregoing schemes assume, namely, that

through the fall all men are eternally sentenced to hell, declares

that, by Christ's vicarious sufferings, power is given to the

Church, a priestly hierarchy, to save such as confess her

authority and observe her rites. All others must continue lost.19

This theory early began to be constructed and broached by the

Fathers. It is held by the Roman Catholic Church, and by all the

consistent portion of the Episcopalian. A part of the Baptist

denomination also through their popular preachers, if not in their

recognised symbols assert the indispensableness of ritual baptism

to salvation.

The fifth view of the problem is that no soul is lost or doomed

except so far as it is personally, voluntarily depraved and

sinful. And even to that extent, and in that sense, it can be

called lost only in the present life. After death every soul is

freed from evil, and ushered at once into heaven. This is the

distinctive doctrine of the ultra Universalists. It is

disappearing from among its recent advocates. As a body they have

already exchanged its arbitrary conceptions of "death and glory"

for the more rational conclusions of the "Restorationists." 20

The sixth and final scheme of Christian salvation teaches that, by

the immutable laws which the Creator has established in and over

his works and creatures, a free soul may choose good or evil,

truth or falsehood, love or hate, beneficence or iniquity. Just so

far and just so long as it partakes of the former it is saved; as

it partakes of the latter it is lost, that is, alienates the favor

of God, forfeits so much of the benefits of creation and of the

blessings of being. The conditions and means of repentance,

reformation, regeneration, are always within its power, the future

state being but the unencumbered, more favorable experience of the

spiritual elements of the present, under the same Divine

constitution and laws. This is the common belief of Unitarians and

Universalists, the latter alone teaching it as a sure doctrine of

Revelation.

Salvation by purchase, by the redeeming blood of Christ; salvation

by election, by the independent decree of God, sealed by the blood

of Christ; salvation by faith, by an appropriating faith in the

blood of Christ; salvation by the Church, by the sacraments made

efficacious to that end by the blood of Christ; salvation by

nature, by the irresistible working of the natural order of

things, declared by the teachings of Christ; salvation by a

resurrection from the dead, miraculously effected by the delegated

power of Christ; salvation by character, by conformity of

character to the spiritual laws of the universe, to the nature and

will of God, revealed, urged, exemplified, by the whole mission of

Christ; these are the different theories

19 Adams, Mercy to Babes. (A plea for the baptism of infants, that

they may not be damned.)

20 Adin Ballou, Universalism and Restorationism Moral Contraries,

1837.

proposed for the acceptance of Christians.

Outside of Christendom we discern, received and operative in

various forms, all the theoretic modes of salvation acknowledged

within it, and some others in addition. The creed and practice of

the Mohammedans afford a more unflinching embodiment of the

conception of salvation by election than is furnished anywhere

else. Islam denotes Fate. All is predestinated and follows on in

inevitable sequence. No modifying influence is possible. Can a

breath move Mount Kaf? The chosen of Allah shall believe; the

rejected of Allah shall deny. Every believer's bower is blooming

for him in Paradise; every unbeliever's bed is burning for him in

hell. And nothing whatever can avail to change the persons or the

total number elected for each.

There is one theory of salvation scarcely heard of in the West,

but extensively held in the East. The Brahmanic as well as the

Buddhist thinker relies on obtaining salvation by knowledge. Life

in a continual succession of different bodies is his perdition.

His salvation is to be freed from the vortex of births and deaths,

the fret and storm of finite existence. Neither goodness nor piety

can ever release him. Knowledge alone can do it: an unsullied

intellectual vision and a free intellectual grasp of truth and

love alone can rescue him from the turbid sea of forms and

struggles. "As a lump of salt is of uniform taste within and

without, so the soul is nothing but intelligence."21 If the soul

be an entire mass of intelligence, a current of ideas, its real

salvation depends on its becoming pure and eternal truth without

mixture of falsehood or of emotional disturbance. He "must free

himself from virtues as well as from sins; for the confinement of

fetters is the same whether the chain be of gold or of iron."22

Accordingly, the Hindu, to secure emancipation, planes down the

mountainous thoughts and passions of his soul to a desert level of

indifferent insight. And when, in direct personal knowledge, free

from joy and sorrow, free from good and ill, he gazes into the

limitless abyss of Divine truth, then he is sure of the bosom of

Brahm, the door of Nirwana. Then the wheel of the Brahmanic Ixion

ceases revolving, and the Buddhist Ahasuerus flings away his

staff; for salvation is attained.

