IT seems terrible enough that the saints in heaven should have lost their Christian tenderness and sympathy, so as to feel no pity for the damned in hell, and be perfectly indifferent to their torments! The Christian religion makes our second duty the love of our fellow-men. And our Savior himself teaches that it is not enough to love our friends and those who love us, but, in order to be his disciples and the children of God, we must love our enemies, bless them that curse us, do good to them who hate us, and pray for such as despitefully use us and persecute us. God is said, even in the Old Testament, to be good to all, and his tender mercies to be over all his works; from which it would be no violent inference that if there is a hell, such as orthodoxy describes, it cannot be wholly beyond the range of his goodness, nor utterly without any reflection of the divine mercy. But our great Teacher would not leave a point like this to an inference; he therefore declares plainly that God “is kind to the unthankful and to the evil,” and, with so many instances of goodness and mercy in the world about us, still affirms that “there is none good but one, that is, God,”— none so steadily, universally good; none good without variableness or shadow of turning; none good without limit and without end.
And his children are required to be like him. When, therefore, we are told that God and good angels and saints in heaven have ceased to feel pity for any individual of the human race, it becomes a trial of Christian faith; but when the matter is carried still farther, and we are required to believe that these saints—to say nothing of God and Christ and the blessed angels—actually rejoice in the damnation of their fellow-men, and find an increase of their own felicity in the miseries of those of their own kind, our faith stumbles, and we refuse to believe. Nature is not changed. God is God, and goodness is goodness still; and Christian love is not devilish hate, and the felicities of heaven are not created by beholding the torments of hell!
“God shall not pity you,” says Christopher Love, “but shall laugh at your destruction, and mock when your fear comes. The godly shall not pity you, but they shall rejoice to see God’s power and God’s glory in your damnation. . . . When thou art scorching in thy flames, when thou art howling in thy torments, then God shall laugh at thy destruction, and then the saints of God shall sing and rejoice that thou art a vessel of his justice, and so his power and wrath are made known in thee.” So Rev. Mr. Boston says: “None were so compassionate as the saints on earth during the time of God’s patience. But now that time is at an end. Their compassion on the ungodly is swallowed up in joy in the Mediator’s glory, and his executing of just judgment, by which his enemies are made his footstool.
“Though sometimes the righteous man did weep in secret places for their pride, and because they would not hear, yet then he shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance, he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. No pity shall then be shown to them from their nearest relations. The godly wife shall applaud the justice of the Judge in the condemnation of her ungodly husband. The godly husband shall say amen to the damnation of her who lay in his bosom. The godly parents shall say hallelujah at the passing of the sentence against their ungodly child; and the godly child shall from his heart approve the damnation of his wicked parents,—the father who begat him, and the mother who bore him.”
On this point, as on the preceding, President Edwards is painfully express and full. We have seen how, in his theology, saints in glory and the damned in hell are to see each other, and be acquainted with each other’s condition; and how the saints are to find “no occasion for grief,” or to feel any pity in the miseries of their fellow men. The picture would have been dark and revolting enough had he stopped here, and would have suggested far more difficulties than orthodoxy could ever explain. But he chose to go farther, or, I ought rather say, the necessities of his creed urged him much farther. These necessities required him to affirm, not only that the saints in heaven will feel no sorrow for the damned in hell, but that the torments of the damned will prove a source of sublime and never-ceasing joy to them. And what his creed required, that President Edwards said without reservation, and endeavored to justify. The saints are not only to rejoice in the damnation of the wicked, but the miseries of hell are forever to enhance the happiness of the blessed in heaven!
“They will not be sorry for the damned,” he says; “it will cause no uneasiness or dissatisfaction to them; but, on the contrary, when they have this sight, it will excite them to joyful praises. . . . Therefore the damned and their misery, their sufferings and the wrath of God poured out upon them, will be an occasion of joy to them. . . . When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the damned, how will this heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state, so exceedingly different from it!. . . When they shall see the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they, in the mean time, are in the most blissful state, and shall surely be in it to all eternity, how will they rejoice!”
