selection of the doctrine to be, on the one hand, particularized
and left behind; on the other hand, carried forward and
universalized. This immense error demands correction. Let us
notice a few specimens in exemplication of it. Jehovah is not the
only true God in distinction from odious idols; but Brahma, Ahura
Mazda, Osiris, Zeus, Jupiter, and the rest, are names given by
different nations to the Infinite Spirit whom each nation worships
according to its own light. The Jews and the Christians are not
the only chosen people of God; but all nations are his people,
chosen in the degree of their harmony with his will. The
providence of God is not an exceptional interference from without,
exclusively for the Jews and Christians; but it is for all, a
steady order of laws within, as much to be seen in the shining of
the sun, or the regular harvest, as in any shocks of political
calamity and glory. Not the Messiah alone reveals God; but, in his
degree, every ruler, prophet, priest, every man who stands for
wisdom, justice, purity, and devotion, represents him. It is not
doctrinal belief in the Messiah, but vital adoption of his spirit
and character, of the principles of real goodness, that
constitutes the salvation of the disciple. We are to look not for
the resurrection of the flesh from the grave, but for the
resurrection of the soul from all forms of sin, ignorance, and
misery. It is the universal prevalence of truth and virtue,
knowledge, love, and peace, in the hearts of men, not the physical
reign of the returning Messiah, which will make a millennium on
earth. The kingdom of God which Judaism localized exclusively in
Palestine, and the early church exclusively in heaven or on the
millennial earth, should be recognized in every place, whether
above the sky or on the globe, where duty is done, and pure
affection, trust, and joy experienced; for God is not excluded
from all other spaces by any enthronization in one. We ought not
to cling, as to permanent fixtures of revealed truth, to the rigid
outlines of that scheme of faith which was struck out when the
three story house of the Hebrew cosmogony showed the limits of
what men knew, before exact science was born, or criticism
conceived, or the telescope invented, or America and Australia and
the Germanic races heard of; but we should hold our speculative
theological beliefs freely and provisionally, ready to reconstruct
and read just them, from time to time, in accordance with the
demands of the growing body of human knowledge.
Reflecting, in the light of these general ideas of truth, on the
whole subject of the current doctrine of the end of the world and
the day of judgment, we shall see that that doctrine presents no
valid claim for our belief, but is a mythological growth out of
the historic and literary conditions amidst which Christianity
arose on the basis of Judaism. The doctrine was formed by the
unconscious transmutation of metaphors into dogmas. Poetic figures
came, by dint of familiarizing repetition, by dint of imaginative
collection and contemplation, to be taken as expressive of literal
truths. To any reader of the Apocalypse, with competent historical
and critical information for entering into the book from the point
of view occupied by its author, it is just as evident that its
imagery was meant to describe the immediate conflict of Hebrew
Christianity with pagan Rome, and not the literal blotting out of
the universe, as it is unquestionable that the book of Daniel
depicts, not the impending destruction of the world, but the
relations of the chosen nation with the hostile empires of
Persia, Media, Babylon, and Macedonia, from which they had
suffered so much, and which they then hoped speedily to put
beneath their feet. The slain Lamb, standing amidst the throne of
God, with seven eyes and seven horns; Death, on a pale horse, with
Hell following him; the woman, clothed with the sun, and the moon
under her feet; the great red dragon, whose tail casts to the
earth the third part of the stars of heaven; the worm wood star,
that falls as a blazing lamp, and turns a third of the waters of
the earth into bitterness; the seven thunders, seven seals, seven
vials, seven spirits before the throne, seven candlesticks, seven
angels, seven trumpets, seven epistles to the seven churches,
seven horns, seven headed beast, all these things must, perforce,
be taken as free poetic imagery; it would require a lunatic or an
utterly unthinking verbalist to interpret them literally. Why,
then, shall we select from the mass of metaphors a few of the most
violent, and insist on rendering these as veritable statements of
fact? If the rest is symbolism, so are the pictures of the
avenging armies of angels, the reeking gulf of sulphur, and the
golden streets of the city.
The entire scheme of thought, as it still stands in the mind of
the Orthodox believer, is to be rejected as spurious, because it
rests on a process of imaginative accumulation and transference
which is absolutely illegitimate; namely, the association and
universalizing of political and military images, which are then
hardened from emblems into facts, and cast over upon the mutual
relations of God and mankind. We ought to break open the
metaphors, extract their significance, and throw the shells aside.
But ignorant bibliolatary and ecclesiasticism insist on
worshipping the shells, with no insight of their contents.
There is one all important fact which should convince of their
error those who hold the current view of a general judgment at the
end of the world as having been revealed from God through Christ.
We refer to the fact that the system of ideas in which a final
resurrection and judgment of the dead are logical parts, existed
in the Zoroastrian theology five or six centuries before the birth
of Christ. It was adopted thence by the Jews, and afterwards
adopted from the Jews by the Christians. If, therefore, this
doctrine be a revelation from God, it was revealed by him to the
Persians in a dark and credulous antiquity. In that case it is
Zoroaster and not Christ to whom we are indebted for the central
dogmas of our religion! No, these things are imagery, not essence,
the human element of imaginative error with which the divine
element of truth has been overlaid, and from whose darkening and
corrupt company this is to be extricated.
There are, in the New Testament, in addition to the relevant
metaphors which we have already examined, several others of great
impressiveness and importance. We must now explain these, separate
the truths and errors popularly associated with them, and leave
the subject with an exposition of the real method of the divine
government and the true idea of the day of judgment, in contrast
with the prevalent ecclesiastical perversions of them.
The part played in theological speculation and popular religious
belief by imagery borrowed from the scenery and methods of
judicial tribunals, the procedures and enforcement of penal law,
has not been less prominent and profound than the influence
exerted by natural, political, and military metaphors. The power,
the pomp, the elaborate spectacle, the mysterious formalities, the
frightful penalties, the intense personal hopes and fears,
associated with the trial of culprits in courts or before the head
of a nation, must always have sunk so deeply into the minds of men
as to be vividly present in imagination to be affixed as typical
stamps on their theories concerning the judgments of God and the
future world. This process is perhaps nowhere more distinctly
shown than in the belief of the ancient Egyptians. Before the
sarcophagus containing the mummy was ferried over the holy lake to
be deposited in the tomb, the friends and relatives of the
departed, and his enemies and accusers, if he had any, together
with forty two assessors, each of whom had the oversight of a
particular sin, assembled on the shore and sat in judgment. The
deceased was put on his trial before them: and, if justified,
awarded an honorable burial; if condemned, disgraced by the
withholding of the funeral rites. Now the papyrus rolls found with
the mummies give a description of the judgment of the dead, a
picture of the fate of the disembodied soul in the Egyptian Hades,
minutely agreeing in many particulars with the foregoing ceremony.
Ma, the Goddess of Justice, leads the soul into the judgment hall,
before the throne of Osiris, where stands a great balance with a
symbol of truth in one scale, the symbol of a human heart in the
other. The accuser is heard, and the deceased defends himself
before forty two divine judges who preside over the forty two sins
from which he must be cleared. The gods Horus and Anubis attend to
the balance, and Thoth writes down the verdict and the sentence.
The soul then passes on through adventures of penance or bliss,
the details of which are obviously copied, with fanciful changes
and additions, from the connected scenery and experience known on
the earth.
Taking it for all in all, there perhaps never was any other scene
in human society so impressive as the periodical sitting in
judgment of the great Oriental kings. It was the custom of those
half deified rulers the King of Egypt, the Sultan of Persia, the
Emperor of India, the Great Father of China to set up, each in the
gate of his palace, a tribunal for the public and irreversible
administration of justice. Seated on his throne, blazing in
purple, gold, and gems, the members of the royal family nearest to
his person; his chief officers and chosen favorites coming next in
order; his body guards and various classes of servants, in
distinctive costumes, ranged in their several posts; vast masses
of troops, marshalled far and near. The whole assemblage must have
composed a sight of august splendor and dread. Then appeared the
accusers and the accused, criminals from their dungeons, captives
taken in war, representatives of tributary nations, all who had
complaints to offer, charges to repel, or offences to expiate. The
monarch listened, weighed, decided, sentenced; and his executioners
carried out his commands. Some were pardoned, some rewarded, some
sent to the quarries, some to prison, some to death. When the
tribunal was struck, and the king retired, and the scene ended,
there was relief with one, joy with another, blood here, darkness
there, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in many a place.
Dramatic scenes of judgment, public judicial procedures, in some
degree corresponding with the foregoing picture, are necessary in
human governments. The prison, the culprit, the witnesses, the
judge, the verdict, the penalty, are inevitable facts of the
social order. Offences needing to be punished by overt penalties,
wrongs demanding to be rectified by outward decrees, criminals
gathered in cells, appeals from lower courts to higher ones, may
go on accumulating until a grand audit or universal clearing up of
arrears becomes indispensable. Is it not obvious how natural it
would be for a mind profoundly impressed with these facts, and
vividly stamped with this imagery, to think of the relation
between mankind and God in a similar way, conceiving of the
Creator as the Infinite King and Judge, who will appoint a final
day to set everything right, issue a general act of jail delivery,
summon the living and the dead before him, and adjudicate their
doom according to his sovereign pleasure?
The tremendous language ascribed to Jesus, in the twenty fifth
chapter of Matthew, was evidently based on the historic picture of
an Eastern king in judgment. "When the Son of Man shall come in
his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit
upon the throne of his glory: and before him shall be gathered all
nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a
shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the
sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left." If Jesus
himself used these words, we suppose he meant figuratively to
indicate by them the triumphant installation, as a ruling and
judging power in human society, of the pure eternal principles of
morality, the true universal principles of religion, which he had
taught and exemplified. But unfortunately the image proved so
overpoweringly impressive to the imagination of subsequent times,
that its metaphorical import was lost in its physical setting.
This momentous error has arisen from the inevitable tendency of
the human mind to conceive of God after the type of an earthly
king, as an enthroned local Presence; from the rooted incapacity
of popular thought to grasp the idea that God is an equal and
undivided Everywhereness. In his great speech on Mar's Hill, the
apostle Paul told the Athenians that "God had appointed a day in
the which he would judge the world in righteousness by that man
whom he hath ordained." Is not this notion of the judgment being
delegated to Jesus plainly adopted from the political image of a
deputy? The king himself rarely sits on a judicial tribunal: he is
generally represented there by an inferior officer. But this
arrangement is totally inapplicable to God, who can never abdicate
his prerogatives, since they are not legal, but dynamic. The
essential nature of God is infinity. Certainly, there can be no
substitution of this. It cannot be put off, nor put on, nor
multiplied. There is one Infinite alone.
The Greeks located, in the future state, three judges of the dead,
Minos, who presided at the trial of souls arriving from Europe;
Rhadamanthus, who examined those coming from Asia; and Aacus, who
judged those from Africa. They had no fourth and fifth inspectors
for the souls from America and Australia, because those divisions
of the earth were, as yet, unknown! How suggestive is this mixture
of knowledge and ignorance! The heaven of the Esquimaux is a place
where they will have a plenty of fine boats and harpoons, and find
a summer climate, and a calm ocean abounding with fat seals and
walruses. The Greenlander's hell is a place of torment from cold;
the Arab's, a place of torment from heat. Every people and every
man unless they have learned by comparative criticism to correct
the tendency conceive their destiny in the unknown future in
forms and lights copied, more or less closely, from their familiar
experiences here. Is there not just as much reason for holding to
the literal accuracy and validity of the result in one case as in
another? The popular picture, in the imagination of Christendom,
of Gabriel playing a trumpet solo at the end of the world, and a
huge squad of angelic police darting about the four quarters of
heaven, gathering the past and present inhabitants of the earth,
while the Judge and his officers take their places in the
Universal Assize, instead of being received as sound theology,
should be held as moral symbol. Taken in any other way, it sinks
into gross mythology. Can any one fail to see that this picture of
the Last Judgment is the result of an illogical process; namely,
the poetic association and universalizing of our fragmentary
judicial experiences, and the bodily transfer of them over upon
our relations with God? The procedure is clearly a fallacious one,
because the relations of men with God in the sphere of eternal
truths are wholly different from their relations with each other
in the sphere of political society. They are, in no sense, formal
or forensic, but substantial and moral; not of the nature of a
league or compact, but interior and organic; not acting by fits
and starts, or gathering through interruptions and delays to
convulsive catastrophes, but going on in unbreakable continuity.
