WERE this little volume to be sent out to the public without any notice of some of the various ameliorations to which, during the last hundred years, or even the last fifty years, the doctrine of endless punishment has been subjected, I might justly expose myself to the censure of my orthodox friends as not unwilling to leave the impression upon the mind of my reader, that all who profess faith in that doctrine to-day hold it with all its circumstances of horror essentially as it has now been described. Such an impression, I am sure, would be quite erroneous, and consequently unjust. The doctrine has obviously undergone many modifications and improvements, or rather, perhaps, has been stripped of many of its most offensive characteristics, and, as now held by intelligent and pious people, is in many of its aspects a very different thing from what it formerly was. There are many, I am gratified in believing, who, without at all ceasing to be orthodox, still entertain that doctrine in such a manner as to be, as they honestly think, obnoxious to few objections, and in the main consistent with the broadest humanity as well as with the acknowledged benevolence and mercy of God.
Thus contemplated, it is, in their view, deprived of all excessive severity, and whatever, would render it abhorrent to the finest moral sensibilities, at least beyond what we sometimes witness in the retributions of the present life. God, in the conception of this class of thinkers, is not a being who finds his chief glory in the greatness and persistence of his wrath; he is not the implacable enemy of any of his creatures, nor are their miseries, whatever they may be, to be ascribed to any disposition in him that finds pleasure in their pain. On the contrary, they are self-wrought. The sinner himself pulls retribution down upon his own head, and richly deserves before he suffers it. If men will persist in evil-doing; if, instead of drawing nearer to God, they alienate themselves more and more from the fountain of life and peace; if they willingly and wilfully place themselves in opposition to divine truth, and engage in open rebellion against the holiness and love of God,—what can they expect, what ought they to meet, but disappointment and disaster?
There is a settled moral order in the universe, let men think or say what they will. It is inwrought in the very nature of things, if I may so express myself, and is as fixed and unalterable as any law in the material universe. Can a man smite a granite rock with his naked fist and not be hurt? You may say the rock is impassive, but it at least resists the force which he hurls against it, and seems to return the blow he first delivered. “Can a man take fire in his bosom,” asks the wise man, “and his clothes not be burned? Can one go upon hot coals and his feet not be burned?” That the transgressor suffers is not because God is revengeful or unfriendly or indifferent, but because the sinner himself is at war with the moral laws ordained in infinite wisdom and benevolence for the welfare of all, and so of him; and so long as he persists in fighting against truth and righteousness, truth and righteousness will oppose him, and will give him no peace; nor is it possible for him to attain it, unless the whole moral economy of the universe is first destroyed or inverted.
These milder and juster views, now entertained by many orthodox people, clearly taking up the line of long cherished Universalist thought, are finely expressed in the following paragraph from the pen of Dr. Porter, President of Yale College, who may well be regarded as a representative of the best form of New England orthodoxy, and of the best orthodoxy of the country: “Whatever representations we find [in the Scriptures] of man’s weakness or depravity and danger, whatever high-wrought pictures of God’s anger or its continuance, we must hold fast to the primal truths which make God dear to our affections as our pitying Father, or venerable as our holy Judge. It is because we believe that God is morally perfect, that we assert that he would delight to receive honor and love from all his creatures; that he uses all the means for the triumph of goodness and the deliverance of all that he wisely can do; that he will never cast off a soul that truly loves him, in any part of his dominion, or in any period of his administration; and that he cannot possibly be displeased with, or effectively punish, any being who loves him in the present, or who repents of not having loved and obeyed him in the past.”
It needs no words of mine to indicate to the careful reader the transformation orthodoxy has undergone, when it can express itself in language like this. It is obviously no longer what it was a hundred years ago. Its very grounds seem to have been changed. The Calvinistic doctrine of eternal election and reprobation has wholly disappeared. As God is the Creator, so is he the lover of all souls made in his image. His government is at once moral and beneficent, designed to promote the happiness of his creatures; even his punishments are no longer revengeful. In all parts of his dominion, and in all periods of eternity, God is the same, desiring nothing so much as to receive the love and service of all human souls, and ready to welcome the most abandoned and lost, if they will but return in penitence to seek his grace.