We should do the intelligence of President Edwards great injustice were we to assume that he did not see the unnatural and abhorrent character of this doctrine. To be utterly indifferent to the miseries of any of our fellow-beings, however vicious or criminal, betrays a condition of mind and heart that is far enough from being commendable, even in “natural men,” to say nothing of those touched by the divine charities of the gospel; but that the saints in heaven should be so lost to all the better feelings of our nature as to rejoice in view of the unspeakable torments of the damned in hell shocks human sensibilities, and outrages common sense. Yet orthodoxy can hardly avoid this issue. And President Edwards meets it like a man, avowing it without reservation, and earnestly endeavoring to persuade himself and others that, bad as it looks and bad as it is, it is still the most amiable, the sweetest, divinest thing imaginable, the very perfection of piety, the maturest blossom of celestial holiness. Next to being willing to be damned one’s self is the grace of rejoicing in the damnation of one’s neighbors. He who can do either of these gives full proof that he is no longer “a natural man,” and is therefore fit for heaven. In favor of such an abomination, President Edwards summons more considerations than he would deem sufficient to establish the most important and useful truth, and urges them with a zeal worthy of a better cause.
As God is the author of hell-torments, so the saints in glory are wholly conformed to his will. What he loves they love, and what he hates they hate. Now, he can have no love to the damned, or he could not inflict upon them such dreadful, unintermitted, and endless torments. He must hate them with a perfect hatred, and desire to do them all the evil he can, with no ulterior object and without end. In this, therefore, his saints should be in complete harmony with God. They should desire what he desires and delight in whatever he does. “The saints in heaven,” says President Edwards, “will be perfect in their love to God; their hearts will be all a flame of love to God, and therefore they will greatly value the glory of God, and will exceedingly delight in seeing him glorified. The saints highly value the glory of God here in this [world], but how much more will they do so in the world to come. They will therefore greatly rejoice in all that contributes to that glory. The glory of God will, in their esteem, be of greater consequence than the welfare of thousands and millions of souls.”
Now it happens, according to orthodoxy and President Edwards, that “God glorifies himself in the eternal damnation of ungodly men. God glorifies himself in all he doth; but he glorifies himself principally in his eternal disposal of his intelligent creatures; some are appointed to everlasting life, and others left to everlasting death.” And it appears as if, in the orthodox view, it is a matter of the profoundest indifference whether souls are damned or saved. God reaps an equal harvest of glory in both cases. He is glorified in men’s salvation, and he is glorified just as really and just as much in their damnation. “Men who bring forth no fruit to God,” says President Edwards, “may yet in suffering destruction be useful. Although they be not useful in anything they do, yet they may be useful in what they may suffer, just as a barren tree, which is no way useful standing in the vineyard, may be good fuel.
God can find use for the most wicked men; he hath his use for vessels of wrath, as well as for vessels of mercy.” Our author has, indeed, a whole sermon, the object of which is to demonstrate that the wicked are “useful only in their destruction,” and at the same time to show in how many ways this endless destruction is to contribute to the glory of God and the happiness of his saints. It seems a little remarkable, certainly, that under these circumstances the thought of saving sinners should ever have occurred, since God would have gained all the glory in their damnation that he could promise himself in saving them; so that the great end he had in view—his own glory—would have been equally attained without the humiliation, sufferings, and death to which Christ so unprofitably subjected himself.
The reader cannot fail to be interested in following President Edwards in his discussion of this delightful topic, and seeing what inexhaustible sources of satisfaction his saints find in the endless torments of their fellow-creatures. “It will be an occasion of their rejoicing,” he says, “as the glory of God will appear in it. The glory of God appears in all his works; and therefore there is no work of God, which the saints in glory shall behold and contemplate, but what will be an occasion of rejoicing to them. God glorifies himself in the eternal damnation of ungodly men.”