God is a Spirit; and we too, in essence, are spirits. The rewards
and punishments imparted from God to us, then, are spiritual,
results of the regular action of the laws of our being as related
to all other being. Consequently, no figures borrowed from those
judicial and police arrangements inevitable in the broken and
hitching affairs of earthly rulers, can be directly applicable,
the circumstances are so completely different. The true
illustration of the divine government must be adopted from
physiology and psychology, where the perfect working of the
Creator is exemplified, not from the forum and the court, where
the imperfect artifices of men are exhibited.
God forever sits in judgment on all souls, in the reactions of
their own acts. The divine retribution for every deed is the kick
of the gun, not an extra explosion arbitrarily thrown in. The
thief, the liar, the misanthrope, the drunkard, the poet, the
philosopher, the hero, the saint, all have their just and
intrinsic returns for what they are and for what they do, in the
fitness of their own characters and their harmonies or discords
with the will of God, with the public order of creation. Thus is
the daily experience of one man made a lake of peace threaded with
thrilling rivulets of bliss; that of another, a stream of
devouring fire and poison, or a heaving and smoking bed of
uncleanness and torment. The virtues represent the conditions of
universal good; the vices represent private opposition to those
conditions. Accordingly, the good man is in attracting and
cooperative connection with all good; the bad man, in antagonistic
and repulsive connection with it. In these facts a perfect
retribution resides. If any one does not see it, does not feel its
working, it is because he is too insensible to be conscious of the
secrets of his own being, too dull to read the lessons of his own
experience. And this self ignorant degradation, so far from
refuting, is itself the profoundest exemplification of the truth
of that wonderful word of Jesus: "Verily, I say unto you, they
have their reward." Those who consider themselves saints indulge
in an unspeakable vulgarity, when they feel, "Well, the sinners
have their turn in this world; we shall have ours in the next."
The law of retribution in the spiritual sphere is identical with
the first law of motion in the material sphere; action and
reaction are equal, and in opposite directions. This law being
instantaneous and incessant in its operation, there can be no
occasion for a final epoch to redress its accumulated disbalancements.
It has no disbalancements, save in our erroneous or defective vision.
The true conception of the relation of the all judging Creator to
his creatures is that of the Infinite Being who supplies all
finite receptacles in accordance with their special forms of
organization and character, and who causes exact retributions of
good and evil intrinsically to inhere in their indulged modes of
thought and feeling and will, their own virtues and vices,
fruitions and battlements. This internal, continuous, dynamic view
worthily represents the perfection of the Divine government. The
incomparably inferior view the external, intermittent,
constabulary theory rests, as it seems to us, merely on the
traditions of ignorance and fancy. It has, in every instance,
originated from the unwarrantable interpretation of a trope as a
truth.
For example, the picture of the Last Judgment, supposed to be
drawn by Jesus, in the Parable of the Tares, must be considered,
not as a rigid prophecy of the end of the earth, and the
transmundane destination of souls, but as a free emblem of the
approaching close of the Jewish dispensation, and the terrible
calamities which would then come on the proud, obstinate and
rebellious people. The reaping angels are the Roman and Jewish
armies, and other kindred agencies and collisions in the destined
evolution of the fortunes of Christianity and mankind in the
future. Taken literally, the symbols are incongruous with fact,
and absolutely incredible in doctrine. For they are based on the
image of a royal land owner, who draws his support from the income
of his fields and subjects, and who rewards the faithful bringer
of fruits, and punishes the slothful defaulter; who welcomes and
stores sheaves, because they are wealth: rejects and burns tares,
because they are an injury and a nuisance. But nothing can be
riches or a nuisance to the infinite God, who neither lives on
revenue nor judges by jerks. Men are not literally wheat, the
property of the good sower, Christ; nor tares, the property of the
bad sower, the Devil: they are souls, responsibly belonging to
themselves, under God. And the pay of the human agriculturists, in
the moral fields of the divine King, consists in the daily crops
of experience they raise, not in being advanced to a seat at the
right hand of their Lord, or in being flagellated and flung into a
flaming furnace.
Jesus himself, undoubtedly, used this physical imagery as the
vehicle of spiritual truths; it is lamentable that perfunctory
minds have so generally overlooked the substance in the dress. He
is represented, in Matthew, as having said to his apostles: "When
the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory, ye also shall
sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel."
Now, that he used this figure to convey an impersonal moral
meaning, and that his profound thought underwent a materializing
degradation in the minds of his hearers and reporters, appears
clearly from the incident related immediately afterward. The wife
of Zebedee asked that her two sons might sit, the one on his right
hand, and the other on the left, in his kingdom. And Jesus said,
"Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism
that I am baptized with: but to sit on my right hand, and on my
left, is not mine to give." The imagery meant that the missionary
assistants, in forwarding and spreading the kingdom of truth and
love he came to establish, would be represented in common with
himself in the power it would acquire and sway over the world.
When his hearers interpreted the imagery in a physical sense, as
indicating that he was hereafter to be a visible king, and that
his favorites might expect to share in his authority, honor, and
glory, he solemnly repudiated it.
There is yet another and a wholly different style of imagery
employed by Jesus to convey his instructions as to the judgment
which is to separate the justified from the condemned. The
consideration of this species of imagery would afford an
independent proof, of a cogent character, that they strangely
misapprehend the mind of Jesus who interpret the moral meaning of
his parable in an outward and dramatic sense. The metaphors to
which we now refer are of a domestic and convivial nature, based
on some of the most impressive social customs of the Oriental
nations. It was the habit of kings, governors, and other rich and
powerful men, to give, on certain occasions, great banquets, to
which the guests were invited by special favor. These feasts were
celebrated with the utmost pomp and splendor, by night, in
brilliantly illuminated apartments. The contrast of the blazing
lights, the richly costumed guests, the music and talk, the honor
and luxury within, set against the darkness, the silence, the
envious poverty and misery without, must have deeply struck all
who saw it, and would naturally secure rhetorical reflections in
speech and literature. The Jews illustrated their idea of the
Kingdom of God by the symbol of a table at which Abraham and Isaac
and Jacob were banqueting, and would be joined by all their
faithful countrymen. In his parable of the Supper, describing how
a king, on occasion of the marriage of his son, made a feast and
sent out generous invitations to it, Jesus works up this imagery
still more elaborately. What did he really mean to teach by it? Is
it not clearly apparent from the whole context that he intended it
as an illustration of the fact that the Jews, to whom he first
announced his gospel, and offered all its privileges, having
rejected it, its blessings would be freely thrown open to the
Gentiles, and that they would crowd in to occupy the place of joy
and honor, which the chosen people of Jehovah had refused to
accept? It is by a pure effect of fancy and doctrinal bias that
the parable has been perverted into a description of the Last
Judgment. The reference plainly indicates admission to or
exclusion from the privileges of the new dispensation, a matter of
personal experience in the heart of the disciple and in the
society of the church on this earth. The wedding garment, without
which no one can come to the royal table, is a holy, humble, and
loving character. In consequence of his destitution of this,
Judas, although seated at the table, with the most honored guests,
in the very presence of his Lord, was proved to have no right
there, and was thrust into the outer darkness. His bad spirit, his
inability to appreciate and enjoy the pure truths of the kingdom,
constituted his expulsion. That such was the idea in the mind of
Jesus, something to be experienced personally and spiritually in
the present, and not something to be shown collectively and
materially at the end of the world, appears from the great number
of different forms in which he reiterates his doctrine. Had he
meant to teach literally that he was to come in person at the last
day, and sit in judgment on all men, would he not have had a
distinct conception of the method, and have always drawn one and
the same consistent picture of it? But if he meant to teach that
all who were fitted by their spirit, character and conduct to
assimilate the living substance of his kingdom were thereby made
members of it, while all others were, by their own intrinsic
unfitness, excluded, then it was perfectly natural that his
fertile mind would on a hundred different occasions convey this
one truth in a hundred different figures of speech. That in which
the images all differ is unessential: that in which they all agree
must be the essential thought. Now the parables differ in the
forms of judgment they picture. Therefore these forms are
metaphoric dress. The parables agree in assigning a different fate
to the righteous and the wicked. Therefore this difference is the
vital truth. And Jesus nowhere makes righteousness consist in
anything national, dogmatic, or ceremonial, but everywhere is
something moral.
The doctrine of an unfailing tribunal in the soul, the belief that
we are all judged momentarily at the continuous bar of the truth
reflected in our own conscience, is too deep, delicate, and
elusive a view for the ignorance and hardness of some ages, and of
some persons in every age. They cannot understand that the mind of
man is itself a living table of the law and judgment seat of the
Creator, by its positive and negative polarities, in sympathetic
connection with the standards of good and evil, pronouncing the
verdicts and executing the sentences deserved. They need to
project the scheme of retribution into the startling shape of a
trial in a formal court, and then to universalize it into an
overwhelming world assize. The semi dramatic figment, no doubt,
was an inevitable stage of thought, and has wrought powerfully for
good in certain periods of history. But the pure truth must be as
much better for all who can appreciate it, as it is more real and
more pervasive.
Since God, the indefeasible Creator, is a resistless power of
justice and love in omnipresent relations with his creatures, the
genuine day of judgment to each being must be the entire career of
that being. In a lower degree, every day is a day of judgment;
because all acts, in the spirit from which they spring and the end
at which they aim, carry their own immediate retributions. If we
could survey the whole, at once, from the Divine point of view,
and comprehend the relation of the parts to the whole, undoubtedly
we should perceive that the deserts and the receipts of each
ephemeral existence are balanced between the rise and set of its
sun. But death may, with most solemn emphasis, be regarded as the
final day of judgment to each man, in this sense; that then the
sum of his earthly life and deeds is sealed up and closed from all
further alteration by him, passing into history as a collective
cause or total unit of influence. As long as the creation rolls in
space, and conscious beings live and die, that bequeathal will
tell its good or evil tale of him. What sensitive spirit will not
tremble at the thought of a judgment so unavoidable and so
tremendous as this! The votaries of superstition are mistaken in
supposing that the removal of their false beliefs will destroy or
weaken the sanctions of duty among men. The removal of imaginary
sanctions will but cause the true ones to appear more clearly and
to work more effectively.
The judgment of God then, we conclude, is no vengeful wreaking of
arbitrary royal volitions; but it is the return of the laws of
being on all deeds, actual or ideal. This is, in itself, perpetual
and infallible: but it sometimes forces itself on our recognition
in sudden shocks or crises caused by the gathering obstacles and
opposition made to it by our ignorance, vice, and crime. Every
other doctrine of the Divine judgment is either an error or a
figurative statement of this one. In the latter case, the physical
cover should be dissolved and thrown away, the moral nucleus laid
bare and appropriated. But the popular mind of Christendom has
unfortunately pursued the contrary course, first exaggerating and
consolidating the metaphors, then putting their forms literally in
the place of their meaning.
The awful panorama of the last things, as painted in the
Apocalypse, the sun becoming as sackcloth of hair, and the moon as
blood; the blighted stars dropping; the unveiling of the great
white throne, from before the face of whose occupant the
frightened heaven and earth flee away; the standing up of the
dead, both small and great, the opening of the books, and the
judging of the dead out of the things written therein, this scenic
array has, by its terrible vividness and power of fanciful
plausibility, sunk so deeply into the imagination, and taken such
a tenacious hold on the feelings of the Christian world, secured
for itself so constant a contemplation and encrusted itself with
such a mass of associations, that it has actually come to be
regarded as a veritable revelation of the reality, and to act as
such. And yet, surely, surely, no one who will stop to think on
the subject, with conscious clearness, can believe that books are
provided in heaven with the names of men in them and recording
angels appointed to keep their accounts by double or by single
entry, and that God will literally sit upon a vast white dais
raised on the earth, and go through an overt judicial ceremony. On
what principle is a part of the undivided apocalyptic portrayal
rendered as emblem, the rest accepted as absolute verity? If the
blood red warrior on his white horse followed by the shining
cavalry of heaven, the horrible vials of wrath, the chimerical
angels and beasts, the sky and globe converted into terror struck
fugitives, the bridal city descending from God with its incredible
walls and its impossible gates and its magic tree of life yielding
twelve kinds of fruit, are imagery; then the lake of burning
sulphur, and the resurrection trumpet, and the indictment of the
dead before the dazzling throne, are imagery too. The reader
smiles at the idea that the good Esquimau will sit in Leaven
amidst boiling pots of walrus meat, while in hell the fish lines
of the bad Esquimau will break, and his canoe be crushed by
falling ice. But what better reason can the civilized man give for
the reflecting over upon the judgments of the future his present
experience in the imagery of criminal courts? The same process of
thought is exemplified in both cases. Can any one literally credit
the following verses:
"There are two angels that attend, unseen Each one of us, and in
great books record Our good and evil deeds. He who writes down The
good ones after every action closes His volume and ascends to God.