In short, God is now doing, and will forever continue to do, all that infinite wisdom can suggest for the complete triumph of good over evil, and the moral improvement and salvation of his intelligent creation; and nothing will prevent his final success but the persistent wickedness of men themselves. The only question is whether the human will is stronger than the divine, and man’s obstinacy and rebellion can forever resist all the resources of infinite wisdom and love. This narrows the difference between Universalism and orthodoxy almost to a line. But let us briefly consider some of these modifications of orthodoxy a little more in detail.
I. In the first place, I remark that in Protestant Christendom, at least in all the better portions of it if not universally, the ancient doctrine of infant damnation is now wholly disavowed and rejected. No intelligent Protestant, clerical or lay, now believes that infants dying in infancy are in danger of being lost, whatever the Confessions may say or imply to the contrary. The day for such an opinion has passed forever. At the same time it is but weakness or ignorance on the part of our orthodox friends, to deny as some of them have done, that the doctrine was ever held by the Protestant churches. The fact is capable of the most abundant proof, as both Dr. Chambré and Dr. Krauth have fully shown.
It was one of the unhappy heirlooms which Protestants received from the Roman Church, and it is no little honor to them to have rid themselves of it, while the Roman Church with its pretension to infallibility is obliged to bear it as a burden and a curse, which, however, it manages to make profitable. But even the Church of Rome cannot altogether prevent the introduction of modifications and improvements here, as elsewhere; and we have seen how among the educated, this doctrine of infant damnation is softened down to accommodate it to a more advanced stage of civilization, a certain presage of its ultimate rejection in spite of the authority of Augustine and papal infallibility.
There is, however no little difficulty, even among Protestants, as I have endeavored to show, in providing for the salvation of all infants dying in infancy. Neither regenerating baptism nor electing grace is sufficient to save more than a small portion of the millions who annually perish at this tender age, and I know of no device yet suggested that has the breadth necessary to meet the emergency of the case. If all are born sinners, and if, to be saved, sinners must repent and believe the gospel; and finally, if this faith and repentance must be exercised in this life,—the problem how any infant can be saved becomes perplexing indeed.
If we can persuade ourselves, as many seem to do, that an external rite applied to an unconscious or resisting subject will accomplish so momentous a change as converting a sinner into a Christian, even that does not reach a quarter of the infants dying in infancy, and makes no provision for the thousand accidents liable to occur in the most rigid Christian community. Meanwhile the Calvinistic device of election was never designed to affect but a very small part of the human race at large, and the very principle on which it is founded forbids that it can be extended to all infants dying in infancy. Dr. Hodge tells us that “according to the common doctrine of Evangelical Protestants; all who die in infancy are saved. . . .
“The Scriptures nowhere exclude any class of infants, baptized or unbaptized, born in Christian or in heathen lands, of believing or unbelieving parents, from the benefits of the redemption of Christ. All the descendants of Adam, except Christ, are under condemnation; all the descendants of Adam, except those of whom it is expressly revealed that they cannot inherit the kingdom of God, are saved.” I am not disposed to call in question the principle here avowed, but I fail entirely to see how it can be made to consist with the established principles of orthodoxy. But let us thank God for this noble declaration of Dr. Hodge. So far, then, as the doctrine of infant damnation is concerned, the Protestant churches have outgrown it.
It cannot be disguised that this doctrine of the salvation of all infants dying in infancy is attended by one serious inconvenience. It makes the death of infants an unspeakable blessing, an event over which orthodox parents ought to rejoice instead of weeping; and if there is any occasion in human life when the people of God should dance and sing, it is when in the Divine providence they are called to lay their infant children in the grave. They at least are safe. Had they lived, who can estimate the danger they would have incurred? Of adults even Dr. Hodge believed the great majority will be lost. For so he interpreted Matthew 7:14, where the Savior says many enter the wide gate and walk the broad way which leads to destruction, while few find the strait gate and pursue the narrow way that leads to life.
“This is to be understood of adults,” he said. To die in infancy is, then, far better than to live, and grow up to manhood; and the present condition of society, especially in our large cities, where by the most culpable ignorance or neglect the laws of health are persistently trampled underfoot, and the life of infants in great numbers annually sacrificed, should be regarded as one of God’s wise and beneficent ordinances. Does not a theology that not only admits, but directly leads to, such inferences as these demand still further modification and improvement?
II. There has been a most remarkable modification of orthodox opinion, amounting indeed to a revolution, in respect to the relative number of the finally saved and lost.