The saints in heaven, he tells us, “will rejoice in seeing the justice of God glorified in the sufferings of the damned. The misery of the damned, dreadful as it is, is but what justice requires. . . . They will greatly rejoice to see justice take place, to see that all the sin and wickedness that have been committed in the world [except their own] is remembered of God, and has its due punishment. The sight of this strict, immutable justice of God will render him amiable and adorable in their eyes. They will rejoice when they see him who is their Father and eternal portion so glorious in his justice.”
And this leads President Edwards to say: “Then there will be no more difficulties about the justice of God, about the absolute decrees of God, or anything pertaining to the dispensations of God towards men. But divine justice in the destruction of the wicked will then appear as light without darkness, and will shine as the sun without clouds, and on that account will they sing joyful songs of praise.”
Certain it is that the saints will have nothing to complain of in God’s dispensations towards themselves. Entirely freed from all punishment, delivered by sovereign grace from the damnation they deserved, taken into God’s special favor, and assured of endless felicity, they would be most unreasonable beings if they still found fault with the divine treatment of them. And when we add that in addition to their own happiness they are permitted to behold the unspeakable torments of the damned, and to rejoice over them, their case appears enviable, and I should think it very strange if they found any “difficulties about the justice of God, or about the absolute decrees of God.” Could they conceive of anything more fully in their favor?
I can easily imagine how glad a human being would be, who, justly sentenced to the scaffold, or to be burnt at the stake, should receive a full pardon and be permitted not only to live but to go free. I strive to imagine how one “bound over to the wrath of God and curse of the law, and so made liable to death, with all miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal,” would feel, if delivered from this awful condition, and made partaker of the glories and joys of heaven. Our love of happiness, out dread of misery, will easily help us to interpret to our own souls something of the joy one would experience in such a translation from darkness to light, from death to life. But this natural feeling does not at all meet the case of President Edwards. His saints, not content with being saved and blessed themselves, are required to rejoice in the damnation of their fellow-men! It is not enough that they are happy; they must be glad to see their neighbors miserable; nay, their happiness is to be forever augmented by the torments of others of their race.
To see the enormity of all this, let us suppose that there are two men, brothers, if you please, who are guilty of the same capital offence, and condemned to the same punishment by fire. What should we think, if one, having been so fortunate as to obtain pardon, should attend the execution of the other, and instead of exhibiting any tokens of grief or pity, should merely dance and sing, as he witnessed the sufferings of his brother; and in the language of President Edwards, should “rejoice to see justice take place,” rejoice to see the guilt of his brother remembered, and have its due punishment? Would not every man think this pardoned brother a wretch, not only without ordinary human feeling, but a monster of depravity?
Yet this monster, so callous, so inhuman, would be an angel by the side of President Edwards’s “saints in glory.” For what would be the sufferings of a human being for a few minutes at most in an earthly fire, in comparison with an eternity of torments in the fire of hell! The rich man in Hades remembered his five brethren, and desired that they might be warned, so as not to fall into like misery with himself. President Edwards’s saints not only have no pity upon their brethren, but rejoice in their most horrible torment.
“They will rejoice in it,” says President Edwards, “as it will be a glorious manifestation of the power and majesty of God. God will show his own greatness in executing vengeance on ungodly men. . . . God will show his glorious power in destroying these enemies. . . . The power of God is sometimes spoken of as very glorious, as appearing in the temporal destruction of his enemies. . . . Moses rejoiced and sang when he saw God glorify his power in the destruction of Pharaoh and his host at the Red Sea. But how much more will the saints in glory rejoice when they shall see God gloriously triumphing over all his enemies in their eternal ruin.
“Then it will appear how dreadful God is, and how dreadful a thing it is to disobey and condemn him. It is often mentioned, as a part of the glory of God, that he is a terrible God. To see the majesty and greatness and terribleness of God, appearing in the destruction of his enemies, will cause the saints to rejoice; and when they shall see how great and terrible a being God is, how will they prize his favor! how will they rejoice that they are the objects of his love! how will they praise him the more joyfully, that he should choose them to be his children, and to live in the enjoyment of him.”
