THAT beings so wretched, so desolate, so abandoned of God and their fellows, so lost to all good and all hope, should wish to die and be extinct, is not to be deemed remarkable.
Yet few thoughts are more abhorrent, more revolting to human nature, than that of annihilation. We cling to life with an instinctive tenacity, and, when we relinquish our hold upon it, it is only with the hope of renewing it in another state of being. We talk about annihilation, but we cannot conceive it as a thing possible to ourselves. In giving us existence and making us rational, God imparted to us an almost unconquerable love of life, so that we shrink with horror from the thought of its termination, or, rather, we find it impossible to construe the word to human thought at all. Every language on earth, I believe, is so framed as, in one way or another, to carry, beneath all its phraseology expressive of death as the end of life, the notion of an existence beyond. All nations have felt—the most ignorant as well as the most cultivated—if they have not expressly said, “We do not wholly die.” Milton exhibits the native feeling of the human soul in its normal condition, when he makes Satan, contemplating a possible annihilation, say:—
- Sad cure! For who would lose,
- Though full of pain, this intellectual being:
- Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
- To perish rather, swallow ed up and lost
- In the wide womb of un created night,
- Devoid of sense and motion?
But the advocates of endless punishment unite in representing the damned as earnestly desiring and praying for this “sad cure” of their intolerable and never-ending miseries; And under the accumulated horrors of hell, a school of theology is growing up, which looks forward with a kind of grim semi-satisfaction to the time when annihilation is to end the disgraceful history of the wicked, and God’s tarnished honor be partially restored by his utterly destroying what he should never have created.
In all our earthly sufferings and sorrows, when health and strength are gone, when racked with pain, and all hope of relief is lost, death, terrible as it ordinarily is, loses its frightful aspect, and appears as our unfailing friend and final earthly resource. In like manner in the world to come, if, as orthodoxy teaches, the condition of the damned is so desperate; if their miseries are so various and so extreme; if, indeed, their torments are unspeakable, and to us now inconceivable, and that both in soul and body; if they are perpetual, admitting no intermission and no alleviation; and, finally, if they are to be without end, allowing no hope of their termination, even after countless millions of ages, it would be marvellous if the sufferers did not at last relinquish all love of life, and come to look upon existence as a curse, and desire annihilation, reluctant as the conscious soul may be to adopt so frightful an alternative.
“They shall desire death,” says Jeremy Taylor, “and death shall fly from them; for unto all their evils and miseries this, as the greatest, is adjoined that neither they nor it shall ever die. They shall always burn and never be consumed; they shall seek for death in the flames, but shall not find it. Therefore justly doth one cry out, O woe eternal, that shall never have end! O end without end! O death more grievous than death; always to die, and never to be quite dead!” President Edwards, as we have seen, speaks of the damned as wishing that they “might be turned into nothing,” or into a toad or viper. This reminds me of what an old friend once told me of his personal experience, that when a lad, and taught as he was, that he was in the utmost danger of suffering endless torments in hell, he was so alarmed and wretched that he could hardly sleep, and wished a thousand times, in his fear and misery, that he had been created a toad or anything, however mean and revolting, rather than a human being!
Such creatures, poor or miserable as they might be, were not born “totally depraved,” nor exposed to hell-torments forever.
Pollock, who lavishly employed his powers on descriptions of the torments of the damned, after giving a picture, as we have seen, of “the worm that never dies,” produces another of “eternal death,” as follows:—
- Fast by the side of this unsightly thing,
- Another was portrayed, more hideous still:
- Who sees it once shall wish to see’t no more.
- Forever undescribed let it remain!
- Only this much I may or can unfold—
- Far out it thrust a dart that might have made
- The knees of terror quake, and on it hung
- Within the triple barb, a being pierced
- Through soul and body both: of heavenly make
- Original the being seemed, but fallen
- And worn, and wasted with enormous woe.