Formerly, as I have shown, it was a settled doctrine in the orthodox world that the number of the damned would vastly exceed that of the saved. The words of Christ: “Wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be who go in thereat; because strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth to life, and few there be that find it,” were uniformly interpreted of the final destiny of mankind; and it necessarily followed that the flock of Christ was to be a very little one, while the hosts of Satan were to be innumerable!
But at the present time this opinion is no longer entertained in any of the Protestant churches, at least in none of the better educated and influential. If formerly the great majority of mankind was believed to be heirs of damnation, now the great majority, it is believed, will be saved. In fact, there is in many quarters a disposition to reduce the number of the damned to the minimum, under the impression that this would relieve the doctrine of endless punishment of some of the greatest difficulties under which its advocates feel it to be laboring.
The honor of introducing this amelioration in this country belongs, I believe, to the late Dr. Lyman Beecher. As early as 1808, in a sermon preached in Newark, N. J., he said: “It seems to be the imagination of some that the kingdom of darkness will be as populous and vast as the kingdom of light, and that happiness and misery of equal dimensions will expand, side by side, to all eternity. But blessed be God, it is mere imagination, totally unsupported by reason or revelation. Who ever heard of a prison that occupied one half the territories of a kingdom; or who can believe that the universe, which was called into being and is upheld and governed to express the goodness of God, will contain as much misery as happiness? How could the government of God be celebrated with such raptures in heaven if it filled with dismay half the universe? How vast soever, therefore, the kingdom of darkness may be, in itself considered, it is certainly nothing but the prison of the universe, and small compared with the realms of light and glory. The world of misery shrinks into a point, and the wailings of the damned die away and are lost in the song of praise.”
This was a novel doctrine in that early day, and must have been peculiarly so in New Jersey. It is difficult to believe that at that time the New Jersey orthodoxy had advanced so far as to entertain the amazing hope that one half the human race would finally reach heaven. But be this as it may, the language of Dr. Beecher was as eloquent as the thought was grand. The seed, however, seems to have fallen on unreceptive hearts, for we hear nothing more of it for near a quarter of a century. In 1827 this sermon was republished in Boston, where the Doctor was then a preacher, and presently produced good fruit. It touched the heart of many New England divines, and called forth a ready response. It was felt to relieve the doctrine of endless punishment from a portion of the embarrassments under which it was then staggering, and the government of God from a corresponding portion of its fatuity or its diabolism. For what could one say in defence of the wisdom or goodness of the Creator, whose work ended in more evil than good, more misery than happiness?
Professor Stuart, who was at that time engaged in some controversy with Universalism, eagerly seized the inspiring thought of Dr. Beecher, and though the present seemed dark and unpromising, found the means of nourishing the grateful hope in the language of the prophets. Looking forward he saw a good time coming, when the grace of God would prove more efficacious in winning souls, and the gospel gain victories unknown before. In the latter days of the kingdom of God he believed “the triumph of redeeming love will bring home to glory such multitudes of our ruined race that the number who may finally perish will scarcely be thought of in comparison with the countless myriads of those who will come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads.” There is no doubt that this cheering prospect was peculiarly grateful to the heart of Professor Stuart, and it is not at all improbable that he was pleased to urge it as far as possible under his convictions of truth.
At about the same time or a little later, Dr. Pond, of the Bangor Theological Seminary, whose theory of religion is even now far enough from being hopeful, found it difficult to content himself with the meagre salvation he saw in near vision, nor could he bear to have the history of the universe close in such a gloom as he saw spreading about him, and, apparently catching something of the spirit of Dr. Beecher, and something of the distant view of Professor Stuart, he said: “We are looking indeed for better days. We are expecting a long season of rest and peace to this agitated world, when its remotest ends shall teem with inhabitants, and when, in the strong language of prophecy, ‘all shall be righteous.’”
We may all well hope, I trust, that the world is improving; that the gospel is being diffused more and more widely; and that the time is certainly coming when “from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same, the name of God shall be great among the Gentiles, and in every place incense shall be offered to his name and a pure offering.” But it would be a bitter reflection upon our gracious Creator to suppose, as Professor Stuart and Dr. Pond and many others seem to do, that under the divine government all the earlier generations of men were damned and all the later ones saved. Is God a respecter of persons? Are not his ways equal? And must it not be that in the end all men will see that to every human soul, no matter when or where born, he has proved himself the same gracious God, the same loving Father?