The conception of salvation by ritual works based on faith either

faith in Deity or in some redemptive agency is exhibited all over

the world. Hani, a Hindu devotee, dwelt in a thicket, and repeated

the name of Krishna a hundred thousand times each day, 23 and thus

saved his soul. The saintly Muni Shukadev said, as is written in

the most popular religious authority of India, "Who even

ignorantly sing the praises of Krishna undoubtedly obtain final

beatitude; just as, if one ignorant of the properties of nectar

should drink it, he would still become immortal. Whoever worships

Hari, with whatever disposition of mind, obtains beatitude."24

"The repetition of the names of Vishnu purifies from all sins,

even when invoked by an evil minded person, as fire burns even him

who approaches it unwillingly."25 Nothing is more common in the

sacred writings of the Hindus than the promise that "whoever reads

or hears this narrative with a devout mind shall receive final

beatitude." Millions on millions of these docile and abject

devotees undoubtingly expect salvation by such merely ritual

21 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 359.

22 Ibid. p. 363.

23 Asiatic Researches, vol. xvi. p. 115.

24 Eastwick, Prem Sagar, p. 56.

25 Vishnu Parans, p. 210, note 13.

observances. One cries "Lord!" "Lord!" Another thumbs a book, as

if it were an omnipotent amulet. Another meditates on some mystic

theme, as if musing were a resistless spell of silent exorcism and

invocation. Another pierces himself with red hot irons, as if

voluntary pain endured now could accumulate merit for him and buy

off future inflictions.

It is surprising to what an extent men's efforts for salvation

seem underlaid by conceptions of propitiation, the placation of a

hatred, the awakening of a love, in the objects of their worship.

In all these cases salvation is sought indirectly through works,

though not particularly good works. The savage makes an offering,

mutters a prayer, or fiercely wounds his body, before the hideous

idol of his choice. The fakir, swung upon sharp hooks, revolves

slowly round a fire. The monk wears a hair shirt, and flagellates

himself until blood trickles across the floor of his cell. The

Portuguese sailor in a storm takes a leaden saint from his bosom

and kneels before it for safety. The offending Bushman crawls in

the dust and shudders as he seeks to avert the fury of the fetich

which he has carved and set in a tree. The wounded brigand in the

Apennines, with unnumbered robberies and murders on his soul,

finds perfect ease to his conscience as his glazing eye falls on a

carefully treasured picture of the Virgin, and he expires in a

triumph of faith, saying, "Sweet Mother of God, intercede for me."

The Calvinistic convert, about to be executed for his fearful

crimes, kneels at the foot of the gallows, and exclaims, as in a

recent well known instance, "I hold the blood of Christ between my

soul and the flaming face of God, and die happy, assured that I am

going to heaven."

It is all a terrible delusion, arising from perverted sentiment

and degraded thought. Of the five theoretical modes of salvation

taught in the world, Election, Faith, Works, Knowledge, Harmony,

one alone is real and divine, although it contains principles

taken from all the rest and blended with its own. There is no

salvation by foregone election; for that would dethrone the moral

laws and deify caprice. There is no salvation by dogmatic faith;

because faith is not a matter of will, but of evidence, not within

man's own power, and a thousand varieties of faith are

necessitated among men. There is no salvation by determinate

works; for works are measurable quantities, whose rewards and

punishments are meted and finally spent, but salvation is

qualitative and infinite. There is no salvation by intellectual

knowledge; for knowledge is sight, not being, an accident, not an

essence, an attribute of one faculty, not a right state and ruling

force in all. The true salvation is by harmony; for harmony of all

the forces of the soul with themselves and with all related forces

beyond, harmony of the individual will with the Divine will,

harmony of personal action with the universal activity, what other

negation of perdition is possible? what other definition and

affirmation of salvation conceivable? By the Creator's fiat, man

is first elected to be. By the guiding stimulus of faith, he is

next animated to spiritual exertion. By the performance of good

works, he then brings his moral nature into beautiful form and

attitude. By knowledge of truth, he furthermore sees how to

direct, govern, and attune himself. And finally, by the

accomplishment of all this in the organized harmony of a wise and

holy soul, there results that state of being whose passive

conditions constitute salvation, and whose active experience is

eternal life.