It might not be amiss to reflect that when Moses sang over the destruction of Pharaoh and his hosts, he had as little thought of their endless damnation as he had of the Westminster Confession of Faith or the power of the Pope. And it would do no harm to remember also that when Moses desired to see the glory of God, God was graciously pleased not to call attention to his naked power, his wrath, or terribleness exhibited in the destruction he was able to accomplish, but chose rather to make “all his goodness pass before him.” Even under the Law goodness was more glorious than omnipotence itself!
But beyond all this very narrow and selfish joy, the saints will find occasion for rejoicing, “as they will have the greater sense of their own happiness by seeing the contrary misery. It is the nature of pleasure and pain, of happiness and misery, greatly to heighten the sense of each other. Thus the seeing of the happiness of others tends to make men more sensible of their own calamities; and the seeing of the calamities of others tends to heighten the sense of our own enjoyments. When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the damned, how will it heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state, so exceedingly different from it! When they shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are, who were naturally in the same circumstances with themselves; when they shall see the smoke of their torment and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they, in the meantime, are in the most blissful state and shall surely be in it to all eternity, how will they rejoice!”
Not to do President Edwards any injustice, I must allow him to explain his own doctrine fully. “Hereby the saints,” he says, “will be made the more sensible how great their salvation is. When they shall see how great the misery is from which God hath saved them, and how great a difference he hath made between their state and the state of others, who were by nature, and perhaps for a time by practice, no more sinful and ill-deserving than any, it will give them a greater sense of the wonderfulness of God’s grace to them. Every time they look upon the damned it will excite in them a lively and admiring sense of the grace of God in making them so to differ. . . .
“The sight of hell-torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever. It will not only make them more sensible of the greatness and freeness of the grace of God in their happiness, but it will really make their happiness the greater, as it will make them the more sensible of their own happiness; it will give a more lively relish of it; it will make them prize it more. When they see others, who were of the same nature and born under the same circumstances, plunged in such misery, and they so distinguished, oh, it will make them sensible how happy they are. A sense of the opposite misery in all cases greatly increases the relish of any joy or pleasure.”
This seems to me little better, let me confess, than moral madness. The man, saint or sinner, who could find happiness thus in the misery of his fellows, ought evidently to be somewhere else than “in glory.” It would betray a nature so perverted and callous that he would be an object of the profoundest pity or the sharpest indignation of his race. Now, as the torments of the damned are “unspeakably, inconceivably great,” it follows, upon the reasoning above, that the sight of them must be the source of a vast, measureless joy, an exquisite and perpetual delight; and hence the greater the miseries of the damned in hell, the greater the happiness of the saints in heaven! In this ungodly world, where fortunately we have few approximations to this kind of sainthood, practices founded upon this doctrine of President Edwards would not only be thought strange and inconsistent with the lowest conceptions of morality, but absolutely revolting. We call the rabble brutal that gathers about the scaffold on which the most guilty wretch pays the penalty of his crimes, if they exhibit any tokens of joy at his sufferings, or even of levity. Yet they ought to shout and sing for very delight, since seeing his misery should heighten their happiness!
What would the community think of a party of young people who should gayly prosecute the most innocent amusements, while one of their companions, ay, or any human being, was known to be dying in an adjoining room, in full hearing of their hilarity and mirth, and whose expiring groans mingled every moment with their pleasures? What would the world say of a company of learned orthodox divines, who should sit enjoying a sumptuous dinner, while a house across the street was on fire, and its unhappy inmates were perishing in the flames, and filling the whole neighborhood with what President Edwards would call “their dolorous shrieks and cries”? And what should we think of their humanity, not to say their religion, if they were afterwards to tell us what a zest the horrors of this scene gave to their entertainment, and to assure us that never before did they eat a dinner with such perfect satisfaction, since the miseries of their neighbors added amazingly to their enjoyment? If President Edwards’s doctrine is good for heaven, it ought to be tolerable on earth.
