IF the sinner is to be punished in the future world, as orthodoxy teaches, it must be presupposed that his personal identity is maintained, so that he shall consciously be the same being there he is here, and know that the sins for which he suffers are sins which he himself consciously and wilfully committed. To punish a man who after his crime had become a maniac, would be as impossible in fact as it would be cruel in practice. We might make him suffer any amount of pain, but unless he remembered his sin, and linked it with his suffering, how could it, in any proper sense, be punishment?
That we are to be ourselves in the future world, is what every one believes, who has any notion at all of our immortality. If I perish in death, and God is pleased to create another being like me in the immortal world, what is that to me? And whatever difficulties the metaphysician may have in determining in what our identity consists, nothing is more obvious to our common apprehension than that memory is somehow associated with it. And we have reason to believe that in the future world this faculty may be much more active and efficient than it is here. There are many psychological facts which tend to prove that under some extraordinary circumstances the memory, quickened and aroused, recalls events long forgotten, and, with a rapidity that is simply amazing, gathers up in a moment the scenes that have filled a life time. The story is told of a laborer, who, at work on the steeple of a church or other object of great elevation, accidentally fell, and subsequently related that in the two or three seconds of his fall, which he supposed must end in instant death, he passed in review, as it seemed to him, all the actions of his life, and with a vividness and particularity such as he never experienced before.
Similar facts are mentioned in the case of persons drowned, who were subsequently resuscitated. It may be no extravagance to suppose that, when entirely freed from the clogs of the body, the soul in all its faculties may act with far greater ease and effect than now, and that the memory may operate in such a manner as to enable them to take in, with a clearness we little experience in the present life, every event as it passed, and every feeling, thought, and purpose of our souls, so that our whole life, with all its coloring of good and evil, will lie before our minds and in our memories as a nicely lined and tinted map.
“The memory,” says Jeremy Taylor, “shall be another cruel tormentor of those miserable sinners, converting all they have done, good or bad, into torments: the good, because they have lost their reward; the bad, because they have deserved their punishment: the delights also which they have enjoyed, and all the happiness of this life, in which they have triumphed, (seeing that by them they fell into this misery,) shall be a sharp sword which shall pierce their hearts; they shall be full of affliction, when they shall compare the shortness of their past pleasures with the eternity of their present torments. What groans, what sighs, will they pour out when they see that these delights lasted hardly an instant, and that the pains they suffer for them shall last for ages and eternities; all that is past appearing but as a dream. Let us tremble at the pleasures and felicity of this life, since they may turn into arsenic or wormwood. The miserable wretch shall with great grief remember, how often he might have gained heaven, and did not, but is now tumbled into hell; and shall say unto himself, ‘How many times might I have prayed, but spent my time in play; but now I pay for it.
“How many times ought I to have fasted, but left it to satisfy my greedy appetite. How many times might I have given alms, and spent it in sin. How many times might I have pardoned my enemies, and chose rather to be revenged. How many times might I have frequented the sacraments, and forsook them, because I would not quit the occasion of sinning. There never wanted means of serving God, but I never made use of them, and am therefore paid for all. Behold, wretched soul, that entertaining thyself in pleasures, thou hast for toys and fooleries lost heaven. If thou wouldest, thou mightest have been companion of angels; if thou wouldest, thou mightest have been in eternal joy, and thou hast left all for the pleasure of a moment. ‘O accursed and miserable creature, thy Redeemer courted thee with heaven, and thou despisedst him for a base trifle. This was thy fault, and now thou sufferest for it; and since thou wouldest not be happy with God, thou shalt now be eternally cursed by him and his angels.’”
At the final judgment, President Edwards says, “shall be brought to light the hidden things of darkness; then shall all the wickedness of their hearts be made known; then shall be declared the actual wickedness they have been guilty of; then shall appear their secret sins that they have kept from the eye of the world; then shall be manifested in their true light those sins that they used to plead for, and to excuse and justify. And then shall all their sins be set forth in all their dreadful aggravations, all their filthiness will be brought to light to their everlasting shame and contempt. Then it shall appear how heinous many of those things were, that they in their lifetime made light of; then will it appear how dreadful their guilt is in thus ill-treating so glorious and blessed a Savior.” “How shall we remain amazed,” says Jeremy Taylor again, “when we shall see a number of our actions to be sins, which we never thought to be such! And which is more, we shall find that to be a fault, which we thought to be a laudable work; for many actions, which in the eyes of men seem virtuous, will then be found vices in the sight of God: then shall be brought to light the works which we have done, and those which we have left undone; the evil of that action we have committed, and the good of that which we have omitted.”
“What bitter and tormenting reflections will they have concerning the folly they have been guilty of in their lives,” says President Edwards, “in so neglecting their souls, when they had such opportunity for repentance; that they went on so foolishly to treasure up wrath against the day of wrath, to add to the record of their sins from day to day, to make their misery yet greater, and greater and greater; how they have kindled the fires of hell for themselves, and spent their lives in gathering fuel! They will not be able to help revolving such thoughts in their minds, and how tormenting they will be!” It is undoubtedly one of the most perplexing facts, that memory is to survive the grave and go with us through eternity. We shall never forget who we are nor what we have done. And I beg those of the contrary part to reflect that this fact does not exclusively affect that class of our race which we call “wicked.” The righteous, as we name them, have not been free from sin, and some have in their time been great sinners. If David is to be himself in the future world and carry his memory with him, will he not sometimes remember Uriah and his deliberately providing for his being killed in battle?
And especially if Uriah should chance, as is very probable, to have died in “a natural condition,” as President Edwards expresses it, or with some unrepented sin upon his soul, and now be in hell! Saul of Tarsus was a bitter persecutor of Christians, and not only consented to the death of Stephen, but kept the clothes of them that stoned him; and although he afterward became a Christian himself and consecrated his life to building up what he had before sought to destroy, he never forgot his enmity in persecuting the Church of God. When is he to forget it?
The tenacity of the memory in instances of great wickedness is finely illustrated in the case of Joseph’s brethren. Years before they had conspired to take his life. This resolution was finally changed, and he was sold as a slave to some Midianite merchants that chanced to be passing. But in their distress in Egypt, so far away from the scene of their wrong-doing, and with nothing but their trouble to remind them of their guilt, we hear them saying one to another, “We are verily guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear; therefore is this distress come upon us. And Reuben answered them saying, Spake I not unto you saying, Do not sin against the child; and ye would not hear? Therefore, behold his blood is required.”
O Memory, how is the guilty to free himself from thy power? “What is written is written,” said the angry Pilate of the superscription upon the cross to which, merely to please his Jewish subjects, he had adjudged an innocent man. But this was as far as he would go in the way of compliance. It was enough that he had prostituted his great office and committed a heinous crime against justice and humanity. “What is written is written,” and it shall not be altered! It is so with human actions. What is done is done, and it cannot be undone. Its record is written on high and written in our memory, and neither prayers nor tears can obliterate a single letter. Repentance and reformation do not alter the fact nor do they relieve us of the sin.
Divine pardon restores our filial relations with God and gives us a degree of peace, but there stands the ugly fact still, and our own better dispositions and nicer sense of right and wrong only make us the more alive to the feeling of the wrong done and deepen our regret that we so sinned. O Memory, Memory, thou avenging power, how shall we escape thy retributions? Where shall we find the Lethe whose waters we may drink and forget that we have sinned? God may release us from all positive or outward torments, and as a loving father receive us to his arms, but who shall deliver us from the sad memories of our past follies and sins? “Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”