THE schoolmen divide punishments into those of sense and those of loss, the poena sensus and poena damni. We have already considered to some extent those of the former class. Among the latter are reckoned the loss of God, the loss of heaven, and consequently the loss of happiness and everything desirable. This is a form of misery that has no physical element in it. It stands connected only with our judgments, our conscience, and our emotions. It is the simple recognition of what is, and what “might have been,”—of the present painful fact, and the beautiful ideal, whose reality has forever vanished, and the memory of which remains but to torture us with the sense of its loss. Our writers on the punishments of the world to come generally speak first and chiefly of
- The Loss of God.
They describe this as the greatest, the most deeply felt, of all our spiritual pains. “In hell,” says Jeremy Taylor, “there is the pain of loss, and that so rigorous, that in depriving the damned of one only thing, they take from him all good things; for they deprive him of God, in whom they are all comprised. He who is condemned by human laws to the loss of his goods may, if he live, gain others, at least in another kingdom, if he fly thither; but he who is deprived of God, where shall he find another God? and who can fly from hell? God is the greatest good, and it is therefore the greatest evil to be deprived of him, because evil is the privation of good; and that is to be esteemed the greatest evil, which is the privation of the greatest good, which is God; and must certainly, therefore, cause more grief and resentment in the damned than all the punishments and torments of hell besides,” In a similar strain, Rev. Christopher Love says: “The wicked in hell, they have this loss that they are deprived of and banished from the favorable presence of God.
“And here saith St. Chrysostom, if there were a thousand worlds, the loss of the favor of God is more than a thousand worlds. It is the greatest torment of a damned man that he is without God. The presence of God makes heaven to be heaven. The absence of God makes hell more hell than it is.” Father Miller tells us, in his little book on Purgatory, that the unfortunate souls in that place of torment feel the intensest desire to see God, and that absence from his presence is one of the bitterest ingredients in their cup of sorrow; and Father Furniss represents the very devils in hell as crying out, “I would gladly burn here for millions of years, if I could only see God for one minute!”
All our Protestant confessions and catechisms make “separation from the comfortable presence of God” a part of the miseries of the world to come.
But Dr. Watts seems to look upon this doctrine with some distrust; and it must be confessed to involve questions and difficulties not always recognized, perhaps, nor ever easily solved. “When an impenitent sinner is cast into hell,” says Dr. Watts, “we have abundant reason to suppose that the evil tempers of his soul, and the vicious principles within him, are not abated, but his natural powers, and the vices which have tainted them and mingle with them, are awakened and enraged into intense activity under the first sensations of his dreadful punishment.”
Now, I need not say that the misfortune and the sin of evil men in the present world is that they have little or no perception of the divine character, and find no pleasure in his society or in meditating upon his perfections and government. On the contrary, the wicked are more inclined to say to God, “Depart from us, for we desire not a knowledge of thy ways.” The more effectually they can banish him from their thoughts, the happier they fancy they shall be; and the fool, to make his path less hazardous, says, in his heart, “There is no God.” As Dr. Watts says: “Here in this life perhaps a profane wretch has imagined that he could live well enough without God, and is content to have nothing to do with him in the way of worship or dependence.”
From this state of stolid indifference or positive enmity towards God, what has awakened the soul of the damned? He is no longer what he has been. He has come to see, not only that there is a God, but that the ground of his own existence is in him, and that he is essential to his happiness. This is a great change, and a change for the better. It is, in fact, the recognition of the deepest need of his soul,—the first movement toward regeneration and a new life. Till the soul feels this want of alliance with God, whether in this world or the next, the need of something great and good and eternal to which it can attach itself and upon which it can unreservedly depend, it will never truly feel after God nor find him. And when the sense of this need comes to the soul, whether in heaven, earth, or hell, I cannot persuade myself that the Father of souls will be deaf to its cry.
He whose first and great command to all creatures in the moral universe is, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,” can never be indifferent to the feeblest motions of the soul towards obedience to that royal law. But, be this as it may, nothing can be more obvious than the fact that if a soul, upon exchanging worlds, comes to see its relations to God, and feel the need of him, it must have undergone a change analogous to what one here experiences in conversion,—a change at least necessarily antecedent to conversion, and closely connected with it,—and therefore furnishes a complete refutation of the common doctrine that there is no change after death.
- Sufferings from Loss of Heaven.
