chasm in it; but temporal and eternal are but distinctions of
imagination; our eternal life commences, and our earthly is but the
first stage, the infancy of that awful and endless existence. If I see
in our nature that which can survive change, I see that also in it which
can take materials of joy and sorrow along with it. The faculties that
make our life here must be those which shall make that which is to come.
Memory then will be there, which is but the resurrection of our by-gone
experience; and whether for good or evil, it will call up the spirits of
buried deeds, and as the life has been, will be an angel of heaven or a
minister of hell;—imagination, which may have been the nurse of piety or
the slave of passion,—intellect, which may have had the glow of the
seraph or the malice of the demon: accordingly, then, as these powers
have been properly directed or abused, every instinct of our moral
nature tells us must be the joy of a righteous soul, or the agony of an
evil heart. What treasure will the good man find he has laid up for his
immortal life, when the past arises to him in the lustre of a new world:
the consciousness of good thoughts and good actions, the peace of
assimilation with God, and of union with the best of men: the immortal
love of those with whom he had companioned in his earthly journey, the
gratitude of many from whose eyes he had banished tears, and from whose
bosoms he had plucked out despair; who has been true to the claims of
his nature, and accomplished the work of a disciple of Christ, and a
child of God, and a brother of man. On the other side, what are to be
his feelings, who awakens in eternity with emotions of isolation and
repulsion, condemned in his own conscience, who now discovers he has all
to learn which can fit him for the society of noble spirits, whose
expanded faculties flash shame and sorrow on his guilty soul, and show
him that his whole course was folly: the sensualist, who stultified his
reason and profaned his affections: the hypocrite, that toiled but for
the outward, betrayed his convictions, and was a living and incarnate
lie; before his fellows, a whited sepulchre; before his God, a corrupted
mass of falsehood: the profane man, on whose lips prayer rarely dwelt,
but to whom cursing and bitterness were familiar: the persecutor, who
finds at last that he has hated or tormented others for a falsehood, or
a sound: the man of wild ambition, who, despising the true glory which
comes from God, and consists in doing right, spreads terror around him,
in pursuing a phantom: the worldling, whose spirit was enslaved to those
treasures for which he wasted life, and which he has left behind him in
the dust. The sense of right and wrong is powerful and eternal; and when
bad men resist it, it may be safely trusted to effect its own work, both
of correction and of punishment.
II. I shall here review some of the arguments pleaded for the eternal
misery of the wicked, and state briefly the grounds on which I reject
it.
When we consider the mild and merciful spirit of the Gospel,—when we
reflect on it as a revelation of divine love made manifest in the most
perfect form of human love,—we are at first sight astonished that so
tremendous an idea as that of an infinite and eternal hell could ever
have been connected with it, or so wretched a one as a seclusive, and
comparatively all but an unpeopled heaven. And truly this could have
never been, had the doctrine of immortal life been apprehended in the
full spirit of Christianity. But the fact of man’s immortality made
manifest in the Gospel has not generally been so apprehended, it has had
from the first to contend against darkening and perverting influences.
Converts to the faith of Christ brought with them many of the prejudices
and errors of their former training, and what in the early ages of the
church was the result of ignorance, in later ones became sanctified into
the testimony of faith. Those who came from heathen superstitions to the
religion of Christ, brought with them minds filled with material images;
their worship or their age left no means for any others; and their
belief in a future existence of necessity became shaped by these
associations. A sacrificial worship symbolized their gods of wrath, and
what they had attributed to many, they were unable to dissociate from
one; physical pains and pleasures comprehended their whole notion of
retribution and reward, and these their Christianity made eternal. Their
hell and their heaven were therefore fashioned from the rude conceptions
of their previous superstitions, and from the symbolic language of the
Gospel crudely understood. The everlasting hell which thence grew out of
the mistakes of the vulgar, and the speculations of the learned, it was
too much the interest of priests to maintain, not to receive the
sanction of the church with an earnest and zealous promulgation.