- And still around the everlasting lance
- It writhed convulsed; and uttered mimic groans,
- And tried, and wished, and ever tried and wished
- To die; but could not die. O h, horrid sight!
- I trembling gazed, and heard this voice
- Approach my ear: This is eternal death!
Dr. Young quite agrees with other orthodox authorities in describing the damned as praying for annihilation. In his work entitled “The Last Day,” he says:—
- I tremble as I write;
- The whole creation swims before my sight;
- I see, I see the Judge’s frowning brow:
- Say not ’t is distant, I behold it now;
- I faint, my tardy blood forgets to flow,
- My soul recoils at the stupendous woe;
- That woe, those pangs, which from the guilty breast,
- In these, or words like these, shall be expresst:
- “Who burst the barriers of my peaceful grave?
- Ah! cruel death, that would no longer save,
- But grudged me ev’n that narrow, dark abode,
- And cast me out into the wrath of God!
- Where shrieks, the roaring flame, the rattling chain,
- And all the dreadful eloquence of pain,
- Our only song; black fire’s malignant light
- The sole refreshment of the blasted sight.
- * * * * *
- Oh, must I look with terror on my gain,
- And with existence only measure pain!
- What! no reprieve, no least indulgence given,
- No beam of hope from any point of heaven!
- Ah! Mercy! Mercy! art thou dead above?
- Is love extinguished in the source of love?
- * * * * *
- Just is my lot. But, oh, must it transcend
- The reach of time, despair a distant end?
- With dreadful growth shoot forward, and arise
- Where thought can’t follow, and bold fancy dies!
- “Never! where falls the soul at that dread sound,
- Down an abyss how dark? and how profound?
- Down, down (I still am falling, dreadful pain!)
- Ten thousand thousand fathoms still remain:
- My plunge but still begun—And this for sin?
- Could I offend if I had never been,
- But still increased the senseless happy mass,
- Flowed in the stream , or flourished in the grass?
- Father of mercies! why from silent earth
- Didst thou awake and curse me into birth?
- Tear me from quiet, ravish m e from night,
- And make a thankless present of thy light?
- Push into being a reverse of thee,
- And animate a clod with misery?
- “The beasts are happy, they come forth and keep
- Short watch on earth, and then lay down to sleep.
- Pain is for m an; and oh! how vast a pain
- For crimes which made the Godhead bleed in vain?
- Annulled his groans, as far as in them lay,
- And flung his agonies and death away?
- As our dire punishment forever strong,
- Our constitution, too, forever young,
- Cursed with returns of vigor still the same,
- Powerful to bear, and satisfy the flame;
- Still to be caught, and still to be pursued;
- To perish still, and still to be renewed!
- And this my help! my God! at thy decree!
- Nature is changed, and hell should succor me.
- And canst thou then look down from perfect bliss,
- And see m e plunging in the dark abyss?
- Calling the Father in a sea of fire,
- And pouring blasphemies at thy desire?
- With mortal’s anguish wilt thou raise thy name,
- And by my pangs Omnipotence proclaim?
- * * * * *
- Forbid it! and oh! grant, great God, at least
- This one, this slender, almost no request;
- When I have wept a thousand lives away,
- When torment is grown weary of its prey,
- When I have raved ten thousand years in fire,
- “Ten thousand thousands—let m e then expire!”
- Deep anguish! but too late; the hopeless soul,
- Bound to the bottom of the burning pool,
- Though loath, and ever loud blaspheming owns
- He’s justly doomed to pour eternal groans;
- Enclosed with horrors, and transfixed with pain,
- Rolling in vengeance, struggling with his chain;
- To talk to fiery tempests, to implore
- The raging flame to give its burnings o’er;
- To toss, to writhe, to pant beneath his load,
- And bear the weight of an offended God!