CHAPTER VI.

RECOGNITION OF FRIENDS IN A FUTURE LIFE.

OF all the sorrows incident to human life, none is so penetrating

to gentle hearts as that which fills them with aching regrets,

and, for a time, writes hollowness and vanity on their dearest

treasures, when death robs them of those they love. And so, of all

the questions that haunt the soul, wringing its faculties for a

solution, beseeching the oracles of the universe for a response,

none can have a more intense interest than gathers about the

irrepressible inquiry, "Shall we ever meet again, and know, the

friends we have lost? somewhere in the ample creation and in the

boundless ages, join, with the old familiar love, our long parted,

fondly cherished, never forgotten dead?" The grief of bereavement

and the desire of reunion are experienced in an endless diversity

of degrees by different persons, according as they are careless,

hard, and sense bound, or thoughtful, sympathizing, and

imaginative; undisciplined by the mysteries and afflictions of our

mortal destiny, or profoundly tried by the disappointments and

prophecies of time and fate; and as they are shadowed by the gloom

of despair, or cheered by the radiance of belief. But to all who

feel, even the least, the uncertain but deep monitions of the

silent pall, the sad procession, and the burial mound, the

impressive problem must occur, with frequency and power, Does the

grave sunder us and the objects of our affection forever? or,

across that dark gulf, shall we be united again in purer bonds?

Outside of the atheistic dissolution and the pantheistic

absorption, it is supposable that, surviving the blow of death,

our spirits may return to God and run their endless course in

divine solitude. On the other hand, it is supposable that,

possessed with all the memories of this probationary state,

blessed by the companionship of our earthly friends, we may aspire

together along the interminable gradations of the world to come.

If the former supposition be true, and the farewell of the dying

is the announcement of an irrevocable separation, then the tears

we shed over the shrouded clay, once so prized, should be

distillations from Lethe's flood, to make us forget all. But if

the latter be true, then our deadly seeming losses are as the

partings of travellers at night to meet in the morning; and, as

friend after friend retires, we should sigh to each departing

spirit a kind adieu till we meet again, and let pleasing memories

of them linger to mingle in the sacred day dreams of remaining

life.

Evidently it is of much importance to a man which of these views

he shall take; for each exerts a distinctive influence in regard

to his peace of mind, his moral strength, and his religious

character. On one who believes that hereafter, beyond all the

partings in this land of tombs, he shall never meet the dear

companions who now bless his lot, the death of friends must fall,

if he be a person of strong sensibilities, as a staggering blow,

awakening an agony of sorrow, taking from the sky and the earth a

glory nothing can ever replace, and leaving in his heart a

wretched void nothing can ever fill. Henceforth he will be

deprived mostly for all felt connection between them is hopelessly

sundered of the good influences they exerted on him when present:

he must try, by all expedients, to forget them; think no more of

their virtues, their welcome voices and kindly deeds; wipe from

the tablets of his soul all fond records of their united happy

days; look not to the future, let the past be as though it had

never been, and absorb his thoughts and feelings in the turmoil of

the present. This is his only course; and even then, if true to

the holiest instincts of his soul, he will find the fatal

separation has lessened his being and impoverished his life,

"For this losing is true dying; This is lordly man's down lying,

This his slow but sure reclining, Star by star his world

resigning."

But to him who earnestly expects soon to be restored under fairer

auspices and in a deathless world to those from whom he parted as

he laid their crumbling bodies in the earth, the death of friends

will come as a message from the Great Father, a message solemn yet

kind, laden indeed with natural sadness yet brightened by sure

promise and followed by heavenly compensations. If his tears flow,

they flow not in scalding bitterness from the Marah fountain of

despair, but in chastened joy from the smitten rock of faith. So

far from endeavoring to forget the departed, he will cling to

their memories with redoubled tenderness, as a sacred trust and a

redeeming power. They will be more precious to him than ever,

stronger to purify and animate. Their saintly examples will

attract him as never before, and their celestial voices plead from

on high to win him to virtue and to heaven. The constant thought

of seeing them once more, and wafting in their arms through the

enchanted spaces of Paradise, will wield a sanctifying force over

his spirit. They will make the invisible sphere a peopled reality

to him, and draw him to God by the diffused bonds of a spiritual

acquaintance and an eternal love.