Christ certainly did not come to die for and save any special race or generation; he gave himself a ransom for all, and tasted death for every man; those who lived in the darkness before the flood were as much the objects of his mission as those who shall fill the earth in its latter-day glory. To reason, therefore, as Professor Stuart and Dr. Pond seem to do, is only to solve one difficulty by creating another. I would as soon believe that God will damn the great majority of mankind, as that he will damn the whole or even the great majority of the pagan world.
The declaration of Dr. Beecher that hell is only “the prison of the universe” appears to have struck many minds with the force of a revelation. It was no longer half the universe, and no longer embraced half of God’s intelligent creation. All the associations of a prison in a state or kingdom made it something small in comparison with the kingdom itself. Hence the Rev. Albert Barnes, so well known for his Notes on the New Testament, notwithstanding all the perplexities in which an unhappy creed involved him, tells us, as the conclusion of the whole matter, that, “taking the race as a whole, there is no reason to think that the number of those who should be lost, compared with the immense multitudes that shall be saved by Christ, will be more than the prisoners in our community now, compared with the number of peaceful and virtuous citizens.” No one can fail to see what an immense remove this implies from the doctrine as formerly held, and clearly indicates the vast majority of the saved. But Dr. Joel Parker, formerly President of the Union Theological Seminary, of New York City, carried the disparity still further. “We know not,” said he, in a course of lectures against Universalism, “the comparative magnitude of the prison of hell. It may bear a proportion to all the moral intelligences of Jehovah’s empire, not unlike a country jail to the inhabitants of the world at the present time.”
The estimate is simply hypothetical, it will be observed, but we can hardly suppose he would have suggested it, had he not inclined to entertain it. Reduced to numbers it would probably give about a hundred million souls to heaven where it would consign one to hell. If the reader thinks this disparity too large, he may reduce it to a million to one. The population of our globe is now estimated to be twelve or fourteen hundred millions, and a common country jail would hardly have more than a dozen prisoners within its walls. If Dr. Parker intended to include in the term “all the moral intelligences of Jehovah’s empire,” the angels in their various orders, it probably would not alter the conditions of the statement, since without doubt he believed that a corresponding proportion of them were in that prison of the universe. Now, to say that only one in a hundred million, or, to make the matter less striking, one in a million, will finally be damned, must be confessed to change essentially the phase of the doctrine from what it was when our grandfathers and grandmothers used to sing,—
- Broad is the road that leads to death,
- And thousands walk together there,
- While wisdom shows a narrow path,
- With here and there a traveller.
Without quoting many utterances that have more recently been called out from the orthodox pulpit or press on the relative numbers of the saved and damned, all confirming the advanced views of Dr. Beecher and Dr. Parker, I must not omit the declaration of the late Dr. Hodge, of the Princeton Theological Seminary, well styled “the Nestor of the Presbyterian Church,” who was distinguished alike by his long service as professor in that institution, by large learning, eminent abilities, and the most robust orthodoxy. If anywhere in the United States, or indeed in the Protestant world, not excepting Scotland itself, one might reasonably expect to find the old doctrine of a narrow heaven and a spacious hell, it would be at Princeton, and with Dr. Hodge.
But with the whole Protestant Church, both Dr. Hodge and Princeton were swept along by a moral force which no sturdiness of conservatism could resist. In closing his great work on Systematic Theology, Dr. Hodge bravely says: “We have reason to believe, as urged in the first volume of this work, and as often urged elsewhere, that the number of the finally lost, in comparison with the whole number of the saved, will be very inconsiderable. Our blessed Lord, when surrounded by the innumerable company of the redeemed, will be hailed as the ‘Salvator Hominum,’ the Savior of men, as the Lamb of God that bore the sins of the world.”
This, then, is the doctrine of the Protestant Church, and is orthodox. The number of the saved is to be very large, and the number of the damned very small. As a certain orthodox preacher said, whose name I am sorry to have forgotten: “The Devil will not, at the conclusion of the judgment, go down to hell with flying colors at the head of a large portion of mankind, as some supposed, but, on the contrary, a very small part of Adam’s race will descend with him.” The world of misery shrinks into a point, as Dr. Beecher says, “and the wailings of the damned die away and are lost in the song of praise.”