It is easily seen that on this theory hell, with its horrible torments, is a necessary foil for the glories and joys of heaven. Heaven without hell by its side would be heaven no longer; and were it not for the torments of the damned, President Edwards’s saints would lose more than half their happiness. Which reminds me of a remark of Goethe, that there were some in his time “who thought there would be no pleasure in being Christians, if all the heathen were not to be roasted eternally.”
President Edwards finds another consideration which greatly fortifies his position. The Apostle, in one of his epistles, told his Christian brethren that all things were theirs, from which the President generously infers that “the saints in heaven possess all things as their own, and therefore all things contribute to their joy and happiness. . . . All things in the world to come, or in the future and eternal world, are the saints’; not only life, but death, men and angels, and devils, heaven and hell, are theirs, to contribute to their joy and happiness. Therefore the damned and their misery, their sufferings and the wrath of God poured out upon them, will be occasion of joy to them.”
But while proving and illustrating this important doctrine, President Edwards meets with one objection. He was always asserting that the devil and his wicked angels hate the damned, and rejoice in their torments; and now it appears that God and good angels and the saints in heaven are in perfect harmony with the devil in this, and do the same thing! “God has no love to them, nor pity for them,” but, on the contrary, “they are the objects of his eternal hatred.” In like manner the devil has no love to them, nor pity for them, but they are the objects of his eternal hatred. The coincidence is remarkable, and would somewhat stagger ordinary men; but to President Edwards it presented no considerable difficulty.
He explained the striking similarity of temper and conduct on the principle that extremes are apt to meet. God and the saints in glory hate the damned out of an exuberance of goodness, out of a transcendent holiness; the devil and his angels, on the contrary, hate them, and rejoice in their damnation out of a wicked and malignant feeling; just as Dr. Adam Clarke says the effects of extreme heat and cold, frost and fire, are the same. The streams come from different fountains, but flow in the same channel, and, unluckily for the damned, prove equally bitter and fatal.
The difficulty is somewhat increased, as President Edwards is obliged to confess, by the circumstance that “Christ, by many precepts in his word, hath made it our duty to love all men. We are commanded to love wicked men, and our enemies and persecutors.” Then Paul’s love to his countrymen was so great that he declared he could wish himself accursed from Christ for the sake of his brethren and kinsmen according to the flesh. The good angels, too, take an interest in human welfare; and are said to rejoice over any sinner that repents. That Christ loved sinners may be safely inferred from the single fact that he died for them; and the Apostle affirms the same of God himself, when he says that “he spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all,” and commended “his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” It is the commandment of God that we should not only love him supremely, but love our neighbor as ourselves.
In the time of our Savior the Jews had come to explain this as meaning only that we should love our neighbor, but hate our enemy. “This gloss,” says the learned Dr. Lightfoot, “came from hell, not from heaven; from Satan, not from God.” Our divine Master not only corrected their error, but defined the commandment: “I say unto you, Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you; and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.” And he enjoined this upon them that they might be the children of their Father in heaven, who is good to all, making his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sending rain upon the just and the unjust. From all which we may confidently infer, not only that the spirit of the Christian religion is benevolent, but that God is good, and loves his enemies, and therefore cannot hate them, and curse and endlessly torment them, as orthodoxy teaches.
All this President Edwards seems willing to allow—with some pretty serious exceptions, certainly—so far as the present world is concerned, but denies that it holds at all with respect to the future. Here in this momentary life the saints are required to love their neighbors, and, indeed, to love the wicked; but as soon as they attain to “glory,” the moment they reach heaven, the scene changes, and what was the most sacred duty in this world falls away, and is a duty no longer! Speaking of this love of enemies, which Christ clearly makes the distinctive mark of his disciples, President Edwards says: “This command doth not extend to the saints in glory, with respect to the damned in hell; nor is there the same reason that it should.