Since the result in which a man rests on this subject, believing

or disbelieving that he shall recognise his beloved ones the other

side of the grave, exerts a deep influence on him, in one case

disheartening, in the other uplifting, it is incumbent on us to

investigate the subject, try to get at the truth, clear it up, and

appreciate it as well as we can. It is a theme to interest us all.

Who has not endeared relatives, choice friends, freshly or long

ago removed from this earth into the unknown clime? In a little

while, as the ravaging reaper sweeps on his way, who will not have

still more there, or be there himself? Whether old acquaintance

shall be all forgot or be well remembered there, is an inquiry

which must profoundly interest all who have hearts to love their

companions, and minds to perceive the creeping shadows of mystery

drawing over us as we approach the sure destiny of age and the dim

confines of the world. It is a theme, far removed from noisy

strifes and vain shows, penetrating that mysterious essence of

affection and thought which we are. The thing of first importance

is not the conclusion we reach, but the spirit in which we seek

and hold it. The Christian says to his friend, "Our souls will be

united in yonder heaven." Danton, with a horrible travesty, said

to his comrades on the scaffold, "Our heads will meet in that

sack."

Before engaging directly in the discussion, it will be interesting

to notice, for an instant, the verdict which history, in the

spontaneous suppositions and rude speculations of ancient peoples,

pronounces on this subject.1 Among their various opinions about

the state after death, it is a prominent circumstance that they

generally agree in conceiving it as a social state in which

personal likenesses and memories are retained, fellow countrymen

are grouped together, and friends united. This is minutely true of

those nations with the details of whose faith we are acquainted,

and is implied in the general belief of all others, except those

who expected the individual spirit to be absorbed in the soul of

the universe. Homer shows Ulysses and Virgil in like manner shows

Aneas upon his entrance into the other world mutually recognising

his old comrades and recognised by them. The two heroes whose

inseparable friendship on earth was proverbial are still together

in Elysium:

"Then, side by side, along the dreary coast Advanced Achilles' and

Patroclus' ghost, A friendly pair."

In this representation that there was a full recognition of

acquaintances, all the accounts of the other world given in Greek

and Roman literature harmonize. The same is true of the accounts

contained in the literature of the ancient Hebrews. In the Book of

Genesis, when Jacob hears of the death of his favorite child, he

exclaims, "I shall go down to my son Joseph in the under world,

mourning." When the witch of Endor raised the ghost of Samuel,

Saul knew him by the description she gave of him as he rose. The

monarch shades in the under world are pictured by Isaiah as

recognising the shade of the king of Babylon and rising from their

sombre thrones to greet him with mockery. Ezekiel shows us each

people of the heathen nations in the under world in a company by

themselves. When David's child died, the king sorrowfully

exclaimed, "He will not return to me; but I shall go to him." All

these passages are based on the conception of a gloomy

subterranean abode where the ghosts of the dead are reunited after

their separation at death on earth. An old commentator on the

Koran says a Mohammedan priest was once asked how the blessed in

paradise could be happy when missing some near relative or dear

friend whom they were thus forced to suppose in hell. He replied,

God will either cause believers to forget such persons or else to

rest in expectation of their coming. The anecdote shows

affectingly that the same yearning heart and curiosity are

possessed by Moslem and Christian. A still more impressive case in

point is furnished by a picture in a Buddhist temple in China. The

painting represents the story of the priest Lo Puh, who, on

passing into paradise at death, saw his mother, Yin Te, in hell.

He instantly descended into the infernal court, Tsin Kwang Wang,

where she was suffering, and, by his valor, virtues, and

intercessions, rescued her. The picture vividly portraying the

whole story may be seen and studied at the present time by

Christian missionaries who enter that temple of the benevolent

Buddha.2 From the faith of many other nations illustrations might

be brought of the same fact, that the great common instinct which

has led men to believe in a future life has at the same time

caused them to believe that in that life there would be a union

and recognition of friends. Let this far reaching historical fact

be taken at its just value,

1 Alexius, Tod and Wiedersehen. Eine Gedankenfolge der besten

Schriftsteller aller Zeiten und Volker.