Connected with other doctrines, what immense power was thus placed in
the hands of ecclesiastics! With what deep and gloomy awe it shrouded
the character of the priest! Once in the place of his ministry, he stood
there not as the simple teacher of his brethren, and his equals, not as
the mere expounder of his master’s gospel, but as the commisioned
delegate of heaven, authorized by God to denounce his everlasting wrath
on the guilty, to wield the thunder of an eternal vengeance. We cannot
estimate the power with which such a doctrine would invest the
hierarchy, and we are not therefore surprised that it is the last which
any orthodox priesthood would be willing to resign,—one of those prime
doctrines, to deny which has ever been stamped as heresy, from Origen to
Servetus. If even in these times, when protestantism and other causes
have done so much to take away the reverence with which the ministry was
once surrounded, highly-wrought pictures of endless misery give men not
deemed to have any supernatural authority such influence over the minds
of their hearers, such despotism over their feelings and their
consciences, what must it have been when superstition bent down the
votaries before the church in prostrate submission, when the servants of
her altar were regarded as the direct messengers of God,—as those
ordained to stand between hell and heaven, with the key of both; to
announce glad tidings, or empty the vials of indignation; to distribute
God’s grace, or to proclaim his malediction. Many causes have been
assigned for the growth of ecclesiastical supremacy, but this doctrine I
am persuaded was the greatest of all; the priestly throne, which raised
its ambition to the stars, was girded around by the lightning and
tempests of eternal terrors. The doctrine of eternal torments derives
much strength from ecclesiastical interest; and it is further sustained
by all the logic of theological subtlety. Many writers on divinity seem
to find a strange and morbid pleasure in describing the tortures of the
wicked, both in nature and duration, exhausting all analogies to
illustrate the incomprehensible; and all modes of thought and expression
to explain the infinite. On this doctrine the transition from Romanism
to Protestantism has impressed no change. If the Reformation broke some
bonds that enslaved the freedom of religion, it removed no cloud which
obscured its heaven: the fierce teachings of Augustine were only made
more complete and systematic by the still fiercer doctrines of Calvin;
and the dark sketch of eternal reprobation drawn in its outlines by the
Carthaginian monk, received its last touches from the Genevan master:
what in the olden church was broached only in the cautious reasonings of
the schools, has in Protestantism been made the staple _materiel_ of
theological declamation.
These doctrines have not only done much to obscure men’s minds as to the
condition of the wicked in a future state, but also to mislead them in
an equal degree on that of the righteous. This we observe in many of the
popular notions of heaven. To millions, heaven seems to be for the soul
what the grave is for the body—a place of mere repose. If something more
than this, an elysium for indolence, a kind of region of complacent
idealism, where the faithful and elect are to enjoy ecstacies and
prayer, musings and melodies, which the coarse struggles of earth
forbade, in which the cares of the world left no time to engage;—the
clear skies and still waters of paradise, the golden harps, the incense,
and the music of angels, to relieve from weariness, strife, and pain,
toil-worn and time-worn spirits. Nor is such view of heaven ungrateful,
tried as we are here with sin and tired as we are with labour; but this
must not exhaust our thoughts of future bliss. Our highest happiness,
even in heaven, must consist in highest action: no other happiness can
exist for a moral and intellectual being than that which calls his
faculties into energy, and supplies both with materials and objects on
which to engage them. Our ideas in general of heaven are too much those
of negation or contrast. We are here in sojourn, we think only of home
there; we are here in conflict, we think only of peace there; we are
here in labour, and there we only picture our rest; we forget that all
these are worth nothing but as means to higher purposes, unsuitable as
final conditions to creatures who bear within them the life that is
henceforth to go on with that of the All-creative God.
I may just observe here, and it is pleasant to be able to do so, that
the opinion against which this Lecture is directed, is an illustration
of the fact that tenets die out practically before they are renounced
theoretically. It is well known to all who hear recent orthodox
preaching, or who read recent orthodox works on practical piety, how
little compared with former times is the space now occupied in them by
Satan and damnation. The imagination is not tortured as it once was,
with all horrible and hideous representations of human suffering, which
taste and devotion alike reject. Why, even in the Lecture of my reverend
and respected opponent, though directly on the subject, all the
repulsive features are lost in a most moderate and temporate exposition.
Such errors let alone will gradually of themselves expire.
1. In support of the doctrine of eternal torments, it is in the first
place pleaded that Scripture expressly declares it. This conclusion is
founded principally on the words and phrases correspondent to our
“ever,” “everlasting” “for ever and ever,” &c. That in numerous passages
they imply duration without end or limit, we readily admit. It is
needless to point them out. We are then told that this must be their
invariable meaning, except some evident fragility in the object to which
they are applied implies the contrary. To assert that they have the
highest force when connected with future punishment, is to assume what
is to be proved; for the nature of the object is the very question in
dispute. If we can show that the words have not unvarying literal
application, then the subject is at least open to discussion; but if it
be asserted they must mean endless duration, because future punishment
is in its _nature_ endless, the point is dogmatically decided, and there
is no further possibility of argument. If every phrase of Scripture is
to be taken as a rigid definition, then we are to believe that Christ
held himself in his own hands when he said, “this is my body.” Now the
instances in the Bible, in all parts of it in which phrases disputed
between us and our opponents indicated limited duration, and only that,
are numerous beyond counting:[601]—sometimes, not longer than a man’s
life, as when after certain conditions of compact, the slave is said to
serve his master for ever. In other cases it is more extended, but still
temporary; as when the land of Judea is called an everlasting
possession; the law an everlasting covenant; the nation a people
established for ever; the hierarchy an everlasting priesthood. As to the
last, the writer to the Hebrews tells us, that “the priesthood being
changed there is made a necessity of change also of the law; for there
is verily a disannulling of the commandment going before for the
weakness and unprofitableness of it.”