This is not Universalism certainly, but it approaches it as nearly as thought can go and yet be orthodox. It preserves the principle, it keeps an example, and that is all. Reduced to a practical view, the danger of your being finally damned is not a thousandth part as great as that of your being killed by lightning, which, if duly considered, must somewhat lessen the tremendous force usually ascribed to the doctrine as a moral power.
This growing faith in the goodness of God and the extent of the Redeemer’s kingdom necessarily marks a corresponding change in the popular thought upon the salvation of the heathen. Half a century ago all Christendom was agreed that no heathen could be saved, and as we have seen, they were believed to be daily sinking into hell in such numbers as should have shocked, if it did not shame, the Church to action. Now the strictest, the most conservative orthodox divines are unable to confront that opinion without a shudder. Faith in the ancient dogma falters. Even Dr. Bartlett, now President of Dartmouth College, and one of the sturdiest defenders of the doctrine of endless punishment, is obliged to confess a feeble and reluctant assent to the belief that some of the heathen will be saved.
After quoting some passages of Scripture about the terms of salvation, he asks: “Does this involve the actual perdition of all the heathen? I have not so understood the Scriptures. Two extreme views have been held; one which would make their condition quite hopeless; the other, against all appearances, singularly hopeful.” He then proceeds to say, what is so obvious, and what the New Testament says or clearly implies on every page, that “there is no Savior but Christ;” and, hampered by his creed, which teaches that the salvation of Christ can be attained only in this little world and during this short life, he goes on to say: “But it would seem that men willing to be saved may be saved by him, who know little or very confusedly about him, it may be personally nothing.”
Is not this a most amazing statement to be made by a learned Christian divine in this nineteenth century of grace? Men, it seems, may be saved by Christ who know little or nothing personally of him, and who of course believe as little as they know! “Abraham,” we are told, “believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness;” and under the gospel it is by grace that men are saved, yet only “through faith.” St. Paul always preached “repentance toward God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ,” and thus alone expected to make Christians or save souls. But Dr. Bartlett, and the orthodox world generally now, has contrived an easier way, which was revealed to St. Bridget, as we learn from Rev. Mr. Oxenham; for she with her own ears heard Christ say to a heathen man: “O pagan, I receive all who would have walked in the way of my commandments, if they had only known how, and did good works as far as they were informed and were able.”
And Sister Emmerich, another candidate for Catholic sainthood, I presume, being one day in hell, as these saints seem often to have been, saw “poor pagans cast themselves at the feet of Jesus and adored him with inexpressible joy.” I am glad to hear that Christ visits sinners even in that prison of the universe, and am morally certain that he does not go there except on an errand of mercy.
But it is a little odd to see Dr. Bartlett in his sober senses in such charming sympathy with these female dreamers and visionaries of the Catholic Church.
And speaking of the Catholic Church reminds me to say that in quite recent times some of her most popular sons have caught the spirit of improvement that seems abroad in the very air of Christendom, and begin to talk of a salvation vastly beyond its ancient limits. The Rev. Mr. Oxenham has no faith at all in the old doctrine that the majority of mankind is finally to be damned, and intimates that the Rev. Dr. Faber was of the same opinion; and further says that Lacordaire, “the very model of priesthood in the modern church,” after devoting a volume of his Conferences to a discussion of the subject as to the extent of salvation, “comes to the conclusion that the great majority of mankind will be saved.” This conclusion, as will be seen, is precisely the reverse of that to which Massillon, who was not less a model of priesthood, and had the advantage of being a bishop, came to only a century and a half ago.
The doctrine of Lacordaire must sound very strange in the ears of that venerable church, for it has not been heard before for many hundred years; and yet I doubt not that, as in our Protestant churches, it is as pleasing as it is novel. And as time goes on, and the world becomes wiser and better, that church and all churches will hear more and more of such preaching, and enter into its faith and its joy.
I am sorry to be obliged to add one reflection, where I could wish to express nothing but my most cordial sympathy with this better tone of thinking and feeling, and that is the sad one that this whole doctrine of the salvation of the heathen and of the vast majority of mankind, true as it is and noble as it is, stands in no harmony with the creeds, whether Catholic or Protestant, with which it is now united and made to do service. On the contrary, it contradicts both the letter and spirit of the creeds. If two cannot walk together except they be agreed, it becomes a very serious question which in this case is to be converted, the old thought or the new. The fact that the world seldom turns back, and that the broader light cannot be narrowed again, make the solution of the problem easy, and at once satisfy the loftiest hope and aspiration of the Christian soul.