“We ought now to love all, and even wicked men; we know not but that God loves them. However wicked any man is, yet we know not but that he is one whom God loved from eternity; we know not but that Christ loved him with a dying love, had his name upon his heart before the world was, and had respect to him when he endured those bitter agonies upon the cross. We know not but that he is to be our companion in glory to all eternity.” Is not this to place the second commandment of the law on very narrow and insecure grounds?
As I read the Scriptures, we are under obligation to love our neighbor because God commands it; and I conclude that God commands it because it is right; or, if one chooses to go further, God requires us to love our fellow-men because He himself, who is the standard of all moral excellence, loves them. According to orthodoxy, our duty to love the wicked rests upon our ignorance. We are to love them because we do not know that God does not love them, and that Christ did not die for them, and that they may not be saved! This is an unconscious confession on the part of orthodoxy of the superior moral power of Universalism. That teaches, without any reservation or doubt, and as fundamental truths, that God loves all men, and that Christ died for all, and hence that we all ought to love one another and perform the works of a genuine and universal benevolence.
But President Edwards’s difficulties do not end here. If a part of the human race is ultimately to be damned to all eternity, and the saints do not know who they are that are thus to be lost, that happy ignorance can hardly belong to God; and it becomes a very serious question why he should command his saints on earth to love those whom he hates and proposes to damn forever; or, to change the statement, why Christ should enjoin it upon his disciples to love and bless and pray for and do good to those whom he himself did not love and for whom he did not die. Here is one of the mysteries which orthodoxy should endeavor to explain. Would God have his children on earth better and more benevolent than himself? Would Christ require his disciples to go beyond their Head? He said it was enough that the disciple is as his Master, and the servant as his Lord. He could hardly wish his followers to be better than the Author and Finisher of their faith, to love where he hates, to bless where he curses, and do good where he does the contrary.
According to President Edwards, there is to be a great, an unaccountable difference in the moral government and Christian temper between this and the future world. While, as he confesses, “we are commanded to love wicked men, and our enemies and persecutors” here, “this command doth not extend to the saints in glory with respect to the damned in hell. Their ignorance will there have passed away, and they will see things as they are, and know whom they ought to love and whom they should hate. “The saints in glory,” he says, “will know concerning the damned in hell, that God never loved them, but that he hates them, and [that they] will be forever hated of God. This hatred will be fully declared to them; they will see it, and will see the fruits of it in their misery. Therefore, when God has thus declared his hatred of the damned, and the saints see it, it will be no way becoming them to love them, nor to mourn over them. It becomes the saints fully and perfectly to consent to what God doth, without any reluctance or opposition of spirit; yea, it becomes them to rejoice in everything that God sees meet to be done.” True; but to what a waste of affection and prayers and good works this ignorance of God’s will has led the saints!
“As only a small part of the human family, as we shall see, is finally to be saved, it is quite certain that far the larger part of all the love, all the prayers, and all the beneficence of the saints has been completely thrown away, and worse; and this, too, at the command of God! If they had only known—had God declared it betimes to them that “he never loved” those that are finally to be lost—that he hated them, and will hate them forever, it would have saved them an immense amount of affection and kind offices, and the growing habit of tenderness and good-will, which, when they enter President Edwards’s heaven and take their places in glory, they will be obliged to eradicate and lay aside. There, in that world of perfect holiness, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, relatives and friends, will be obliged to strip them selves of all natural affection and other earthly attachments, and enter upon an entirely new mode of existence, insomuch that many of them, it is to be feared, will hardly know themselves, or even the God that made them, or the Savior that bought them.
Everything will be strange to them. They will no longer love the greater number of those they loved before; and in God and Christ they will see little of that great love which had, through their earthly pilgrimage, been growing year after year upon their understandings and their hearts. “The different circumstances of our nature now,” says President Edwards, “from what will be hereafter, make that a virtue now which will be no virtue then. For instance, if a man be of a virtuous disposition, the circumstances of our nature now are such that it will necessarily show itself by natural affection; and to be without natural affection is a very vicious disposition. But natural affection is no virtue in the saints in glory. Their virtue will exercise itself in a higher manner.”