It may be doubted if this fearful subject was ever more effectively presented than Dr. Young has done in these impressive lines. The lost soul acknowledges its sins, and confesses the justice of its condemnation, but still implores mercy. But when it finds that mercy is “dead” in heaven, and love extinguished in its source, and that pardon is impossible, it humbly craves the last boon and the least, it thinks, that the Creator could bestow,—it asks only to be permitted to die, to be annihilated And lest this should seem to imply a desire on its part to escape punishment, and thus defraud justice of its due, and rob God of any part of his glory, it ventures to propose such terms as in its poor opinion would amply protect both.
It does not beg for immediate annihilation, but is willing that God should take any amount of revenge he pleases.
- When I have wept a thousand lives away,
- When torment has grown weary of its prey,
- When I have raved ten thousand years in fire,
- Ten thousand thousands—let me then expire!
But even this poor request cannot be granted; for which I have never heard any reasons that did not rather increase than lessen my wonder. That God should wish to perpetuate sin and suffering for their own sake, in any part of his universe, is equally at war with his benevolence and his holiness. If any souls have become “incurable,” it would seem far better that they should be annihilated than exist to deform the other wise fair universe of God. But sound orthodoxy cannot allow this. Their annihilation would, in the first place, deprive the saints in glory of half their happiness. They would no longer know how happy they were; for it is from beholding the miseries of the damned, and by way of contrast only, that they become sensible how blessed their own condition is.
These torments of the damned mightily heighten and set off the joys of God’s favored children. Annihilating the damned and extinguishing the fires of hell would dim the glories of heaven itself, since it would deprive them of their dark background, so important in Professor Patton’s theory of the perfection of the universe. Heaven without a hell would be but a dull and uninteresting place, and its felicities would soon pall upon the senses of our saints in glory. The annihilation of the wicked is therefore no longer to be deemed possible. It would mar “the eternal fitness of things.”
But, in the second place, the annihilation of “incorrigible sinners” would defraud the justice of God of its rightful dues. That the wicked must be punished is at once the express teaching of Scripture, the dictate of reason, and the common voice of history and experience.
“Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished.” It is the declaration of President Edwards, that “God is a strictly just Judge. When men come to stand before him, he will surely judge them according to their works. They that have guilt lying upon them, he will surely judge according to their works. The debt they owe to justice must be paid to the uttermost farthing.” This exhibition of the divine justice is vastly pleasing to the saints. They love to see the wicked suffer the just deserts of their sins. Justice must have its due. The only end of punishment is to satisfy justice. Yet justice is of such a peculiar nature that it is never to be satisfied. Its claims are so enormous that it must be forever impossible to meet and answer them.
“One sin, every sin,” as President Edwards and the Westminster Assembly of Divines say, “deserves eternal death and damnation, which, in the least degree of it, is the total destruction of the creature.” It necessarily follows that it can never be completely suffered; nay, that however much or however long a sinner may suffer, he will at no point in eternity have suffered any appreciable part of what he deserves. All that can be said is, that the work of retribution is going on. “This is the condition of those miserable wretches who suffer the vengeance of eternal fire,” says the learned Drexelius, “that they are always burning. When a thousand years are gone and past, they burn; let another thousand years fly away, they burn; their torments are the same as at the beginning; and if after several millions of years some curious person should desire to know how it is with them, whether their condition is not altered for the better, or whether they find no abatement of their pains, no other answer can be given than this: They are always burning.”
They are always being punished, but their punishment is never done. They are always dying, but are never dead. “If you should suffer that punishment,” says President Edwards, “you would never pay the whole debt. Those who are sent to hell never will have paid the whole of the debt they owe to God, nor indeed a part of it which bears any proportion to the whole.
They never will have paid a part which bears so great a proportion to the whole as one mite to ten thousand talents. Justice, therefore, never can be actually satisfied in your damnation.” In other words, justice insists on being satisfied, and must have the last farthing the sinner owes; but unfortunately this can never be obtained. Were a sinner to burn in hell a thousand million years, or ten thousand million ages, it would be nothing to eternity! But this leads to the consideration of the justice of endless punishment.