The other keeps his dreadful day book open Till sunset, that we
may repent, which doing, The record of the action fades away, And
leaves a line of white across the page."
No more should we literally credit the kindred phraseology in the
New Testament. It is free metaphor. The sultan may keep in his
treasury a book with the names of all his favorites enrolled in
it. Is it not a peurility to suppose that God has such documents?
When the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament were
written, the reappearance of Christ for the last judgment was
almost universally supposed by the Church to be just at hand. At
any instant of day or night the signal blast might be blown, the
troops of the sky pour down the swarms of the dead surge up, and
the sheep and the goats for ever be parted to the right and left.
Each day when they saw "the sun write its irrevocable verdict in
the flame of the west," the believers felt that the supreme Dies
iroe was so much nearer to its dawn. But as generation after
generation died, without the sight, and the tokens of its approach
seemed no clearer, the belief itself subsided from its early
prominence into the background. But as it retreated, and became
more obscure and vague in its date and other details, it grew ever
more sombre, appalling, and stupendous in its general certainty
and preternatural accompaniments. When the tenth century drew nigh
its close, a literal acceptance of the scriptural text that "the
dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, after
being bound in the bottomless pit for a thousand years," should
"be loosed a little season," filled Christendom with the most
intense agitation and alarm. From all the literature and history
of that period the reverberations of the frightful effects of the
general expectation of the impending judgment and destruction of
the world have rolled down to the present time. The portentous
season passed, all things continuing as they were, and the immense
incubus rose and dissolvingly vanished. And the Mediaval Church,
like the Apostolic Church before, instead of logically saying: Our
expectation of the physical return of Christ was a delusion,
fancifully concluded: We were wrong as to the date; and still
continued to expect him.
The longer the crisis was delayed, and the more it was brooded
over, the more awful the suppositious picture became. The
Mohammedans held that the end would be announced by three blasts:
the blast of consternation, so terrible that mothers will neglect
the babes on their breasts, and the solid world will melt; the
blast of disembodiment, which will annihilate everything but
heaven and hell and their inhabitants; and the blast of
resurrection, which will call up brutes, men, genii, and angels,
in such numbers that their trial will occupy the space of
thousands of years.
But in the later imagination of Christendom the vision assumed a
shape even more fearful than this. The Protestant Reformation,
when one party identified the Pope, the other, Luther, with
Antichrist, gave a new impulse to the common expectation of the
avenging advent of the Lord. The horrible cruelties inflicted on
each other by the hostile divisions of the Church aggravated the
fears and animosities reflected in the sequel at the last day.
Probably nothing was ever seen in this world more execrable or
more dreadful than those great ceremonies celebrated in Spain and
Portugal, in the seventeenth century, at the execution of heretics
condemned to death by the Inquisition. The slow, dismal tolling of
bells; the masked and muffled familiars; the Dominicans carrying
their horrid flag, followed by the penitents behind a huge cross;
the condemned ones, barefoot, clad in painted caps and the
repulsive sanbenito; next the effigies of accused offenders who
had escaped by flight; then, the bones of dead culprits in black
coffins painted with flames and other hellish symbols; and,
finally, the train closing with a host of priests and monks. The
procession tediously winds to the great square in front of the
cathedral, where the accused stand before a crucifix with
extinguished torches in their hands. The king, with all his court
and the whole population of the city, exalt the solemnity by their
presence. The flames are kindled, and the poor victims perish in
long drawn agonies. Now can anything conceivable give one a more
vivid idea of the terrors embodied in the day of judgment than the
fact that it came to be thought of under the terrific image of an
Auto da Fe magnified to the scale of the human race and the earth,
Christ, the Grand Inquisitor, seated as judge; his familiars
standing by ready with their implements of torture to fulfil his
bidding; his fellow monks enthroned around him; his sign, the
crucifix, towering from hell to heaven in sight of the universe;
the whole heretical world, dressed in the sanbenito, helpless
before him, awaiting their doom? Who will not shudder at the
inexorable horrors of such a scheme of doctrine, and devoutly
thank God that he knows it to be a fiction as baseless as it is
cruel?
Since the cooling down of the great Anabaptist fanaticism, the
millennarian fever has raged less and less extensively. But if the
literature it has produced, in ignorant and declamatory books,
sermons, and tracts, were heaped together, they would make a pile
as big as one of the pyramids. The preaching of Miller, about a
quarter of a century ago, with his definite assignment of the time
for the appointed consummation, caused quite a violent panic in
the United States. Several prophets of a similar order in Germany
have also stirred transient commotions. In England, the celebrated
London preacher, Dr. Cumming, whose works entitled "The End," and
"The Great Tribulation," have been circulated in tens of thousands
of copies, is now the most prominent representative of this
catastrophic belief. He has, however, made himself so ridiculous
by his repeated postponements of the crisis, that he has become
more an object of laughter than of admiration. Mathematical
calculations, based on mystic numbers transmitted in apocalyptic
poetry, are at a heavy discount. And yet there is a considerable
sect, called the Second Adventists, composed of the most
illiterate believers, and swelled by clergymen wrought up to the
fanatic pitch by an exclusive dogmatic drill, who lead an
eleemosynary life on mouldy scraps of Scripture, and anxiously
wait for the sound of the archangelic trump. Every earthquake,
pestilence, revolution, violent thunderstorm, comet, meteoric
shower, or extraordinary gleaming of the aurora borealis, startles
them as a possible avant courier of the crack of doom. Some of
them are said to keep their white robes in their closets all ready
for ascension. What a dismal thing it must be to live in such a
lurid and lugubrious dream; their best hope for the world the hope
that its end is at hand,
"Impatient of the stars that keep their course And make no pathway
for the coming Judge!"
But this excited and uneasy anticipation is now a rare exception.
In the minds of most intelligent Christians, even of those who
still cling to the old Orthodox dogmas, the day of judgment has
been put forward as far as the day of creation has been put
backward. Less and less do religious believers shudder before the
theatric trials depicted in heathen and Christian mythology; more
and more do they reverently recognize the intrinsic jurisdiction
in the structure of the soul, and in the organism of society. The
time is not far remote, let us trust, when the ancient spirit of
national separation, political antipathy, and sectarian hatred,
whose subjects identify themselves with the party of God, all
others with the party of the Devil, and cry, "How long, O Lord,
dost thou not judge and avenge us on our enemies," will give way
to that better spirit of philanthropy and true piety, which sees
brethren in all men, and prays to the common Father for the equal
salvation and blessedness of all. Then the faith of the self
righteous, who plume themselves on their sound creed, and so
relentlessly consign the heretics to perdition, gloating over the
idea of the time "when the kings of the earth, and the chief
captains, and the rich men, and the mighty men, and every bondman,
and every freeman, shall hide themselves in dens and caves, saying
to the mountains and the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the
face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the
Lamb; for the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be
able to stand?" then the temper of this faith will be seen to be
as wicked as its doctrine is erroneous. It will be recognized as a
remnant of the barbaric past in steep contradiction with the whole
mind of the modest and loving Jesus, who, when the disciples
wished to call down fire from heaven to consume his opponents,
rebuked them in words still condemning all their imitators, "Ye
know not what spirit ye are of." Many a bigoted and complacent
dogmatist, wrapt in that same ignorance to day, fails to read his
own heart, and obstinately shuts his eyes to the truth, foolishly
fancying himself better and safer, on account of his blind
conservatism, than he who fearlessly seeks the guidance of
science. Yet are not the principles of science as much glimpses of
the mind of God as any sentences in the Bible are? The whole
ecclesiastical scheme of eschatology is a delusion. No such
gigantic melodrama, no such grotesque and horrible extravaganza,
will ever get itself enacted between heaven and earth. Forever, as
freshly as on the first morning, the Creator pours his will
through his works in irresistible vibrations of goodness and
justice; and forever may all his creatures come to him unimpeded,
and trust in him without limit.
Away, then, monstrous horrors, bred in the night of the past!
Dreadful incubi! too cruelly and too long ye have sat on the
breast of man. The cockcrow of reason has been heard, and it is
time ye were gone. Fade, terrible dream, painted by superstition
on the cope of the sky, picture of contending fiends and angels,
fiery rain, a frowning God, and shuddering millions of victims!
Away forever, and leave the blue space free for the benignant
mysteries of the unknown eternity to lure us blessedly forward to
our fate. Come, believers in the merciful God of truth, lend your
aid to the glorious work of spiritual emancipation. In this benign
battle for the deliverance of the world from error and fear, every
free mind should be a champion, every loving heart a volunteer.
Free leaders of the free, forward! out of the darkness into the
light. Lift your banner in the front of the field of opinions
where all may see it, and then follow it as far as truth itself
shall lead. On! Progress is the eternal rule. Man was made to
outgrow the old and struggle into the new, as every morning the
sun mounts afresh out of the dead day, and drives the night before
him. Ignorance and despotism have crushed us long. But now, now we
fling our fetters off, and, marching from good to better, hope to
escape from every falsehood, and to conquer every wrong, under the
inspiration of the omnipresent Judge who executes his decrees in
the very working itself of that Universal Order whose progressive
unfolding will be fulfilled at last, not in any magic resurrection
and assize, but in the simple lifting of the veil of ignorance
from all souls brought into full community, and the illumination
before their opened faculties of the whole contents of history.
For we believe that all history is by its own enactment
indestructibly registered in the theatre of space, and that every
consciousness is educating to read it and adore the perfect
justification of the ways of God. The eternal immensity of the
universe is the true Aula Regis in which God holds perpetual
session, overlooking no suppliant, omitting no case.
CHAPTER III.
THE MYTHOLOGICAL HELL AND THE TRUE ONE, OR THE LAW OF PERDITION.
THE doctrine that there is a material place of torment destined to
be the eternal abode of the wicked after death is based on the
language of the Bible, supported by the aggregate teachings of the
church, and commonly asserted, though with a stricken and failing
faith, throughout Christendom at this moment. When any one tries
to show the unreasonableness of the belief in this local prison
house of the damned, arrayed with the innumerable horrors of
physical anguish, he is at once met with the declaration that God
himself has declared the fact, and consequently that we are bound
to accept it without question, as a truth of revelation. For the
reasons which we will immediately proceed to give, this
representation must be rejected as a mistake.
The popular doctrine of hell is not a divine revelation, but is a
mythological growth. It is a fanciful mass of grotesque and
frightful errors enveloping a truth which needs to be separated
from them and exhibited in its purity. In the first place, the
substance of the doctrine affirmed, the notion of a bottomless
pit, or penal territory of fire and torment in which God will
confine all the unredeemed portions of the human race after their
bodily dissolution, is something wholly apart from morality and
religion, something belonging to the two departments of
descriptive geography and police history. The existence or
nonexistence of a place of material torment reserved for the
wicked, is a question not of theology, but of topography. In
earlier times it was avowedly included in geography; and numerous
caves, lakes, volcanos, as at Lebadeia, Derbyshire, Avernus,
Nafita, Etna, and elsewhere were believed to be literally
entrances to hell. So famous and eminent a man as Saint Gregory
the Great, when the great Sicilian volcano was seen to be
increasingly agitated, taught that it was owing to the press of
lost souls, rendering it necessary to enlarge the approach to
their prison. With the increase of knowledge, the localization of
hell was subsequently by many authors, made a part of cosmography,
and shifted about among the comets, the moon and the sun, although
most people still think that it is the interior of the earth. But,
the best theologians of all denominations, the most authoritative
thinkers of all schools, now hold that the supernatural
revelations of God are limited to the sphere of the spirit, and do
not include the data of geology, astronomy, chemistry and
mathematics.