III. There is one point more on which, during the last century, the ameliorating hand of the age has been notably laid. Not only are all infants dying in infancy redeemed and saved; not only are some of the heathen to be rescued from endless perdition; not only is the great majority of mankind finally to be brought to glory; but the very torments of the few unfortunate persons who are finally damned have been greatly modified and softened down.
We have seen what a variety and what dreadful forms of torture the Orthodox Church through long ages described as awaiting the wicked. Hell was a lake of literal fire and brimstone, and fire vastly more intense and penetrating, some said, than any known on earth or even conceivable by us, surrounded by the thickest darkness, and filled with all possible means of physical torture, as well as whatever could alarm and terrify the soul and make it suffer. Neither body nor mind possessed a power or faculty for which God had not prepared a special instrument of torment. All the resources of Omnipotence were called forth to make the existence of the damned an intolerable curse. All the figures of speech in which the Oriental mind luxuriated, and which preachers and prophets had applied to the punishments of men here in this world, were seized by the Western and especially by the Roman mind, and transmuted at once into the most sober matters of fact, and applied to a hell of which the Bible never speaks, and prophets and apostles never dreamed. And so for twelve or fifteen centuries, the Church went on multiplying and aggravating horrors, till it made the Father of mercies a monster of cruelty and hate and revenge, and immortality an infinite curse.
Fortunately, in the widening of thought, in the progress of civilization, and the better apprehension both of the spirit and meaning of the gospel, these unworthy and barbarous views have gradually become obsolescent, and finally have, with the more enlightened Christians, wholly fallen away. Even Dr. Bartlett proposes the question, “How will God punish sinners?” and he answers: “Literalist, or rather materialist, notions have passed away, and ought never to have arisen. The variety and incompatibility of the physical images whereby the doom of the wicked is described, would almost seem purposely intended to prevent any such literal issue. Outer darkness, a lake of fire, cutting asunder, and then receiving one’s portion, the wine of wrath, undying worms, cannot all be literal, for they cannot go together; but they can all shadow forth something terrific. Just the same reason (and no more) existed for taking them literally, as for understanding heaven as a feast, a wedding, a supping with Abraham, and the like,—an error which no one commits. These images all represent great realities, but are not the realities. This is now universally admitted.”
Here, then, is swept away almost by the turn of a pen the whole magazine of materials out of which the older divines managed to frame the horrors of hell. But for this mass of figurative language to work into substantial facts, what would much of the preaching of President Edwards, Jeremy Taylor, and multitudes of others have amounted to? But how far this recognition of the figurative language of the New Testament really modifies the views of Dr. Bartlett in respect to the torments of hell, he does not stop to inform us. He only dissolves the illusion which makes them physical. Calvin seems to have acknowledged that these expressions were figurative, but in his opinion this only made them the more terrible.
The reality far transcended the figure, and hell was worse than a lake of fire and brimstone. But Dr. Bartlett happily lives three hundred years later than Calvin, and so much farther also from the barbarism of the dark ages. That Dr. Porter does not sympathize with what he calls “fearful and even horrible pictures” of hell, is evident from his declaration that “whatever high-wrought pictures we find of God’s anger or its continuance, we must hold fast to the primal truths which make God dear to our hearts as our pitying Father, or venerable as our holy Judge.” The horrors which our old preachers gathered around the damned were as unworthy of God, whether pitying Father or holy Judge, as they were becoming Moloch.
The late Dr. Bushnell, though verging upon the line of heresy, and as some think overstepping it, was still quite orthodox, sometimes, in regard to endless punishment. “I have been through all the questions,” said he, “taken all the turns of doubt, suffered all the struggles of feeling in respect to this confessedly hard-looking doctrine of future punishment.
I have even learned in these struggles to pity the meagreness of any soul that has encountered no troubles and painful misgivings concerning it. Neither is this pity at all diminished, but increased rather, by the fact that I am brought back finally to acquiesce in it myself, and even to look upon it as being probably a necessary factor of the Christian salvation. What else can we infer when we find, as we shall by a little search, that our merciful Christ—he that comes in love, and saves by the sacrifice of his life—is the first distinctly responsible promulgator of it himself?” Since Dr. Bushnell has so bravely disciplined himself on this subject, let us see what it is he has to say about it. There is a pleasure in sitting at the feet of an able master.