2 Asiatic Journal, 1840, p. 211.

while we proceed to the labor in hand. The fact referred to is of

some value, because, being an expression of the heart of man as

God made it, it is an indication of his will, a prophecy.

There are three ways of trying the problem of future recognition.

The cool, skeptical class of persons will examine the present

related facts of the case; argue from what they now know; test the

question by induction and inference. Let us see to what results

they will thus be led. In the first place, we learn upon

reflection that we now distinguish each other by the outward form,

physical proportion, and combination of looks, tones of voice, and

other the like particulars. Every one has his individuality in

these respects, by which he is separable from others. It may be

hastily inferred, then, that if we are to know our friends

hereafter it will be through the retention or the recovery of

their sensible peculiarities. Accordingly, many believe the soul

to be a perfect reflection or immaterial fac simile of the body,

the exact correspondence in shadowy outline of its gross

tabernacle, and consequently at once recognizable in the

disembodied state. The literature of Christendom we may almost say

of the world teems with exemplifications of this idea. Others,

arguing from the same acknowledged premises, conclude that future

recognition will be secured by the resurrection of the material

body as it was in all its perfection, in renovated and unfading

prime. But, leaving out of view the inherent absurdity of the

doctrine of a physical resurrection, there is a fatal difficulty

in the way of both these supposititious modes of mutual knowledge

in another world. It is this. The outward form, features, and

expression sometimes alter so thoroughly that it is impossible for

us to recognise our once most intimate companions. Cases are not

rare of this kind. Let one pass in absence from childhood to

maturity, and who that had not seen him in the mean time could

tell that it was he? The trouble arising thence is finely

illustrated by Shakspeare in the motherly solicitude of Constance,

who, on learning that her young son has been imprisoned by his

uncle, King John, and will probably be kept until he pines to

death, cries in anguish to her confessor,

"Father cardinal, I have heard you say

That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:

If that be true, I shall see my boy again;

For, since the birth of Cain, the first male child,

To him that did but yesterday suspire,

There was not such a gracious creature born.

But now will canker sorrow eat my bud

And chase the native beauty from his cheek,

And he will look as hollow as a ghost,

As dim and meagre as an ague's fit;

And so he'll die; and, rising so again,

When I shall meet him in the court of heaven

I shall not know him: therefore never, never

Must I behold my pretty Arthur more."

Owing to the changes of all sorts which take place in the body,

future recognition cannot safely depend upon that or upon any

resemblance of the spirit to it. Besides, not the faintest proof

can be adduced of any such perceptible correspondence subsisting

between them.

Turning again to the facts of experience, we find that it is not

alone, nor indeed chiefly, by their visible forms and features

that we know our chosen ones. We also, and far more truly, know

them by the traits of their characters, the elements of their

lives, the effluence of their spirits, the magic atmosphere which

surrounds them, the electric thrill and communication which vivify

and conjoin our souls. And even in the exterior, that which most

reveals and distinguishes each is not the shape, but the

expression, the lights and shades, reflected out from the immortal

spirit shrined within. We know each other really by the mysterious

motions of our souls. And all these things endure and act

uninterrupted though the fleshly frame alter a thousand times or

dissolve in its native dust. The knowledge of a friend, then,

being independent of the body, spirits may be recognised in the

future state by the associations mutually surrounding them, the

feelings connecting them. Amidst all the innumerable thronging

multitudes, through all the immeasurable intervening heights and

depths, of the immaterial world, remembered and desired companions

may be selected and united by inward laws that act with the ease

and precision of chemical affinities. We may therefore recognise

each other by the feelings which now connect us, and which shall

spontaneously kindle and interchange when we meet in heaven, as

the signs of our former communion.

It needs but little thought to perceive that by this view future

recognition is conditional, being made to depend on the permanence

of our sympathies: there must be the same mutual relations,

affinities, fitness to awaken the same emotions upon approaching

each other's sphere, or we shall neither know nor be known. But in

fact our sympathies and aversions change as much as our outward

appearance does. The vices and virtues, loves and hatreds, of our

hearts alter, the peculiar characteristics of our souls undergo as

great a transformation, sometimes, as thorough a revolution, as

the body does in the interval between childhood and manhood. These

changes going on in our associates frequently change our feelings

towards them, heightening or diminishing our affection, creating a

new interest, destroying an old one, now making enemies lovers,

and now thoroughly alienating very friends. Such fundamental

alterations of character may occur in us, or in our friend, before

we meet in the unseen state, that we shall no more recognise each

other's spirits than we should know each other on earth after a

separation in which our bodily appearances and voices had been

entirely changed. These considerations would induce us to think

that recognition hereafter is not sure, but turns on the condition

that we preserve a remembrance, desire, and adaptedness for one

another.