God is not a local king, ruling his subjects by means of political
machinery and external interferences; he is the omnipresent
Creator, spiritually sustaining and governing his creatures from
within by means of the laws which determine their experience, the
action and reaction between their faculties and their surrounding
conditions. Accordingly, the sphere of direct revelations from the
spirit of God to the spirit of man is limited to the implications
in the divine logic of the soul and its life, that is, to moral
and religious truths. The facts of history and cosmology are left
for the processes of natural discovery. Whether there be or be not
a localized hell of material tortures lies not within the domain
of revelation, but is a problem of physical science. And science
demonstrates, from the weight of the globe, that it is solid; and
not, according to the current belief, a hollow shell containing a
sea of flame packed with the floating hosts of the lost.
Furthermore, the only mode in which the truth of such a doctrine
could be made known is wholly aside from the method of
supernatural revelation. God does not utter his thoughts to his
chosen messengers in words or other outward signs as a man does.
Men communicate information to one another by voice, gesture,
drawing, writing or other mechanical devices. It is the natural
mistake of a crude age to suppose that God does the same,
breathing verbal formularies into the of minds of his selected
servants. But this is not the case. Revelation is not to receive
an announcement; it is to perceive a truth. Since God is infinite,
we cannot stand out against him and talk with him. Souls in finer
and fuller harmony with the works and laws of God, thus fulfilling
the human conditions of inspiration, are met by the divine
conditions, and obtain new insight of the ways and designs of God.
They experience purer and richer ideas and emotions than others,
and may afterwards impart them to others, thus transmitting the
revelation to them. For this new enlightenment, sanctification, or
rise of life, is what alone constitutes a true revelation. Now if
there be a local and physical hell, it is not a moral truth which
the inspired soul can see, but a scientific fact which can be
perceived only by the senses or deduced by the logical intellect.
If a man could travel to every nook of the creation he might
discover whether there were such a hell or not. But you cannot
discover a spiritual truth by any amount of outward travel. When a
soul is so delivered from egotism, or the jar of self will against
universal law, and brought into such high harmony with the spirit
of the whole, as to perceive this divine law of life, "He who
dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him," then he is
inspired to see a religious truth. He has obtained a divine
revelation. But we cannot conceive of any degree of exaltation
into unison with God which would enable a man to see the fact that
the centre of the earth or the surface of the sun or any other
spot, is a place of fire set apart as the penal abode of the
damned, and that it is crowded with burning sulphur and
unimaginable forms of wickedness and agony. Such a doctrine is out
of the province, and its conveyance irreconcilable with the method
of revelation, which consists not in an exterior communication of
scientific facts to messengers selected to receive them, but in an
interior unveiling of religious truths to souls prepared to see
them.
In the next place, we maintain, that the doctrine of a local hell,
a guarded and smoking dungeon of the damned, ought not to be
regarded as a truth contained in a revelation from God, because it
is plainly proved by historic evidence to be a part of the
mythology of the world, a natural product of the poetic
imagination of ignorant and superstitious men. In all ages and
lands men have recognized the difference between the good and the
bad, merit and crime; have seen that innocence and virtue
represented the permanent conditions of human welfare, that guilt
and vice represented the insurrection of private or lower and
transient desire against public or higher and more lasting good;
and have felt that the former deserved to be praised and rewarded,
the latter to be blamed and punished. In all ages and all nations
society has teemed with devices for the distribution of these
returns, prizes to the meritorious, penalties to the derelict.
There is scarcely any evil discoverable in nature or inventable in
art which has not been used as a means for the punishment of
criminals. Enemies captured in battle, or seized by the minions of
despots, violators of the laws of the community, arraigned before
judicial tribunals, have been in every country subjected to every
species of penalty, such as slavery, imprisonment, banishment,
fine, stripes, dismemberment. They have been starved, frozen,
burned, hung, drowned, strangled by serpents, devoured by wild
beasts. The rebellious and hated offenders of the king, while he
banquets in his illuminated palace with his faithful servants and
favorites around him, are exiled into outer darkness, fettered in
dungeons, plied with every conceivable indignity and misery,
bastinadoed, bowstrung, or torn in pieces with lingering torture.
Here we have the germ of hell. To get the fully developed popular
doctrine of hell it is only necessary to concentrate and aggravate
the known evils of this world, the horrible sufferings inflicted
on criminals and enemies here, and transfer the vindictive and
pitiable mass of wretchedness over into the future state as a
representation of the doom God has there prepared for his foes.
Earthly rulers and their practice, the most impressive scenes and
acts experienced among men, have always hitherto furnished the
types of thought applied to illustrate the unknown details of the
hereafter. The judge orders the culprit to be disgraced, scourged,
put in the stocks, or cropped and transported. The sultan hurls
those he hates into the dungeon, upon the gibbet or into the
flame, with every accompaniment of mockery and pain. So, an
imaginative instinct concludes, God will deal with all who offend
him. They will be excluded from his presence, imprisoned and
tormented forever.
This whole process of comparison and inference, natural as it is,
is one prolonged fallacy exemplifying the very essence of all
mythological construction in contrast both with inspired
perception and logical reasoning. The revealing arrival of a truth
in consciousness is when an intuitive thrill announces the action
of our faculties in correspondence with some relation in the
reality of things. Mythology is the deceptive substitute for this,
employed when we arbitrarily project forms of our present
experience into the unknown futurity, and then hold the resultant
fancies as a rigid belief, or regard them as actual knowledge.
This is exactly what has happened in the case of the doctrine of
an eternal physical hell beyond the grave. The natural and
punitive horrors of the present state have been collected,
intensified, dilated, and thrown into the future as a world of
unmitigated sin and wrath and anguish, a consolidated image of the
vengeance of God on his insurgent subjects.
Now the true desideratum, the only result on which reason can
rest, whenever tests are applied to our beliefs, is this: that
what is known be scientifically set forth in distinct definitions;
that what is unknown be treated provisionally, with theoretic
approaches; and that what is absolutely unknowable be fixedly
recognized as such. This regulative principle of thought is
grossly violated in every particular by the popular belief in a
material hell.
Wherever we look at the prevalent doctrines of hell among
different peoples, from the rudest to the most refined, we see
them reflecting into the penal arrangements of the other world the
leading features of their earthly experience of natural, domestic,
judicial, and political evils. The hells of the inhabitants of the
frigid zones are icy and rocky; those of the inhabitants of the
torrid zones are fiery and sandy. Are not the poetic process and
its sophistry clear? Nastrond, the hell of the Northmen, is a
vast, hideous and grisly dwelling, its walls built of adders whose
heads, turned inward, continually spew poison which forms a lake
of venom wherein all thieves, cowards, traitors, perjurers and
murderers, eternally swim. Is this revelation, science, logic, or
is it mythology?
The Egyptian priests taught, and the people seemed to have
implicitly trusted the tale, that there was a long series of hells
awaiting the disembodied souls of all who had not scrupulously
observed the ritual prescribed for them, and secured the pass
words and magical formulas necessary for the safe completion of
the post mortal journey. The specifications and pictures of the
terrors and distresses provided in the various hells are vivid in
the extreme, including ingenious paraphrases of every sort of
penalty and pang known in Egypt. The same thing may be affirmed
with quadruple emphasis of the Hindu doctrine of future
punishment. In the Hindu hells, truly, the possibilities of horror
are exhausted. To enumerate their sufferings in anything like
their own detail would require a large volume. The Vishnu Parana
names twenty eight distinct hells, assigning each one to a
particular class of sinners; and it adds that there are hundreds
of others, in which the various classes of offenders undergo the
penalties of their misdeeds. There are separate hells for thieves,
for liars, for those who kill a cow, for those who drink wine, for
those who insult a priest, and so on. Some of the victims are
chained to posts of red hot steel and lashed with flexible flames:
others are forced to devour the most horrible filth. Some are
mangled and eaten by ravenous birds, others are squeezed into
chests of fire and locked up for millions of years. These examples
may serve as a small specimen of the infernal ingenuity displayed
in the descriptions of the Hindu hells, which are all of one
substantial pattern, however varied in the embroidery.
The Parsees hold that when a bad man dies his soul remains by the
body three days and nights, seeing all the sins it has ever
committed, and anxiously crying, "Whither shall I go? Who will
save me?" On the fourth day devils come and thrust the bad soul
into fetters and lead it to the bridge that reaches from earth to
heaven. The warder of the bridge weighs the deeds of the wicked
soul in his balance, and condemns it. The devils then fling the
soul down and beat it cruelly. It shrieks and groans, struggles,
and calls for help; but all in vain. It is forced on toward hell,
when it is suddenly met by a hideous and hateful maiden. It
demands, "Who art thou, O, maiden, uglier and more detestable than
I ever saw in the world?" She replies, "I am no maiden; I am thine
own wicked deeds, O, thou hateful unbeliever furnished with bad
thoughts and words." After further disagreeable adventures, the
soul is plunged into the abode of the devil, where the darkness
and foul odor are so thick that they can be grasped. Fed with
horrid viands, such as snakes, scorpions, poison, there the wicked
soul must remain until the day of resurrection.
Now, no enlightened Christian scholar or thinker will hesitate
with one stroke to brush away all the details of these pagan
descriptions of hell, as so much mythological rubbish, leaving
nothing of them but the bare truth that there is a retribution for
the guilty soul in the future as in the present. But, in the
ecclesiastical doctrine of hell, prevalent in Christendom, we see
the full equivalents of the baseless fancies and superstitions
incorporated in these other doctrines. If the mythological hells
of the heathen nations are not a revelation from God, neither is
that of the Christians; for they are fundamentally alike, all
illustrating the same fallacy of the imaginative association of
things known, and the transference of them to things unknown. Not
a single argument can the Christian urge in behalf of his local
hell which the Scandinavian, the Egyptian, the Hindu or the
Persian, would not urge in behalf of his.
We can actually trace the historic development of the orthodox
belief in a material hell from its simple beginning to its
subsequent monstrousness of detail. The Hebrew Sheol or
underworld, the common abode of the dead, is depicted in the Old
Testament as a vast, slumberous, shadowy, subterranean realm,
gloomy and silent. It grew out of the grave in this manner. The
dead man was buried in the ground. The imagination of the
survivors followed him there and brooded on the idea of him there.
The image of him survived in their minds, as a free presence
existing and moving wherever their conscious thought located him.
The grave expanded for him, and one grave opened into another
adjoining one, and shade was added to shade in the cavernous space
thus provided; just as the sepulchres were associated in the
burial place, and as the family of the dead were associated in the
recollection of the remaining members. Thus Sheol was an
imaginative dilatation of the grave.
But it was dark and still; an obscure region of painless rest and
peace. How came the notions of punishment, fire, brimstone, and
kindred imagery, to be connected with it? We might safely say in
general that these ideas were joined with the supposed world of
the dead, by the Hebrews, in the same way that a similar result
has been reached by almost every other civilized nation, that is,
by a reflection into the future state of the retributive terrors
experienced here. Since the sharpest torture known to us in this
world is that inflicted by fire, it is perfectly natural that men,
in imagining the punishments to be inflicted on his victims in the
next world by one who has at his command all possible modes of
pain, should think of the application of fire there. But happily,
we are not left to this possible conjecture.
Few influences sank more deeply into the Hebrew mind then the
legend how the earth opened her mouth and swallowed into Sheol,
Korah and Dathan and Abiram, the rebels against the authority of
Moses, at the same time that fire fell from Jehovah and consumed
two hundred and fifty of their confederates. In this story,
rebellion against a prophet of God, fire and submersion in Sheol,
are fused into one thought as a type of the future punishment of
the wicked.