After giving his conception of a soul suffering punishment under “an abject continuity of consciousness, that is only the more desolate that it cannot die,” he says: “Holding this conception, we go clear, it will be seen, of that very shocking extravagance which maintains the infinity of future punishment. Mere infinity of duration does not make the quantity infinite, as many so hastily assume; for if there be a diminution of degree as there is an extension of time, the quantity will never exceed a certain amount. So, too, if the continuance be endless, not on the score of old sins long ago committed,—the sins of the previous lifetime,—but as being ordered to match the new sins freely committed and persistently adhered to, the eternal punishment, so-called, may be only a stream of temporal retributions appointed to match the stream of eternally recurring transgressions.” This seems at bottom the precise theory of President Dwight half or three quarters of a century before.
Having abandoned Edwards’s argument for the infinity of sin, and thus his justification of infinite or endless punishment, Dr. Dwight lays down the proposition that “God may punish sin as long as it exists, and it may exist for ever. He who sins through this life may evidently sin through another such period, and another, and another, without end. That while we continue to sin, God may justly punish us, if he can justly punish us at all, is equally evident.
No reason can be given why sin may not be punished at any future time with as much justice and propriety as at present. That it may justly be punished at the present time cannot be denied, any more than that it is in fact punished.”
This is probably the best form in which the doctrine of endless punishment can be stated, and be best defended. That the sinner can be justly punished as long as he continues to sin is an old Universalist doctrine, and never called in question. On this ground the Universalist, President Dwight, and Dr. Bushnell can stand side by side. If now it can be proved that men will continue to sin through all eternity, the Universalist must give up his cause as indefensible and lost. To say that the wicked may thus persist in sinning forever amounts to nothing. So the saints, who, I hope, are not less moral beings, and therefore not less free in heaven than they were here, or less free than the damned in hell, may fall from grace and become sinners again.
But who maintains that they will do this, because it is possible? It is my hope that in heaven the saints, though as free as ever, will so love God and goodness that they will have no wish to sin, but every desire to act in perfect conformity with the will of God, the law of infinite love; though Dr. Hopkins had so ill an opinion of the saints in heaven that he thought “the everlasting punishment of the wicked, the smoke of whose punishment will rise up in their sight forever and ever,” would be necessary to keep them from sin.
It is easily seen that this doctrine of President Dwight and Dr. Bushnell on the sinner’s continuing to sin on and on forever, presents that subject in a way most natural, and in a form most readily defended. But if adopted, it must completely revolutionize the whole orthodox system, and it is a marvel that these learned and far-seeing men did not perceive this consequence. If sinners are to sin on forever, it needs no argument to show that they must continue free moral beings as they are here. They must be this in order to be responsible, and the proper subjects of continued punishment. Then it follows that if the damned can continue to sin, they must be able to cease sinning; and both these learned doctors leave us to infer that punishment would soon end when men cease to sin.
It is possible, therefore, that sinners in hell may be converted, and so be saved. It was the doctrine of Luther that if the Devil would stop sinning and love God, he would be in heaven. Of course, the old doctrine of probation as confined to this life falls away entirely; and with it goes the great doctrine of the general or final judgment. There can be no final judgment while men or angels are acting freely, and so the proper subjects of reward and punishment. With this view of the future the whole orthodox system is disintegrated and falls to pieces.
It is a singular, and indeed a very remarkable fact, that the finest description of hell under our new school of orthodox thought, with all its improvements and ameliorations, which I have yet seen, is furnished by an ardent member of the Roman Catholic Church, which I gladly introduce here in full. “What, then, is meant by the dogma of eternal damnation?” asks Rev. Mr. Oxenham, and answers: “It means, in one word, leaving the sinner to himself.
‘Ephraim is joined to his idols; let him alone.’ It is no arbitrary infliction of ‘a vengeful Deity,’ as scoffers, and others who should know better, are fond of phrasing it; it is simply that God has at length withdrawn from his rebellious creature the care and gracious aid it had pertinaciously despised. The blessing comes from God, the curse from the sinner himself. Man is neither a self-existent nor a self-dependent being, he is not a “×J.D60l. His being depends on the will of his Creator, his happiness or well-being on union with him and with those creatures who are given to be his fellows, and on whom he is constrained to lean for support.