Αιων (the principal word in the Greek original), Mr. Simpson in his
Essay on the duration of future rewards and punishments (p. 17) asserts,
occurs about a hundred times in the New Testament, in seventy of which
at least it is clearly used for limited duration. In the Septuagint
translation of the Old Testament it is even repeated, and several times
it is repeated twice, and in two instances signifies no longer a period
than the life of one man only. “It is,” says the same critic, “an
observation of the utmost importance, that when αιων, or αιωνιος, are
applied to the future punishment of the wicked, they are never joined to
life, immortality, incorruptibility, but are always connected with fire,
or with that punishment, pain, or second death, which is effected by
means of fire. Now since fire, which consumes or decomposes other
perishable bodies, is itself of a dissoluble or perishable nature, this
intimates a limitation of the period of time.” The phrase, “everlasting
fire,” is plainly a metaphor, a metaphor which the Jews would be at no
loss to understand: the associations which they derived from the fire in
the valley of Hinnom would render it sufficiently intelligible.
The phraseology was familiar in the Old Testament. Fire unquenchable,
fire not to be quenched, is used in many places in which it cannot be
literal. Thus Jeremiah (xvii. 27.) threatens the Jews, in the name of
God, for their breach of the sabbath, “then will I kindle a fire in the
gates (of Jerusalem,) and it shall devour the palaces thereof, and it
shall not be quenched.” So Isaiah (xxxiv. 9, &c.), speaking of Idumea,
“and the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust
thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch.
It shall not be quenched night nor day: the smoke thereof shall go up
for ever.”—While on this part of the subject, I shall just allude to a
remark made on Mr. Grundy’s view of the text in which it is said of the
wicked that their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched. After
quoting a passage from Mr. Grundy’s Discourse, and making some comment
on it, the lecturer went on to assert, “In a note moreover, we are
informed that the foregoing criticism is founded on the assumption of
the passage really referring to future punishment, which, however, the
preacher affirms it does not. For, he adds, we have before shown, the
worm has been long since dead, and for ages has the fire been quenched.”
The impression which this use of Mr. Grundy’s language had a tendency to
leave, is one wholly foreign to his meaning; for it would seem to imply
that Mr. Grundy asserted the extension already of retributive penalty in
the future life. The plain import is, that our Lord used a metaphor
taken from perishable things, which have, in fact, perished—and thence
it cannot be proved that he referred to an eternal state of suffering.
The allusion, as is well known, is taken from the close of Isaiah,
where, of the worshippers going to Jerusalem, it is said, they shall
look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed, for their worm
shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched. It is plain that
here it means not eternity, and though applied by Christ to future
punishment, it does not follow from the language that he means to imply
unending punishment. Archbishop Newcome’s language is as strong as Mr.
Grundy’s; for he also says, “in the valley of Hinnom, the worm died when
its food failed—and the pile on which human sacrifices were burnt to
Moloch was often extinguished.” To the writer of the lectures which have
been referred to, we are all deeply indebted for an example set us in
times and under circumstances of which we can but little now estimate
the difficulty; we owe him the tribute of our respect for an honest and
fearless advocacy of truth, of mental and religious freedom, at the
expense of painful and personal sacrifices.
Thus, while none of these passages that I have referred to prove this
doctrine, there are many scriptures at utter variance with it. God is
again and again called the father that created us. We are taught that he
is good, and that his tender mercies are over all his works. God is
love. He will not always chide, we are told, neither will he keep his
anger for ever; that he will not cast off for ever; that he hath not
shut up his tender mercies in anger. Finally, almost in the close of the
sacred volume, we are informed that there shall be no more death,
neither sorrow, neither crying, neither shall they suffer any more pain;
for the former things are passed away. Both these cannot be true. It is
a moral contradiction to conceive a gracious and merciful God, creating
beings with immortal life, and then rendering them eternally wretched:
we have but one alternative, either we must renounce our faith in these
declarations, or we renounce it in the benevolence of God. There are but
two texts, one in Daniel, and the other in Matthew, in which there is
any remarkable force. In these it is said that the wicked go away into
everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal, and on
these two phrases the tremendous doctrine is built up. The duration of
both are urged to be equal, and we are told, that if we deny eternal
damnation, we deny eternal life. No such thing. Reason, feeling, nature,
justice, moral sentiment, the belief of a perfect God, and the force of
scriptural evidence, coincide with the one and are repugnant to the
other. There is not a single proof which can be urged in favour of a
future life, which is not an irrefutable argument against future
perdition. If you deduce the ideas from the goodness of God, from his
truth, from his wisdom, it is essentially subversive of this dark dogma.