But another narrative has been of far greater importance in this
direction, namely, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The
Cities of the Plain were situated on a sulphur freighted and
volcanic soil. They were inhabited by a people specially abandoned
to vices, and specially odious to the chosen people of God. When a
terrible eruption took place, overwhelming those cities with all
their people, and swallowing them under a flood of bituminous
flame, ashes and gas, it was natural that the Hebrews in after
time should say that Jehovah had rained fire and brimstone from
heaven on his enemies, and then that the history should take form
in their proud and pious imaginations as a fixed type of the doom
of the wicked. So it did.
At a later period the scenes and events in Gehenna, or the Valley
of Hinnom in the outskirts of Jerusalem, confirmed this tendency
and completed the Jewish picture of hell. In this detested vale
the worship of Moloch was once celebrated by roasting children
alive in the brazen arms of the god, in whose hollow form a fierce
fire was kept up, and around whose shrine gongs were beaten and
hymns howled to drown the shrieks of the victims. Here all the
refuse and offal of the city was carried and consumed, in a
conflagration whose fire was never quenched, and amidst an
uncleanness whose worms never died. This imagery, too, was cast
over into the future state as a representation of the fate
awaiting the wicked.
Still further, it was the custom of some Oriental kings to have
criminals of an especially revolting character, or the objects of
their own particular hatred, flung into a furnace of fire, and
there burned alive before the eyes of their judges. The example of
this given in the Book of Daniel, where Nebuchadnezzar had the
furnace heated seven times hotter than was wont, and ordered
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego cast into it, furnished both the
Jews and the Christians with another type of the punishment of
hell. So striking an image could hardly fail to take effect, and
to be often reproduced. It occurs repeatedly in the New Testament.
The old dragon, the devil, as the Apocalypse says, is to be
chained and cast into a furnace of fire. In the writings of the
Church fathers, and in the visions of the monks of the Middle Age,
this image constantly occupies a conspicuous place. And thus,
finally, the common notion of hell became an underground world of
burning brimstone, an enormous furnace or lake of fire, full of
fiends and shrieking souls.
Tundale, an Irish monk of the Twelfth century, describes the devil
in the midst of hell, fastened to a blazing gridiron by red hot
chains, The screams echo from the rafters, but with his hands he
seizes lost souls, crushes them like grapes between his teeth, and
with his breath draws them down the fiery caverns of his throat.
Some of the damned the chronicler describes as suspended by their
tongues, some sawn asunder, some alternately plunged into caldrons
of fire and baths of ice, some gnawed by serpents, some beaten on
an anvil and welded into one mass, some boiled and strained
through a cloth. The defenders of the orthodox doctrine of hell
will admit that this terrible picture is mere mythology; but they
will say it is the product of a benighted age, and long since
outgrown. Yet it is no more mythological than the declarations in
the Apocalypse which are still literally accredited by multitudes
of the believing. And what shall be said of the following extract
from a little book called "The Sight of Hell," recently published
with high ecclesiastical endorsement, for circulation among the
children of Great Britain and America? The writer, the Rev. J.
Furniss, describes the different dungeons of hell, and the passage
which we quote is but a fair specimen of the entire series of
tracts which he has collected in a volume, and which is having a
large sale at this very time. "In the middle of the fourth dungeon
there is a boy. His eyes are burning like two burning coals. Two
long flames come out of his ears. He opens his mouth, and blazing
fire rolls out. But listen! there is a sound like a kettle
boiling. The blood is boiling in the scalded veins of that boy.
The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is
boiling in his bones. There is a little child in a red hot oven.
Hear how it screams to come out. See how it turns and twists
itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of
the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. Very likely God
saw that this child would get worse and worse, and never repent,
and thus would have to be punished much more in hell. So God in
his mercy called it out of the world in its early childhood." Of
these diabolical horrors, drawn out through hundreds of pages, the
orthodox Protestant may say, "Oh, this is only a piece of Popish
superstition. We all repudiate it as a most repulsive and absurd
fancy."
Well, what then will he say if representations, though perhaps not
quite so grossly graphic in circumstance, yet absolutely identical
in principle, are set before him from the fresh utterances of
hundreds of the most distinguished Baptist, Methodist,
Presbyterian, Episcopalian preachers and theologians? It would be
easy to present whole volumes of apposite citations. But two or
three will be enough. John Henry Newman in that one of his
parochial sermons, entitled, "On the Individuality of the Soul,"
gives us accounts of hell which for unshrinking detail of
materiality will compare with the most frightful passages of
Oriental mythology. George Bull, Lord Bishop of Saint Davids, in
his volume of sermons declares that all who die with any sin
unrepented of, "are immediately consigned to a place and state of
irreversible misery a place of horrid darkness where there shines
not the least glimmering of light or comfort." Mr. Spurgeon
asserts, "There is a real fire in hell a fire exactly like that
which we have on earth, except that it will torture without
consuming. When thou diest thy soul will be tormented alone in
hell: but at the day of judgment thy body shall join thy soul, and
then thou wilt have twin hells, body and soul together, each
brimfull of pain; thy soul sweating in its inmost pores drops of
blood, and thy body, from head to foot, suffused with agony; not
only conscience, judgment, memory, all tormented, but thy head
tormented with racking pain, thine eyes starting from their
sockets with sights of blood and woe; thine ears tormented with
horrid noises; thy heart beating high with fever; thy pulse
rattling at an enormous rate in agony; thy limbs cracking in the
fire, and yet unburned; thyself put in a vessel of hot oil,
pained, yet undestroyed. Ah! fine lady, who takest care of thy
goodly fashioned face, that fair face shall be scarred with the
claws of fiends. Ah! proud gentleman, dress thyself in goodly
apparel for the pit; come to hell with powdered hair. It ill
becomes you to waste time in pampering your bodies when you are
only feeding them to be devoured in the flame. If God be true, and
the Bible be true, what I have said is the truth, and you will
find it one day to be so." Is not this paragraph a disgusting
combination of ignorance and arrogance? It is to be swept aside
and forgotten along with the immense mass of similar trash,
loathsome mixture of superstition and conceit, with which
Christendom has for these many centuries been so cruelly deceived
and surfeited.
Tearing off and throwing away from the vulgar doctrine of hell all
the incrustation of material errors and poetic symbolism, the pure
truth remains that God will forever see that justice is done,
virtue rewarded, vice punished. Then the question arises, In what
way is this done? Not by the material apparatus of a local hell.
For the doctrine of such a penal abode is not only a natural
product of the mythological action of the human mind in its
development through the circumstances of history, but when
regarded in that light it is clearly a false representation. It is
a figment incredible to any vigorous, educated and free
mind at the present day. Such reception as it now has it retains
by force of an unthinking submission to tradition and authority.
In the primitive ages, when the soul was imagined to be a fac
simile of the body, only of a more refined substance, capable of
becoming visible as a ghost, of receiving wounds, of uttering
faint shrieks when hurt, of partaking of physical food and
pleasure, it was perfectly natural to believe it susceptible of
material imprisonment and material torments. Such was the common
belief when the doctrine of a physical hell was wrought out. The
doctrine yet lingers by sheer force of prescription and
unthinkingness, when the basis on which it originally rested has
been dissipated. We know great as our ignorance is, we know that
the soul is a pure immateriality. Its manifestations depend on
certain physical organs and accompaniments, but are not identical
with them. Thought, feeling, will, action, force, desire, these
are spirit, and not matter. A pure consciousness cannot be shut up
in a dungeon under lock and bolt. A wish cannot be lashed with a
whip. A volition cannot be fastened in chains of iron. You may
crush or blast the visible organism in connection with which the
soul now acts; but no hammer can injure an idea, no flame scorch a
sentiment. What the spiritual personality becomes, how it exists,
what it is susceptible of, when disembodied, no man knows. It is
idle for any man, or any set of men to pretend to know.
Unquestionably it is not capable of material confinement and
penalties. The gross popular doctrine of hell as the fiery prison
house of the devil and his angels, and the condemned majority of
mankind, therefore, fades into thin air and vanishes before the
truth of the absolute spirituality of mind.
In those early times, when military, political, judicial and
convivial phenomena furnished the most imposing and instructive
phenomena, before exact science and critical philosophy had given
us their fitter moulds and tests of thought, it was unavoidable
that men should think of God and Satan as two hostile monarchs,
each having his own empire and striving to secure his own
subjects, and looking on the subjects of his adversary as foes to
be thwarted at all points. But when, with the progress of thought
evil is discerned to be a negation, the devil vanishes as a verbal
phantom, and the bounds of his local realm are blotted out and
blent in the single dominion of the infinite God who regards none
as enemies, but is the steady friend and ruler of all creatures,
everywhere aiming, not to inflict vengeance on the wicked, but to
harmonize the discordant, bringing good out of bad and better out
of good in perpetual evolution. Sound theology will see that God
is the pervading Creator who governs all from within by the
continuous action and reaction between every life and its
environing conditions. But mythology puts in place of this the
incompetent conception of God as a political king, governing by
external edicts and agents, by overt decrees and constables. This
deludes us with the local and material hell of superstition, which
has no existence in reality. Disordered Function is the open
turnpike and metropolis of the real hell of experience. The great
king's highway, leading to heaven from every point in the universe
is the golden Mean of Virtue; but on the right and left of this
broad road two tributary rivers, namely, Defect and Excess, empty
into hell. The only true hell is the vindicating and remedial
return of resisted law on a being out of tune with some just
condition of his nature and destiny. The fearful cruelty and
tyranny of the mythological hell, supported by the constant
drilling of the people on the part of the priesthood whose vested
interests and prejudices are bound up in the doctrine, have held
the human race long enough in their bondage of pain and terror. In
a Buddhist scripture we read, "The people in hell who are immersed
in the Lohakumbha, a copper caldron a thousand miles in depth,
boiling and bubbling like rice grains in a cooking pot, once in
sixty thousand years descend to the bottom and return to the top.
As they reach the surface they utter one syllable of prayer, and
sink again on their terrific journey. Those who, during their life
on earth, reverence the three jewels, Buddha, the Law and the
Priesthood, will escape Lohakumbha!" The same essential doctrine
resting on the same inveterate basis, selfish love of power and
sensation, still prevails, though diminishingly, among us. When at
last in the light of reason and a pure faith it vanishes away what
a long breath of relief Christendom and humanity will draw!
If we thus dismiss as a vulgar error the belief in a hell which is
a bounded region of physical torture somewhere in outward space,
it becomes us to acquire in place of this rejected figment some
more just and adequate idea. For a doctrine which has played such
a tremendous part in the religious history of the world must be
based on a truth, however travestied and overlaid that truth may
be. This frightful envelop of superstitious fictions cannot be
without some important reality within. In distinction, then, from
the monstrous mass of mistakes denoted by it, what is the truth
carried in the awful word, hell?
Denying hell to be distinctively any particular locality in time
and space, we affirm it to be an experience resulting wherever the
spiritual conditions of it are furnished. Accordingly, we are not
to exclude it from the present state and confine it to the future,
as those seem to do who say that men go to hell after death. Being
a personal experience and not a material place, many are in it now
and here as much as they ever will be anywhere. Neither are we to
exclude it from the future and confine it to the present state, as
those do who say that all the hell there is terminates with the
emergence of the soul from the body. This might be so, if all sins
discords and retributions were bodily. But, plainly, they are not.
A mental chaos or inversion of order is as possible as a physical
one. Hell is anywhere or nowhere, at any time or at no time,
accordingly as the soul carries or does not carry its conditions.
We are not to say of the sinner that he goes to hell when he dies,
but that hell comes to him when he feels the returns of his evil
deeds. It is a state within rather than a place without.
The true meaning of hell is, a state of painful opposition to the
will of God, misadjustment of personal constitution with universal
order or the rightful conditions of being. This is not, as the
vulgar doctrine would make it, an experience of unvarying sameness
into which all its subjects are indiscriminately flung. It is a
thing of endless varieties and degrees, varying with the
individual fitnessess. Hell is pain in the senses, slavery in the
will, contradiction or confusion in the intellect, remorse or vain
aspiration in the conscience, disproportion or ugliness in the
imagination, doubt, fear, and hate in the heart. There is a hell
of remorse, forever retreading the path of ruined yesterdays.