In the highest and most important sense, the loss of God, or entire separation from his comfortable presence and aid, must be the loss of heaven, whether here or hereafter. The consciousness of God’s love, the feeling of union with him, and that childlike confidence and peace which these convictions produce, make all the heaven we have experienced, or can properly conceive. This is the peace of God that passes all understanding. But in the thought of most Christians heaven is not so much a state of purity and filial love and spiritual joy as it is a place of outward beauty and sensible delights. It is difficult to exchange the gates of pearl and the golden streets of our popular heaven for simple righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. Men tell us, therefore, what a loss the soul must suffer by its exclusion from heaven, its glory and its felicities. But in order to feel this loss, let us consider that the sinner must first know something what it is, and be in an intellectual and moral condition to appreciate it.
To deprive a savage of the conveniences and refinements of civilized life is no deprivation to him, at least none that he is capable of feeling. Till he has undergone an almost total change in his views and habits, till he has passed through a long course of education, fitting him to use and enjoy these conveniences and refinements which civilization brings in its train, they would prove a burden rather than a blessing to him. It is so also in respect to what belongs to the moral and spiritual world. Were it possible for a hardened sinner, with his grovelling tastes, inordinate passions, and brutal pleasures, to be translated from earth or hell at once to heaven, where love excludes all hatred, where benevolence transcends all selfishness, and where each finds his own happiness in the happiness of others; where obedience to duty, personal righteousness, purity, and the worship of a God of all moral excellence, of infinite holiness, is at once the law and the life of all souls, can we imagine our sinner at home and happy there?
The society would be very strange to him. Its spirit would be foreign to all he is familiar with, and though surrounded by the blaze of its imagined glories, he would sigh for his old haunts and his coarse and sinful pleasures. Such a sinner must be converted; he must be renewed in the temper and spirit of his soul, before the loss of heaven can be any loss to him. And our orthodox friends confess as much. Rev. Mr. Swinden says expressly: “Though the wicked are not sensible in this life what it is to fall short of heaven, yet after death, after the separation of soul and body, the eye of the understanding shall be opened, and they shall then clearly discover what it is to be shut out of heaven, to be deprived of the beatific vision, and to lose the fruition of all the glory, splendor, and blessedness of it. They shall then to no purpose incessantly cry, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us.’” But here again we mark a wonderful change in the wicked.
In this world they did not wish to hear of heaven. They put the very thought of it away from them. In the next, they are represented as having come to understand the subject better, and to feel an intense anxiety to enjoy what so lately they despised. But have they been brought to this appreciation of heaven and its joys only to torment them? And, having been removed so far from what they were, are we to suppose that they are to go no farther? May we not safely infer that they will not only increase in their knowledge of heavenly things, but also grow into a temper that will fit them to receive and enjoy them? One thing seems ethically clear, that men can nowhere greatly desire and mourn the loss of what they hate. Most writers, therefore, reason on the tacit assumption that the wicked in hell really understand what heaven is, and most keenly feel their deprivation of it. “If Tully did so bewail his banishment from Italy,” says Christopher Love, “that every time he looked toward Italy he fell a weeping, and if Demosthenes took his banishment from Athens so heavily that every time he looked that way he fell a weeping, how will the thought of this, that you are banished from heaven, grieve you, if it should ever be your dismal lot to be cast into hell!”
To this add what Jeremy Taylor says: “What a grief it will be to see themselves deprived of the palaces of heaven, the society of saints, and the happy country of the living, where all is peace, charity, and joy; where all shine, all pleases, and all parts resound with hallelujahs! If the damned had no other punishment than to see themselves banished among devils, into a place not far from heaven, sad as night, without the sight or comfort of the sun or moon for all eternity, it were a torment insufferable.” We can easily understand how the damned would desire to be freed from the dungeon of hell, as it is here represented, and from the uncomfortable society of devils; and it is equally easy to understand how they would delight in “the palaces of heaven;” but they must undergo a great change before they can find any satisfaction in “the society of the saints,” or enjoy immoderately their “hallelujahs.” In a word, heaven and its employments and its pleasures must be greatly changed from what all spiritually minded Christians believe them to be, or sinners must be greatly changed in their tempers and tastes, their habits and life, before they can really desire them or suffer the sense of any essential loss in being deprived of them. How can two walk together except they be agreed? If sinners ever come to know God and heaven, so as to love them and feel their loss, can we doubt that they must be on the way that leads to them?