But man was created a moral and immortal being, placed in a state of probation, and endowed with excellent gifts both of nature and of grace; and on his use of those gifts depends the favor of his Maker. There is no injustice in withdrawing it from those who deliberately abuse those graces and opportunities; and when the abuse becomes final and complete, the isolation from God and all good must become complete and final also. The soul has missed the final end of its creation through its own fault; it has chosen self instead of God, and it remains forever miserable. The worm of remorse that dieth not, the flame of burning thirst that is not quenched, the great gulf or chasm firmly fixed, express different aspects of the same hopeless, irremediable woe,—the conscious loss of God and all which that loss involves.”
This, then, is the Catholic doctrine of endless punishment, as set forth by a learned and philosophic divine of that venerable church. I suppose, however, that no one can be more fully aware than Mr. Oxenham himself, that it resembles the real doctrine of the Catholic Church, as that church has held and taught it for the last fifteen hundred years, and still holds and teaches it, no more than it does the ancient Egyptian metempsychosis. It is the doctrine of the Rev. Mr. Oxenham and perhaps a few learned gentlemen like himself, who are ashamed of parading the old doctrine of the church before educated readers. But Mr. Oxenham has another object in view. It is his aim to exhibit the Catholic Church—to which, if I mistake not, he has recently become a convert—in a very amiable light, as singularly liberal in her spirit and mild in all her judgments, and so recommend her most favorably to his countrymen, and perhaps all English speaking people.
But, ingenious as this device may be, it is faulty on many accounts. Where does Mr. Oxenham learn that God abandons the sinner and leaves him to himself? It does not seem, from the history of his dealings with mankind which is given in the Scriptures, that this is his way. Nor have I discovered that God is ashamed to acknowledge himself the author of the judgments he inflicts. In short, this whole theory is but a refined speculation, quite destitute of all ground in fact, false in its philosophy, and contradictory of the clearest teaching of revelation. But in common with our best orthodox theologians, Mr. Oxenham obviously rejects the vulgar notion of literal fire and all merely physical torments in the retributions of the future world, and so may be hailed as a coworker in a field where such labor is very much needed, in improving the opinions of the Christian world.
In these several respects—and many others might be recited, were it necessary—it cannot be denied that great progress has, during the last hundred years, been effected in the domain of religious thought. Much that was superstitious has been thrown aside, much that was obscure has been cleared up, much that was crude has been remoulded, and much that was false and mischievous has been replaced by the true and the good.
Yet with all these modifications and improvements in the orthodox world, it cannot be concealed that essentially the same great difficulty remains. The ugly fact remains that sin still holds its place in the universe forever, and with sin inevitable misery. Let the punishment of sin be as mild as it may, it is endless; and this, were it but a toothache, would at last grow intolerable, and, known to be without end, would lead to despair. Few men, it is to be feared, have ever seriously reflected what it would be to make sin and its consequent wretchedness absolutely interminable. The conceit of Archbishop Whately, Mansel, and many others, that the continuance and amount of moral evil does not at all affect the problem of the existence of sin, seems to me singularly inconsiderate and unphilosophical.
If it has any force, it should apply to the whole human race as well as to a few or many individuals. If God in his infinite wisdom and goodness can create one moral being with the foreknowledge that he will sin and suffer forever, why not two, why not all? But what, under this supposition, do men mean by wisdom and goodness? I can understand how God can be wise and good in giving existence to man, knowing that he would sin and suffer for a time, and then be saved from this condition; but make the sin and suffering endless, and it is sheer folly or madness to pretend that the creative act is either wise or good. And this is precisely the problem which orthodoxy in all its forms and phases has to confront.
- Give evil but an end—and all is clear.
- Make it eternal—all things are obscured.
But let no man despair of the future; it is not in the realm of science alone that progress is being made and ignorance and error dissipated. In the domain of theology the past century has marked an advance which for beneficent influences and effects has not been surpassed if equalled in any department of science. Men’s views of God and his moral government—of his rewards and punishments; of man’s nature, relations, duties, and destiny—have all undergone a great change, making them juster and more cheerful and more moral in their influence. The mother no longer fears lest her dead babe is in hell with the damned; and Christians of every sect and party are looking more and more upon God as a friend instead of an enemy, and a father rather than a great and terrible king; and all are coming to regard the Divine goodness as broad enough and rich enough to embrace the whole world; and though clouds and darkness may sometimes encompass his ways, yet justice and judgment, wisdom and love, are forever and ever the habitation of his throne.