There is a hell of loss, whose occupant stands gazing on the
melancholy might have been transmuted now into a relentless
nevermore. Every sinner has a hell as original and idiosyncratic
as his soul and its contents. As the ingredients of evil
experience are not mixed alike in any, hell cannot be one
monotonous fixture for all, but must be a process altering with
the different elements and degrees afforded, and softening or
ending its wretchedness in proportion as the heavenly elements and
degrees of freedom, pleasure, clearness, self approval, beauty,
faith and love, furnish the conditions of blessedness. Hell being
the consciousness of a soul in which private will is antagonistic
to some relation of universal law, its keenness and extent, in
every instance, must be measured by the variations of this
antagonism. But how does such an antagonism arise? What are the
results or penalties of it? How can it be remedied? No amount of
reflection will enable any man to penetrate to the bottom of all
the mysteries connected with these questions. But though we cannot
tell why the principles of our destiny should be as we find them,
we can see what the facts of the case actually are as revealed in
the history of human experience. And this is what chiefly concerns
us. Let us, then, try to penetrate a little more thoroughly into
the nature of hell.
The rude definition of heaven and hell, regardless of any special
place or time, is respectively the experience of good, and the
experience of evil. But what are good and evil? Good is the
conscious realization of universal order, the absolute fruition of
being, the fulfillment of individual function, in accordance with
the conditions for the most perfect and prolonged fulfillment of
the universal totality of functions. Supposing that there were
only one instance and form of conscious life, with no possibility
of conflicting claims within or without, then good would be to
that life simply the fulfillment of the functions of its nature.
But the moment a being is set in relation with other beings like
itself, and also made aware of various gradations of importance
among its own interior faculties, then the definition of good is
no longer the simple fulfillment of function, or the mere
gratification of desire; but it becomes the fulfillment of
function in such a manner as to secure the greatest total quality
and quantity of fulfilled function. Now evil is the opposite or
negation of this. It is whatever lessens the fruition of life,
prevents the fulfillment of function, contracts or mars the
realization of universal order in the consciousness of a living
being. Thus evil is not merely the keeping of an individual desire
from its own proper good. But every gratification of desire which
involves the winning of a less important good at the expense of a
more important one is evil; or, on the other hand, the evil of
sacrificing or denying a gratification in itself legitimate,
becomes good when it is the means for securing a more authoritative
gratification. Let us try to make these abstract statements
intelligible by illustration.
The appropriation of nutriment is a good, the indispensable method
for sustaining life. It is right that we should eat and drink; and
the pleasure which accompanies the proper performance of the
function is the reflex approval of the Creator. The refusal fitly
to take and relish our food brings debility, disease, pain, and
premature death. Whether this refusal results from absorption in
other employment or from some superstitious belief, it is a
violation of the will of our Maker, and the consequent suffering
and dissolution are the retributive hell or reflex signals,
painfully pointing out our duty. On the other hand, if the
pleasure of gratifying appetite becomes a motive for its own sake
and leads to excessive indulgence, the superior good of permanent
health and vigor is sacrificed to the far inferior transient good
of a tickled palate. Thus, the dyspeptic over loading his stomach
is plunged into the horrid hell of nightmare: the gourmand,
pampering himself with a diet of spiced meats and Burgundy,
shrieks from the twinging hell of gout. There is no divine malice
in this. It is simply the rectifying rebound of the distorted
arrangements of nature. The law of virtue prescribes in every
respect that course of action which, on the whole, permanently and
universally, will secure the greatest amount and the best quality
of life and experience. Vice is whatever inverts or interferes
with this, as when a man exalts a physical impulse above a moral
faculty, or incurs years of shame and misery in the future for the
sake of some passing gratification in the present. God commands
man to rule his passions by reason, not slavishly obey them; to
exercise a wisely proportioned self denial to day for the winning
of a safer and nobler morrow. The degree in which they do this
measures the civilization, wisdom, moral valor, and dignity of
men. The failure to do this is the condition on which every
infernal penalty or reaction of hellish experience hinges. A man
may feed an abnormal craving for opium, until all his once royal
powers of body and mind are sacrificed, imbecility and madness set
in, and his nervous system becomes a darting box of torments. How
much better, according to the aphorism of Jesus, to have cut off
this single desire, than for the whole man to be thus cast into
hell.
Hell is the retributive reflex or return of disarranged order
experienced when in the hieriarchy of man higher grades of faculty
and motive are subordinated to lower ones. The miser who gives
himself up to a base greed for money, separated from its uses, is
thereby degraded into a mechanized, self fed and self consuming
passion, having no pleasure, except that of accumulating, hoarding
and gloating over the idle emblem of a good never realized. His
time and life, his very brain and heart, are coined into an
obscene dream of money. He knows nothing of the grandest ranges of
the universe, nothing of the sweetest delights of humanity.
Contracted, stooping, poorly clad, ill fed, self neglected,
despised by everybody, dwelling alone in a bleak and squalid
chamber, despite his potential riches, his whole life is a
conglomerate of impure fears welded by one sordid lust fear of
robbery, fear of poverty, fear of men, fear of God, fear of death,
all fused together by a lust for money. Is he not in a competent
hell? Who would wish anything worse for him? His vice is the
elevation of the love of money above a thousand nobler claims. His
unclean and odious experience is the avenging hell which warns the
spectators, and would redeem its occupant, if he would open his
soul to its lessons. So, when a burglar breaks into a bank and
bears off the treasures deposited there, scattering dismay and
ruin amidst a hundred families, the essence of his crime is that
he makes the narrow principle of his selfish desire paramount over
the broad principle of the public welfare, setting the petty good
of his individual enrichment above the weighty good represented by
that respect for the right of property which is a condition
essential to the life of the community. The principle on which he
acts, if carried out, would cause the dissolution of society. The
evil which he seeks to avoid, his lack of the means of life, is
incomparably smaller than the evil he perpetrates, the means for
the death of society. The resulting sense of hostility between
himself and the community, alienation from his fellow men and from
God, fear of detection, actual condemnation by his own conscience,
and ideal condemnation by all the world, constitute a hell felt in
proportion to the delicacy of his sensibility. The spiritual
disturbance and pain thus suffered are the effort of Providence to
readjust the inverted relation of his low self interest to the
higher interest of the general public, and remove the threatened
ruinous consequences of his sin by remedying the order it has
disbalanced and broken.
These illustrations have prepared the way for a statement of the
true idea of hell in its final formula. The will of God is
expressed in that gradation of goods or scale of ranks which
indicates the fixed conditions of universal welfare and the
accordant forces of the motives which should impel our pursuit of
them. To seek these goods in their proper order of importance and
authority, every level of function beneath kept subservient to
every one above, is the law of salvation, or the pathway of heaven
through the universe. To substitute our will for the will of God,
the intensity of private desires in place of the dignity of public
motives, putting the lower and smaller over the higher and
greater, is the law of perdition, or the pathway of hell through
the universe.
The lowest function of man is a simple momentary gratification of
sense, as, for example, an act of nutrition. The highest function
of which his nature is capable is the surrender of himself to the
universal order, the sympathetic identification of himself with
the eternal law and weal of the whole. Between those vast extremes
there are hundreds of intermediate functions, rising in worth and
authority from the direct gratifications of appetite to the ideal
appropriations of transcendental good, from the titillation given
by a pinch of snuff to the thrill imparted by an imaginative
contemplation of the redeemed state of humanity a million years
ahead. But, throughout the entire range, all the sin and guilt
from which hell is produced consist in obeying a lower motive in
preference to a higher one, making some narrow or selfish good
paramount over a wider or disinterested one. A man, educated as a
physician, practiced his profession on scientific principles, and
nearly starved on an income of seven hundred dollars a year. He
then set up as a quack, compounded a worthless nostrum, and, by
dint of impudence, advertising, and other charlatanry, made
eighteen thousand dollars a year, and justified his conduct on the
ground of his success. By falsehood and cheating he preyed on the
credulity of the public. If all men were like him, society could
not exist. The meanness of his soul, shutting him out from the
most exquisite and exalted prerogatives of human nature, is the
revenge which the universe takes on such a man the hell in which
God envelops him. A manufacturer turns out certain products by
means of a chemical process which adds seven per cent. to his
profit, but shortens the average life of his workmen five years.
All mankind would indignantly denounce him with an instinctive
recognition of his wickedness in thus erecting the profane
standard of pecuniary gain above the sacredness of the lives of
his brothers. But when of two men in deadly peril from an
approaching explosion only one can escape, and the stronger,
instead of monopolizing the chance, as he might, stands back and
lays down his life in saving the weaker, it is a deed of heroic
virtue, applauded by all men, supported by the whole moral
creation which derives new beauty and sweetness from it. It
radiates a peaceful bliss of self approval through the breast
before it is mangled and cold, and fills the soul with a serene
joy as it flies to God. The essential merit of such an action is
the subjection of that selfishness which is the principle of all
sin, and whose recoil is the spring trap of hell, to that
disinterestedness which is the germ of redemption and the perfume
of heaven.
It is not an unfrequent occurrence for a mixture of heaven and
hell to be experienced. Here is an able and upright merchant who
is about to fail, in consequence of disasters which he could
neither foresee nor prevent, and for which he is in no sense
responsible. He shrinks from bankruptcy with inexpressible shame
and distress. He is mortified, cut to the quick, robbed of sleep,
can hardly look his creditors in the face. Now, he reflects, "This
is not my fault. I have been honest, prudent, economical,
unwearied in effort, I have done my duty to the best of my
ability. God approves me, and all good men would if they knew the
exact facts." If that assurance does not shed an element of heaven
into his hell, spread a soothing veil of light and oil over his
stormy trouble, then it is because his pride is greater than his
self respect, his vanity more keen than his conscience is strong,
his regard for appearances more influential than his knowledge of
the truth. And in that case the misery he suffers is the penalty
of his excessive self sensitiveness.
The elements of hell are pain, slavery, imprisonment, rebellion,
forced exertion, forced inaction, shame, fear, self condemnation,
social condemnation, universal condemnation, aimlessness, and
despair. He who seeks good only in the just order of its
successive standards, gratifying no lower function, except in
subservience to the higher ones, escapes these experiences, feels
that he fulfills his destiny, and is an approved freeman of God.
The service of truth and good alone makes free; all service of
evil is slavery and wretchedness. For freedom is spontaneous
obedience to that which has a right to command. The thirsty man
who quaffs a glass of cold water does an act of liberty; but he
who constantly intoxicates himself in satiation of a morbid and
despotic appetite, knows that he is a slave, and feels condemned,
and chafes in the hell of his bondage.
The dissipated sluggards and thieves who feed the vices and prey
on the interests of the community, writhe under the rebuke of the
higher laws they break in enthroning their selfish propensities
above the cardinal standards of the public good; and in the stale
monotony of their indulgences, they know nothing of the glorious
zest shed by the best prizes of existence into the breasts of the
virtuous and aspiring, whom every day finds farther advanced on
their way to perfection. Envy is the very blast that blows the
forge of hell. It sets its victim in painful antagonism with all
good not his own, actually turning it into evil; while a generous
sympathy appropriates as its own all the foreign good it
contemplates. The sight of his successful rival keeps an envious
man in a chronic hell, but adds a heavenly enjoyment to the
experience of a generous friend. Ignorance, pride, falsehood, and
hate are the four master keys to the gates of hell keys which
sinners are ever unwittingly using to let themselves in, and then
to lock the bolts behind.
A character whose spontaneous motions are upward and outward, from
the central and lowermost instincts of self toward the highest and
outer most apprehensions of good, exemplifies the law of
salvation, which guides the conscious soul in an ascending and
expanding spiral through the successively greater spheres of truth
and life. The character whose spontaneous tendencies are the
reverse of this, moving inward and downward, exemplifies the law
of perdition, which guides the soul in a descending and
contracting spiral, constantly enslaving it to lower and viler
attractions of self in preference to letting it freely serve the
superior ranks forever issuing their redemptive behests and
invitations above. When the members of a family erect their
separate wills as independent laws, instead of harmoniously
blending around a common authority of truth and love, when they
live in incessant collisions and stormy insubordination, a
poisonous fret of irritable vanity gnawing their heart strings, a
fiery sleet of hate and scorn hurtling through the domestic
atmosphere, the whole household are in perdition. Their home is a
concentrated hell. To be without love, without soothing attentions
and encouragements, without fresh aims, and a relishing
alternation of work and rest, without progress and hope, to be
deprived of the legitimate gratifications of the functions of our
being, and compelled to suffer their opposites what closer
definition of hell can there be than this? And this, while avoided
or neutralized by virtue, is, in its various degrees, obviously
the inevitable result and penalty of sin.