Is there not a little danger that in this kind of spiritual sublimation heaven and its felicities may be put quite beyond all human apprehension, and so beyond all human interest and desire? A heaven where there are no natural affections, where all the sympathies and ties that bind us together here on earth, and which give to earth most of its beauty, and to existence itself its chief value, are rooted out and banished, may, for aught we know, be far higher than one where all our human affections, purified and expanded, shall exist in their perfection, but at the same time must be one as foreign to our hearts as it is inconceivable to our intellects.
Imagine President Edwards called upon to minister the consolations of religion to parents weeping over the bier of a beloved child. What should he say to them? Would he tell them that this natural affection which now caused them so much pain was to endure only a little while; that their lost child would be nothing more to them forever; that if they were to meet in heaven they would not know each other, or, knowing, would not care; and if their child were in hell, it would be the occasion of no grief, and they would rejoice in its damnation, and find an eternal source of happiness in its torments?
It must have struck every reader of the quotations above that there are some souls, nay, that all the souls which shall finally be lost, have always been objects of God’s hatred. “The saints in glory,” says President Edwards, “will know concerning the damned in hell, that God never loved them, that he hates them, and [that they] will be forever hated of God.” So he speaks of some as being “appointed to everlasting life, and others left to everlasting death.” This language expresses the familiar doctrine of eternal election and reprobation, which teaches that some of the human race were made for heaven and blessedness, and others were created to be damned and tormented in hell-fire forever. “God never loved them,” says President Edwards.
He did not love them when he made them, and has never loved them since. He has always hated them, and will hate them forever. Their existence is no blessing, but a curse. The good things they have received, the apparent benefits and mercies, were not good in their intention, and will not be good in the end. All are designed to contribute to their misery. God never loved them, and Christ never died for them. They have never had any real offers of mercy, and no genuine calls to repentance and salvation. All has been hypocritical and false. No salvation was ever provided or intended for them. God never did, or designed to do, them any good, for he never loved them.
This terrible doctrine is not only Calvinistic, but it is orthodox. Every form of the Christian religion which teaches the doctrine of endless punishment necessarily implies it. Affirm the endless damnation of one solitary soul, and the only way of avoiding this doctrine is by denying the foreknowledge of God. If he sees the end from the beginning, then that end, whatever it may be, determines the purpose of the Creator in respect to the creature whose history is thus traced from its beginning to its close, by the omniscience of God. And it matters not at all whether man’s action is necessitated or free: if necessitated, then the whole web of causes and consequences, of motives and actions, were prearranged and inviolably foreordained; if free, then God clearly foresaw how free powers would move amidst their manifold surrounding, and that in the end they would compass the free agent’s damnation. The final result is equally certain in both cases, and God, who foresaw that result, created that human soul for that terrible destiny!
The fact is not to be denied that the problem, How are saints in heaven to be happy in the sight or knowledge of the torments of the damned in hell? is becoming, year after year, more pressing and more painful in the Christian consciousness of the world. “The plain truth is,” says Rev. Dr. Townsend, “that this subject has relations to certain emotions of the human heart, the deepest and tenderest of which it is capable. The constitutional antipathies, the inward disturbances, the multiplication of personal anxieties, objectionable methods of presentation, are nothing in comparison, or are each a hundred fold intensified by the thought that a father, a mother, a brother, or a sister, or a darling child, may be suffering endless punishment. How can I be happy in heaven if my child is in hell? is the blunt and awful question which the preacher is frequently called upon to answer.”