If now the critical inquirer shall say there is no evidence, and

it is incredible, that the body will be restored to a future life,

or that the soul has any resemblance to the body by which it may

be identified, furthermore, if he shall maintain that the doctrine

of the revelation and recognition of the souls of friends in

another life by an instinctive feeling, a mysterious attraction

and response, is fanciful, an overdrawn conclusion of the

imagination, not warranted by a stern induction of the average

realities of the subject, and if he shall then ask, how are we to

distinguish our former acquaintances among the hosts of heaven?

there is one more fact of experience which meets the case and

answers his demand. When long absence and great exposures have

wiped off all the marks by which old companions knew each other,

it has frequently happened that they have met and conversed with

indifference, each being ignorant of whom the other was; and so it

has continued until, by some indirect means, some accidental

allusion, or the agency of a third person, they have been suddenly

revealed. Then, with throbbing hearts, in tears and rapture, they

have rushed into each other's arms, with an instantaneous

recurrence of their early friendship in all its original warmth,

fulness, and flooding associations. Many such instances are

related in books of romance with strict truth to the actual

occurrences of life. Several instances of it are authenticated in

the early history of America, when children, torn from their homes

by the Indians, were recovered by their parents after twenty or

thirty years had elapsed and they were identified by circumstantial

evidence. Let any parent ask his heart, any true friend ask his heart,

if, discovering by some foreign means the object of his love,

he would not embrace him with just as ardent a gratitude and

devotion as though there were no outward change and they had

known one another at sight. So, in the life beyond the

grave, if we are not able to recognise our earthly companions

directly, either by spiritual sight or by intuitive feeling, we

may obtain knowledge of each other indirectly by comparison of

common recollections, or by the mediation of angels, or by some

other Divine arrangement especially prepared for that purpose. And

therefore, whether in heaven we look or feel as we do here or not,

whether there be any provision in our present constitution for

future recognition or not, is of no consequence. In a thousand

ways the defect can be remedied, if such be the will of God. And

that such is his will every relevant fact and consideration would

seem to prove. It is a consistent and seemingly requisite

continuation and completion of that great scheme of which this

life is a part. It is an apparently essential element and

fulfilment of the wonderful apparatus of retribution, reward, and

discipline, intended to educate us as members of God's eternal

family. Because from the little which we now understand we cannot

infer with plainness and certainty the precise means and method by

which we can discriminate our friends in heaven need be no

obstacle to believing the fact itself; for there are millions of

undoubted truths whose conditions and ways of operation we can

nowise fathom. Upon the whole, then, we conclude that we cannot by

our mere understandings decide with certainty the question

concerning future recognition; but we are justified in trusting to

the accuracy of that doctrine, since it rests safely with the free

pleasure of God, who is both infinitely able and disposed to do

what is best, and we cannot help believing that it is best for us

to be with and love hereafter those whom we are with and love

here.3

There is a way of dealing with the general subject before us

wholly different from the course thus far pursued. Ceasing to act

the philosopher, laying aside all arguments and theories, all dry

speculations, we may come as simple believers to the Christian

Scriptures and investigate their teachings to accept whatever they

pronounce as the word of God's truth. Let us see to what results

we shall thus be led. Searching the New Testament to learn its

doctrine

3 Munch, Werden wir uns wiedersehen nach dem Tode. This work,

based on the Kantian philosophy, denies future recognition. There

is an able reply to it by Vogel, Ueber die Hoffnung des

Wiedersehens.