The great mistake in the popular view or mythological doctrine of
hell has arisen from conceiving of God under the image of a
political ruler, acting from without, by wilful methods, and
inflicting arbitrary judgments on his rebellious subjects. He
should be conceived as the dynamic Creator, acting from within,
through the intrinsic order and laws of things, for the
instruction and guidance of his creatures. His condemnation is the
inevitable culmination of a discordant state of being, rather than
the verdict of a vindictive judge or the sentence of a forensic
monarch. Every retribution is an impinge of the creature in the
creation, and, so far from expressing destructive wrath, is an act
of the self rectifying mechanism of the universe to readjust the
part with the whole. With what pernicious folly, what cruel
superstition, men have attributed their own miserable passions to
their imperturbable Maker, breaking his infinite perfection into
all sorts of frightful shapes, as seen through the blur and
effervescence of their own imperfections! So the sun seems to go
down with his garments rolled in blood, and to set angrily in a
stormy ocean of fire: but really the great lamp of the universe
shines serenely from the unalterable fixture of his central seat,
and all this spectral tempest of blaze and glare is but a
refraction of his beams through our vexed atmosphere.
God being infinitely perfect, does not change his dispositions and
modes of action like a fickle man. His intentions and deeds are
the same here and everywhere, now and always. If we wish to learn
in what manner God will prepare a hell and punish the impenitent
wicked after death, we must not, as men did in the barbaric and
mythological ages, make an induction from the treatment of
criminals by capricious and revengeful rulers in this world; we
must see how God himself now treats his disobedient children for
their demerits here, assured that his eternal temper and method
are identical with his temporal temper and method.
Well, then, how does God treat offenders now? Incapable of anger
or caprice, he retains his own steady procedures and absolute
serenity unaltered, but leaves the culprits to endure the effects
of their perverted bearing towards him and towards the order he
has established.
If a man lies or defiles himself, or blasphemes, or murders, God
does not dash him from a cliff or cast him into a furnace of fire.
There would be no connection of cause and effect in
that; and to suppose it, is a gross superstition. He leaves the
offender to the reactions of his own acts, the discordant vileness
of his own degradation, the devouring return of his own passions,
to punish him for his sin, and to purge him of his wrong. The true
retribution of every wicked deed is contained in the recalcitration
of its own motive. What fitter penalty can the soul suffer than
that of being embraced in the hellish atmosphere of its own bad spirit,
to teach it to reform itself and cultivate a better spirit?
What, then, is the meaning of the fear, suffering and horror,
which so often accompany or follow sin? They do not, as has been
commonly supposed, express the indignation and revengefulness of
God. No, at their very darkest, they must suggest the shadow of
his aggrieved will, not the lurid frown of his rage. A part of the
discord which sin is and introduces, they denote the remedial
struggles of nature and grace to restore the perverted being to
its normal condition. If you put your finger in the fire the
burning pain is the reaction of your act, and that pain is not
vengeance, but preservative education. When some frightful disease
seizes on a man, the inflammation and convulsions which succeed
are the violent spring of the constitution on the enemy, its
desperate attempt to shake off the fell grasp, and bring the
organism to health and peace again. These efforts either succeed,
or in the exhausting shocks the body is destroyed. It is the same
with the soul. Sin is the displacement of the hierarchy of
authorities in the soul, the misbalancing of its energies, the
disturbance of its health and peace. And all the varieties of
retribution are the recoil of the injured faculties, the struggles
of the insulted authorities, to vindicate and reestablish
themselves. Now, these efforts, if the soul is indestructible,
must always, at last, be successful. Health in the body is the
harmonious adjustment of its energies with its conditions; and a
sufficient modicum must be obtained or death ensues. Virtue in the
soul is the harmony of its powers with the laws of God; the
measure of this is the measure of spiritual life; and granting the
soul to be immortal, the tendency towards a complete measure of
virtue must ultimately become irresistible, and every hell at last
terminate in paradise. The persistent forces or laws of the divine
environment steadily tend to draw the unstable forces or passions
of all creatures into harmony with them, and that harmony is
redemption. Perdition is consequently never, as the ecclesiastical
doctrine makes it always, a state of fixed hopelessness. Though we
make our bed in the nethermost hell, God is there. And wherever
God is, penitence and grace, reformation and pardon, have a right
of eminent domain between him and the souls of his children.
According to the common doctrine of hell as a physical locality,
and the predestination of all men to it through the sin of Adam,
birth is a universal gateway of perdition, the whole world one
open course to damnation for all except the few elected to be
saved through the blood of Christ. The orthodox scheme depicts the
lineage of Adam as a dark river of perdition, choked with the
souls of the damned, steadily pouring into hell ever since our
human generations began. But in addition to the refutation of this
terrible belief by its monstrous moral iniquity, science is now
doubly refuting it by the proof of the existence of the human race
on the earth for unnumbered centuries before the Biblical date of
Adam. So this fictitious gate of a fictitious hell is shut and
abolished. With it vanishes the horrible picture of this world as
floored with omnipresent trap doors to the bottomless pit, and
closed fatally around by a dead wall of doom, through which, by
one bloody orifice alone, the believers in the vicarious atonement
could crawl up into heaven. In place of this, we see the whole
universe as one open House of God, traversed in all directions by
the free entries of laws of intrinsic justice and love.
And so of the remaining theoretic gates of hell, unbelief, ritual
neglect, and the other technicalities on which priests and deluded
zealots have always hinged the perdition of such as heed not their
authority; none of them shall much longer prevail. With the wiping
out of the mythological hell all these fanciful entrances to it
likewise disappear. But instead of these visionary ones we should
point out and warn men from the substantial gates of the true
hell. Whatever is a cause of insubordinate and discordant fruition
in body or soul, individual or community, is a real gate of hell.
All the moral and social evils, intemperance, war, ambition,
avarice, the extremes of poverty and wealth, ignorance, bad
example, despotism, disease, every form of vice or crime, all the
influences that destroy or mar human virtue, excellence, and
harmony, are so many open gates of hell, drawing their victims in.
In holding back those who are approaching these fatal gates, in
trying to contract them, to shut them up here is a vital work to
be done, infinitely more promising than the brandishing of the
terrors of that material hell in which sensible men can no longer
believe. For the only true hell is the remedial vibration of truth
in an uncoordinated soul, even when not remedial for the
individual still remedial for the race.
It is not our outward abode, but our inmost spirit, that makes our
experience infernal or heavenly: for, in the last result, it is
the occupying spirit that moulds the environment, not the
habitation that determines the tenant. This is the substance of
the whole matter. An accomplished chemist, who was a good man in
truth, but a heretic by the standard of orthodoxy, died. Being an
unbeliever, of course, he went to hell. Seeing a group of children
in torment there, he pitied them very deeply, and straightway
began to devise measures, by means of his skill in chemical
science, to shield them from the flame. Instantly the whole scene
changed. The beauty of heaven lay around him, and all its
blandness breathed through him. Forgetting his own sufferings in
sympathy for those of others, he had obeyed the law of virtue,
subjecting a selfish desire to a disinterested one; and the
omnipotent God enveloped him with the heaven of his own spirit.
Another man, who was hard and cruel in character, but perfectly
sound in the orthodox faith and observances, died. It is true he
was an avaricious and hard saint, but then he believed in the
atoning blood; and so, of course, he went to heaven. No sooner did
he find himself safely seated in bliss than he tried to peep over
the golden wall into the pit of perdition, in order to heighten
the relish of his favored lot by the contrast of the agonies of
the lost. Instantly the celestial scenery about him was changed
into infernal, and, by the radiation and return of his own bad
spirit, he found himself plunged into hell and writhing under its
retributive experience. His character exemplified the law of
perdition, enthroning selfishness over disinterestedness,
subverting the order of virtue; and the insulted will of God made
his imagined heaven a real hell.
Hell is revealed in the experience of the world as a diminishing
quantity through the successive periods since war, cannibalism and
slavery were universal. Will not the progressive process terminate
in the utter extinction of it, paradise everywhere steadily
encroaching on purgatory until at last the whole universe of matter
and spirit composes an unbroken heaven?
According to the nebular hypothesis, the entire creation was once
a measureless chaos confusion, conflict, collisions, explosions,
making a universal hell of matter. But the discords and
perturbations grew ever less and less, regularity and order more
and more, as suns and planets and moons took form and wheeled in
their gleaming circles, till now the mazy web of worlds is weaving
throughout space the perfect harmony of the creative design. The
evolution of incarnate spiritual destinies began later, and is
more complex than the material, each mind being as complicated as
the whole galaxy. May we not trust that at last it shall be as
complete as the evolution of the astronomic motions already is,
and a divine empire of holy and happy men be the goal of history?
This hope carries the cross through hell, and leaves nothing
unredeemed.
CHAPTER IV.
THE GATES OF HEAVEN; OR, THE LAW OF SALVATION IN ALL WORLDS.
HEAVEN, in the crude fancy of mankind, has generally been
conceived as a definite, exclusive, material abode; either some
elysian clime on the surface of the earth; or some happy isle
beyond the setting sun; or this whole globe, renovated by fire and
peopled with a risen and ransomed race; or else some halcyon spot
in the sky, curtained with inaccessible splendor and crowded with
eternal blessings. It was natural that men should think thus of
heaven as a place whence all the evils which they knew were
excluded and where all the goods which they knew were carried to
the highest pitch, God himself visibly enthroned there in
entrancing glory amidst throngs of worshippers.
This was unavoidable, because, in an early age, before knowledge
and reflection had trained men to the critical examination and
correction of their instinctive conclusions, all the data which
they possessed would naturally lead them to imagine the unknown
God in the glorified form and circumstances of the most enviable
being their experience had yet revealed to them; and to paint the
unknown future state of perfected souls under the purest aspects
of the most desirable boons they had known in the present state.
It being a necessity of their uncritical minds to personify God by
a definite picture of imagination, and to portray heaven to
themselves as an external place, they could not do otherwise than
work out the results by means of the most intense experiences and
the most impressive imagery familiar to them. The highest idea
they had of man, purified and expanded to the utmost, would be
their idea of God; and the grandest and happiest conditions of
existence within their observation, enhanced by the removal of
every limiting ill, would form their notion of heaven. Both would
be outward, definite, local, and, as it were, tangible. Royal
courts with their pomp of power and luxury; priestly temples, with
their exclusive sanctity, their awe inspiring secrets, their
processions and anthems, would inevitably furnish the prevailing
casts and colors to the dogmas and the scenery of early religion.
For what were the most vivid of all the experiences men had among
their fellows on earth? Why, the exhibitions of the sultan with
his gorgeous ceremonial state, and of the high priest with the
dread sacrifice and homage he paid amidst clouds of incense and
rolling waves of song; the admission of the favored, in glittering
robes, to share the privileges; the exclusion of the profane and
vulgar in squalid misery and outer darkness. Consequently, except
by a miracle, these sights could not fail largely to constitute
the scenic elements for the popular belief concerning God and
heaven. What should men reflect over into the unknown to portray
their ideals there, if not the most coveted ingredients and the
most impressive forms of the known? The great thing, then,
inevitably, would be supposed to be to gain the personal favor of
the supreme Sovereign by some artifice, some flattery, some
fortunate compliance with his arbitrary caprice, and to get into
the charmed enclosure of his abode by some special grace some
authoritative passport or magic art.
But as soon as science and philosophy, and a spiritual experience
rectifying its own errors by reflective criticism, have created a
more competent theology it discredits all these raw schemes. It
teaches that God, being the eternal omnipresent power and mystery
which foreran, underlies, pervades and includes all things, cannot
justly be figured as a man, locally here or there, and not
elsewhere. He can be justly thought of only as the almighty
Creator of the universe, intelligible in the order of his works
and ways, but inscrutable in his essence, absent nowhere, present
everywhere in general, and specially revealed anywhere whenever a
fit experience in the soul awakens a special consciousness of him.