If you deduce the idea from the nature of man, it comes to the same
purpose; if you conclude he is to live for ever, because of his infinite
and progressive faculties of reason and of conscience, you must by the
same argument infer that he is to live to a better end than to be cast
eternally into hell. If he was worth creation, he is worth preserving;
if he is worth preserving, he is worth being made good and happy. If a
great multitude of immortals are to endure infinite pain, so far as they
are concerned, the existence of a soul and the being of a God are
infinite evils.
The spirit and the letter of Scripture is in favour of this glorious
doctrine. Every Scripture which proves that God is good and not
malignant is in favour of it; every Scripture which proves that God is a
restorer and not a destroyer is in favour of it; every Scripture which
proves that God has more the desire to pardon than to punish proves it.
To this effect I might quote passages to greater extent than the whole
of this lecture occupies; the selection must therefore be limited, not
by the want of matter but by the want of space. “God is love: and he so
loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever
believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life: for God
sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world
through him might be saved.”[602] “Jehovah is full of compassion, slow
to anger and of great mercy. Jehovah is good to all: and his tender
mercies are over all his works. All thy works do praise thee, O Jehovah:
and thy saints shall bless thee.” We are exhorted to “taste and see that
the Lord is good.” “The goodness of God,” we are told, “endureth
continually.” “The Lord God,” we are assured, “is merciful and gracious,
long suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for
thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin.” “The Lord your
God is gracious and merciful, and will not turn away his face from you
if ye turn to him.” “The Lord is merciful and gracious; slow to anger
and plenteous in mercy: he hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor
rewarded us according to our iniquities: for as the heaven is high above
the earth, so great is his mercy towards them that fear him; as far as
the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions
from us: Like as a father pitieth his children, so hath the Lord
compassion on them that fear him: for he knoweth our frame; he
remembereth that we are dust.” And from our earliest prayer to our dying
hour, we are taught in the simplest and sublimest of all supplications
to open our address to God thus; “Our Father who art in heaven.” We read
evermore in Scripture that God’s is not an everlasting anger; as such
passages as the following testify: “His anger endureth but for a
moment.” “He will not always chide, neither will he keep his anger for
ever.” “Hath God forgotten to be gracious; hath he in anger shut up his
tender mercies?” “I will not contend for ever, neither will I be always
wrath: for the spirit should fail before me, and the souls which I have
made.” Correspondent with the doctrine of these expressions, and with
the spirit of the whole Gospel, is a passage that I quote from a book
which Protestants in general declare not to be canonical. “Thou hast
mercy upon all; for thou canst do all things, and winkest at the sins of
men, because they should amend. For thou lovest all things that are, and
abhorrest nothing which thou hast made: for never wouldst thou have made
any thing if thou hadst hated it. And how could any thing have endured,
if it had not been thy will; or been preserved, if not called by thee?
But thou sparest thine, for they are thine, O Lord, thou lover of souls.
For thine incorruptible spirit is in all things; therefore chastenest
thou them, by little and little, that offend, and warnest them by
putting them in remembrance wherein they have offended, that leaving
their wickedness, they may believe on thee, O Lord. For thy power is the
beginning of righteousness; and because thou art the Lord of all, it
maketh Thee to be gracious unto all. But thou, O God, art gracious and
true: long suffering, and in mercy ordering all things: for if we sin,
we are thine, knowing thy power; but we will not sin, knowing that we
are accounted thine.”[603]
Once more, whatever theoretical view we may happen to hold on the
redemption of man by Christ, the end and glory of that redemption
requires as the only consistent consummation, the ultimate happiness and
virtue of mankind. To this purport I shall adduce one passage of
Scripture and quote a commentary. The passage is Rom. v. 12-21, and the
commentary is by Dr. S. Smith. “As by one man sin entered into the
world, and death by sin; and thus death hath passed upon all men,
inasmuch as all have sinned: (for until the law sin was in the world,
but sin is not imputed, where there is no law:) nevertheless death
reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those that had not sinned after
the similitude of Adam’s transgressions, who is a figure (a type) of him
that was to come: (yet the free gift likewise is not so, as was the
offence: for if through the offence of one, many have died, much more
the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus
Christ, hath abounded unto many. Neither is the gift so, as it was by
one that sinned; for judgment was of one offence to condemnation, but
the free gift is of many offences unto justification. For if, by the
offence of one, death reigned by one, much more those who receive the
abounding of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life
by one, even Jesus Christ:) so then as by the offence of one, judgment
came upon all men to condemnation; so likewise by the righteousness of
one the free gift hath come upon all men to justification of life. For
as by the disobedience of one many were made sinners, so likewise, by
the obedience of one, many shall be made righteous. Moreover, the law
entered that sin might abound: but where sin abounded, grace did much
more abound. That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace
reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ, our
Lord.”