in regard to reunion in a future state, we are very soon struck

with surprise at the mysterious reserve, so characteristic of its

pages, on this entire theme. Instead of a full and minute

revelation blazing along the track of the gospel pens, a few

fragmentary intimations, incidental hints, scattered here and

there, are the substance of all that it expressly says. But though

little is directly declared, yet much is plainly implied:

especially the one great inference with which we are now concerned

may be unequivocally and repeatedly drawn. In the parable of the

Rich Man and the Beggar the Savior pictures forth the recognition

of their souls in the disembodied state. Dives also is described

as recollecting with intense interest, with the most anxious

sympathy, his endangered brethren on earth. Although this occurs

in a parable, yet it is likely that so prominent and vital a

feature of it would be moulded, as to its essential significance,

in accordance with what the author intended should be received as

truth. Jesus also speaks of many who should come from the east and

the west and sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the

kingdom of heaven; from which it would appear that the patriarchs

are together in fellowship and that the righteous of after times

were to be received with them in mutual acquaintance. On the Mount

of Transfiguration the witnessing disciples saw Moses and Elias

together with Jesus, and recognised them, probably from their

resemblance to traditional descriptions of them. Jesus always

represented the future state as a society. He said to his

followers, "I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am there

ye may be also;" and he prayed to his Father that his disciples

might be with him where he was going. At another time he declared

of little children, "Their angels always behold the face of my

Father in heaven:" he also taught that "there is joy in heaven

over every sinner that repenteth;" passages that presuppose such a

community of faculties, sympathies, in heaven and earth, in angels

and men, as certainly implies the doctrine of continued knowledge

and fellowship. When heaven was opened before the dying Stephen,

he saw and instantly knew his Divine Master, the Lord Jesus, and

called to him to welcome his ascending spirit. Paul writes to the

Thessalonians that he would not have them sorrow concerning the

dead as those who have no hope, assuring them that when Christ

reappears they shall all be united again. In the Apocalypse, John

saw, in a vision, the souls of the martyrs, who had died for the

faith of the gospel, together, under the altar. From community of

suffering and a common abode together in heaven we may safely

infer their recognition of each other. The Gospels declare that

Christ after his death remembered his disciples and came back to

them to assure them that they should rejoin him on high; and the

apostles assert that we are to be with Christ and to be like him

in the future state. It follows from the admission of these

declarations that we shall remember our friends and be united with

them in conscious knowledge. Few, and brief, and vague as the

utterances of the Scriptures are in relation to this theme, they

necessarily involve all the results of an avowed doctrine. They

undeniably involve the supposition that in the other life we shall

be conscious personalities as here, retaining our memories and

constituting a society. From these implications the fact of the

future recognition of friends irresistibly results, unless there

be some special interference to prevent it; and such an

interposition there is no hint of and can be no reason for

fearing.

Such is really all that we can learn from the Scriptures on the

subject of our inquiry.4 Its indirectness and brevity would

convince us that God did not intend to betray to us in clear light

the secrets of the shrouded future, that for some reason it is

best that his teaching should be so reserved, and leave us to the

haunting wonder, the anxious surmise, the appalling mystery, the

alluring possibilities, that now meet our gaze on the unmoving

veil of death. God intends we shall trust in him without

knowledge, and by faith, not by sight, pursue his guidance into

the silent and unknown land.

Therefore, after analyzing the relevant facts of present

experience and inferring what we can from them, and after studying

the Scriptures and finding what they say, there is yet another

method of considering the problem of recognition in the future

state. That is without caring for critical discussion, without

deferring to extraneous authority, we may follow the gravitating

force of instinct, imagination, and moral reason. We are made to

love and depend on each other. The longer, the more profoundly, we

know and admire the good, the more our being becomes intertwined

with theirs, so much the more intensely we desire to be with them

always, and so much the more awful is the agony of separation.

This, what is it but great Nature's testimony, God's silent

avowal, that we are to meet in eternity? Can the fearful anguish

of bereavement be gratuitous? can the yearning prophecies of the

smitten heart be all false? Belief in reunion hereafter is

spontaneously adopted by humanity. We therefore esteem it divinely

ordered or true. Without that soothing and sustaining trust, the

unrelieved, intolerable wretchedness in many cases would burst

through the fortress of the mind, hurl reason from its throne, and

tear the royal affections and their attendants in the trampled

dust of madness. Many a rarely gifted soul, unknown in his

nameless privacy of life, has been so conjoined with a worthy

peer, through precious bonds of unutterable sympathy, that, rather

than be left behind, "the divided half of such a friendship as had

mastered time," he has prayed that they, dying at once, might,

involved together, hover across the dolorous strait to the other

shore, and