This conception of God the only one any longer defensible as the
Infinite Spirit, incapable, except in his various incarnations, of
particular local enthronement and uncovering to the outward gaze
of worshippers, necessitates a correspondent alteration in the
vulgar idea of heaven as an exclusive spot in space.
In every form of being, in any portion of the universe, the
central idea of a state of salvation, is the fulfillment of the
will of the Creator in the faculties of the creature, the fruition
of the ends of the whole in the consciousness of the part, the
congruity of the forces of the soul with the requirements of its
situation. If this definition be accepted, it is clear that no
mere place of residence, however excellent, can be heaven. That is
but one factor of heaven, and worthless without a corresponding
factor of a spiritual kind. Essentially, heaven is a divine
experience, not a divine location; yet constructively it is both
of these. Ever so serene and pure a space, perfectly free from
every perturbation of ill, and surrounded with all the outer
provisions of power and order, would be no heaven, until a
prepared soul entered it, furnishing the spiritual conditions for
the forces to run into fruition, for the melody of blissful being
to play. The material elements of the universe, so far as we know,
are unconscious dynamics. However perfectly marshalled, they can
by themselves compose no heaven. So the conscious soul, as far as
we know, is incapable of an independent and unrelated existence in
itself. All its experience, when ultimately analyzed, is the
resultant of the mutual relations between its own energies and
capacities and the forms and forces of things outside of itself.
When there is a right arrangement of right realities in the
residence, and a right development of faculties and affections
within the resident, and such an adjustment of the spiritual
states with the surrounding conditions, that, as these act and
react upon each other, the laws of the universe break into
conscious harmony, or the will of God is realized in a life of
blessedness; that harmony, that blessedness, is what we mean by
heaven; and the conditions of its realization constitute the law
of salvation.
Such being the true idea of heaven, obviously, it cannot be
limited to any particular locality. It may be here, elsewhere,
anywhere, everywhere, before death, in death, after death;
whenever and wherever the proper conditions meet inward state and
outward circumstances so adjusted as to produce an experience
which fulfills the will of God and realizes the end of the
creation. Hereafter this may be, as we know it now on earth, a
spiritual fruition in material conditions, or it may be something
altered in accordance with the varying exigences of worlds whose
details are as yet inconceivable by us, altogether hidden behind
the veil of futurity and our ignorance. But its one fundamental
condition, its eternal essence under all circumstances which can
possibly happen, must always be the same. Whatever changes await
the soul, embodied in a new form in the state after death, or
remaining in pure disembodiment; whatever be the relation of the
immaterial entity of mind to the circumference and contents of its
new home, it can be in paradise, it can command peace and bliss,
or any equivalent of these terms, only by the fulfillment of the
will of God in its being. Heaven is, therefore, the reconciliation
and unison of the soul with its divinely appointed lot, the
identification of the ideal and the real.
The will of God is expressed in the soul in the submissive
services and virtues of a pure and pious character it is expressed
in the outward creation by the unbreakable persistency of his laws
through all the aberrations and discords of accompaning evil or
limitation. Nowhere can it ever be an impossibility to conjoin
these and thus to make a heaven. The one thing which everywhere is
variable and evanescent, is evil, or the imperfect adjustment of
the creature with the works and designs of the Creator. The one
thing which forever stays, and steadily invites the intelligent
soul to its embrace, is good, that is, the opportunity to realize
the divinely intended correspondence of the relations in the part
with the relations in the whole, a serene movement of life through
the unison of the soul with its true fate. Now, the one predicate
which is essential in all things, without whose presence nothing
can be, is the will of God. Even could that will be violated or
withstood, still it would be there, upholding, forgiving, wooing
Salvation, or a life of conscious harmony, is capable of
realization, of course, wherever the means are offered for the
performance and enjoyment of the will of God; and the infinity of
his attributes necessarily makes that condition an omnipresent
possibility in the realm of free spirits. Therefore, heaven is not
outwardly limited to one place, or to one period, but may be
achieved at any time, and anywhere. This throws light on the
fallacy of the current, narrow doctrine of a limited probation.
The oriental belief that the action of the present is the fate of
the future unquestionably covers a profound truth. Yet, if there
is always a future there must likewise always be a present, and
the right action in this may forever redeem that. Probation is
limited by no decree, only by the duration of free being.
Although the essential element in the idea of heaven is forever
the same, it may be regarded in three different aspects, or on
three different scales as an individual experience, as a social
state, as a far off universal event. Heaven, as a private
experience, is the harmonized intercourse of the soul with the
divineness in its surrounding conditions. Heaven, as a public
society, is the blessed communion of blessed souls, a complete
adjustment of the lives of kindred natures. Heaven, as a final
consummation, is the publication of the vindicated will of God in
the total harmony of the universe, all individual wills so many
separate notes blent in the collective consonance of the whole.
But, for all practical purposes, we may overlook this triple
distinction and think of heaven simply as the correspondence of
the life of the soul with those outward conditions which represent
the will of God. And towards this conclusion everything, in its
profoundest and most persistent tendency, is bearing. In spite of
interruptions and seeming exceptions, it is towards this that the
entire confluence of forces and beings gravitates and slowly
advances. The universal law of evolution, in which a scientific
philosophy has generalized its most comprehensive induction, is
but a history and prophecy of the progress towards a moving
equilibrium of the totality of worlds and intelligences, which can
eventuate only in a universal heaven, or unimpeded completion of
the creative design.
Do we not see all creatures tending towards the perfection of
their respective types, every improvement selectively taken up and
carried on, every deteriorating deviation eliminated, all errors
and failures doomed to perish or change into new conditions for
more hopeful attempts? This confirms the faith first based on the
deeper argument. For, since the will of God is the one persistent
reality, the one all evolving and all inclusive power of which
evil is only the distorted and shadowy negation, that opposition
to the will of God which constitutes sin and misery, that discord
with him which generates hell, must prove an ever smaller
accompaniment of his plan, a transitory phenomenon ceasing in even
degree with the spreading conquests of his almighty purpose, as
race on race of creatures, and system on system of worlds, sweep
into the victorious harmony, until the boundless realm of being
shall be boundless heaven.
Heaven, then, in essence, is not merely a favored locality, not
merely a resigned soul, but the result of a combination of these
in a just relation. It is not a playing power in the material
environment nor an inherent attribute of the spiritual instrument;
but it is the music which flows from the instrument when it is
attuned to react in coordination with the acting environment.
Salvation, consequently, is not simply a divine place of abode,
not simply a divine state of soul; but it is these two conjoined.
It is the experimental deposit between the two poles of rightly
ordered conditions in the realm and rightly directed energies in
the inhabitant. Heaven, then, in the best and briefest definition
we can give, is the will of God in fulfillment, or the law of the
whole in uncrossed action.
Hell is the experience produced by the rebound of violated law.
Or, if we hold that, strictly speaking, a divine law is incapable
of violation; as every seeming resistance to gravitation is in
fact a deeper obedience to gravitation, then we may say, in more
accurate phrase, hell is the collision and friction of the
limitations of different laws. It is the discord of the part with
the whole. It is the antagonism of the soul with God. But the
perpetual preservation of a perfectly balanced antagonism with God
is inconceivable. It must vary, totter, grow either worse or
better. If it grows worse, it will finally destroy itself, the
aberrant individuality or malign insurgence vanishing in the
totality of force, as the filth of our sewers vanishes purely in
the purity of the ocean. If it grows better, its improvement will
finally transform the opposition into reconciliation, the evil
disappearing in good. Therefore, every being must at length be
saved from misery, if not by redemptive atonement then by
absolvent annihilation, and one absolute heaven finally absorb the
dwindling hells.
The question of chief importance to us in relation to heaven is,
How can we gain admission into it. The limitations of language
necessitate the use of imagery for the expression of religious
ideas: and there is no objection to it if it be recognized as
imagery, and be interpreted accordingly. Considering, then, that
beatific experience of which heaven consists, under the metaphor
of a city, what are its ways of entrance? How can we pass to its
citizenship?
The obstacles to our entrance exist not in the city itself. Its
gates are never closed. The supreme conditions of redemption are
spiritual, and not local or material. If there be within
no fatal impediments to the free course of the will of God, all
outer obstacles easily give way and cease. If we are ever to know
heaven, it is within ourselves that we must find it out. Whatever
abolishes that internal rebellion of the soul which makes its
experience a purgatory, whatever replaces this confusion with an
accord of the faculties, is a road to heaven. Whatever removes
vices and inserts virtues in their stead, attuning us to the
eternal laws of things, leads us through some gate into paradise.
And nothing else can no ceremonial artifice, no external
transference, no sacramental exorcism, no priestly dodge.
The same mistake generally committed in regard to the nature of
heaven, making it a mere local residence, has been as generally
committed in regard to the conditions of admission. They have been
made arbitrary, whereas they are intrinsic. They are inwrought
with the substantial laws of being. The idea of God being first
fashioned after the image of a sultan throned in his palace amidst
his courtiers, ruling an empire by his whims, it was but natural
that heaven, and the terms of entrance there, should be in a
similar manner conceived under the forms of court ceremonial with
its capricious favoritisms. Thus it has been supposed that by the
atoning sacrifice of an incarnate person of the Godhead
satisfaction has been made for the sins of the world, which was
hopelessly ruined by its original federal representative, and that
thus a pardon was offered to those alone who mentally accept the
formula of the correspondent belief.
According to this view, the only open gateway of heaven is faith
in the vicarious atonement, a baptismal passage through the blood
of Christ. Science explodes this narrow and repulsive doctrine by
demonstrating its irreconcilableness alike with physical fact and
with moral law, first tracing the affiliated lines of our race
back to many separate Adams in the shadows of an indeterminable
antiquity, and then showing that the divine method of salvation is
through substantial rejection of evil and appropriation of good in
personal character, and not through royal proclamation and
forensic conformity.
The plan of God for the salvation of men, as its culmination is
seen in Christ, is the exhibition of the true type of being, the
true style of motive and action, for their assimilation and
reproduction: but Calvinism, when fundamentally analyzed, reduces
it to a monarchical manifesto and spectacular drama working its
effects through verbal terms, acts of mental assent and gesticular
deeds. Every sound teaching of philosophy refutes this exclusive
and arbitrary creed. In fact, its fictitious and mythological
nature is obvious the moment we see that the will of God is
represented in those laws of nature which are the direct
articulations and embodiments of his eternal mind, and not in
those political regulations or priestly and judicial formalities
which express the perverted desires and artificial devices of men.
The wearing of a certain dress, the bending of the knee, the
muttering of a phrase, may flatter an earthly sovereign and gain a
seat at his banquets. But it is childish folly to fancy any such
thing of God. It is absurd to suppose that he has two schemes of
government, one for the present state, another for the future; one
for the elect, another for the reprobate; one for those who gaze
on the spectacle of the crucifixion and make a certain sign,
another for those who do not. His laws, identified with the
unchangeable nature and course of the creation, sweep in one
unbroken order throughout immensity and eternity, awarding perfect
justice, and perfect mercy to all alike, making the experience of
all souls a hell or a heaven to them accordingly as they strive
against or harmonize with the divine system of existence in
which they have their being. The mere acceptance of a technical
dogma, the mere performance of a ritual action, cannot adjust
a discordant character with the conditions of blessedness so
as to reinstate an exile of heaven. To imagine that God will,
in consideration of some technical device, place in heaven a
man whose character fits him for hell, or, in default of that
conventionality, place in hell a man whose character fits him
for heaven, is to represent him as acting on an eccentric whim.
And surely every one who has a worthy idea of God must find
it much easier to believe that men have mixed mythological
dreams with their religion, than to believe that the infinite
God is capable of despotic freaks or melo dramatic caprices.
The poor, odious figment that baptism with the blood of Christ
is the sole entrance to heaven, is rebuked by the sweet and awful
imperturbableness with which the laws of being act, distributing
the ingredients of hell or heaven to every one accordingly as his
vices disobey or his virtues obey the will of God.