And how, pray, does Dr. Townsend answer it? We have seen how President Edwards and men of his school of theology attempt to answer it and how their solution rather aggravates than lessens the difficulty. The saints are to become happy by first becoming inhuman, or perhaps I should say unhuman. They are to undergo a moral revolution on entering heaven, and be made so terribly holy as to lose more than half the graces they have been all their lifetime cultivating. Instead of becoming more tender, loving, sympathetic, and pitiful, as they walk the golden streets, they grow suddenly hard, selfish, cruel, and monstrous, so as to rejoice in the sufferings of their fellow-beings, and even those bound to them by the strongest earthly ties, and claim to gain an accession of happiness from their intolerable torments.
But how does Dr. Townsend meet the difficulty? “Various answers,” he says, “are attempted; and many of them are good, for other folks, but not for us. It is possible that every reader will pause at this point, and insist upon an answer. We, too, will pause, but merely to remark, that after giving the question some degree of attention, we can only say, that, judging from our present human nature and relations, we do not know exactly how a mother can be perfectly happy in heaven, whose son is in hell; nay, worse, we are willing to confess that at times, while facing this question, perplexity has settled down upon us like night.”
And how does Dr. Townsend attempt to dissipate this Egyptian darkness, and relieve himself of such distressing perplexity? He can hardly be said to make any attempt, but coolly tells us that the question to be answered is “whether the doctrine of endless punishment is true. Let that first be settled, then afterwards we will seek an explanation of minor considerations.”
But does not Dr. Townsend see that a doctrine which outrages humanity and tramples underfoot the tenderest and best affections of our being—a doctrine which, in the light of our nature and relations, causes perplexity to settle down upon him like night whenever he honestly confronts it—becomes just in that degree more and more improbable, and hence demands clearer and more abundant evidence? One can have no just conception of the Christian religion if he does not perceive that one of its offices, if not its highest office, is to cultivate a broad and generous benevolence. It refines and purifies all our best affections; and while it teaches the mother to love her child more, it also teaches her to extend something of that affection to all who come within the range of her influence, or can be the objects of human goodwill. Rude men, hard, cruel men, men of savage natures and dispositions, all, indeed, whose affections are dull and cold, are very little touched or moved by the doctrine of endless torments; and they generally accept it without difficulty, and believe it without pain.
It does not distress them; in confronting it no perplexities settle down upon them like night. They are never tortured with the question, How am I to be happy in heaven if those I love are in the torments of hell? Is it probable, then, that the Author of our nature has given us a religion that makes the best among us the most unhappy? Is it reasonable to suppose that Christianity, which immeasurably quickens our sympathies, and invigorates and refines all our benevolent affections, is only fitted to wrench our nature, and torture the very powers it improves and sanctifies?
It is somewhat amazing to observe that President Edwards’s doctrine, of nearly a century and a half ago, that the happiness of the saints in glory is to be indefinitely heightened by beholding the torments of the damned in hell, still finds its advocates in the ranks of orthodoxy. But why should this be thought singular? Is not orthodoxy essentially the same under all its appearances? Its forms of expression may change with the fashion of the times or the spirit of the age, but its fundamental notions remain the same.
I find a paper in the Princeton Review of January, 1878, by the Rev. Prof. Patton, of the Theological Seminary of Chicago, in which, after speaking of the effect of contrast in producing pleasure, the author adds: “Nay, one could go further, and could hold that contrast may be a necessary factor in the divine economy, and that, for aught that is known, the eternity of evil finds some explanation here. It is here, however, that human sympathy is aroused, and would do violence to the cause of light and shade, in order that the dream of a happy universe may be realized. Here, by the throne of the Almighty, is the point of highest light in God’s great picture; but as the light fades away into the deep darkness of the bottomless pit, men recoil and ask the artist to take away the shadows, and flood the canvas with golden glory.
“But how does the poet-painter of the Apocalypse handle the great theme of human destiny? He paints the river of life, the throne of God, the golden streets, the white-robed throng; and, as if to bring out the bright light of the picture, men see in shadow the place whose portals bear the dark inscription, ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!’ And now that so much time has been spent in ridiculing the scholastic and patristic writers who, in language coarse it may be, and grating to the ear, have spoken of the punishment of the lost as a factor in the happiness of the saints, would it not be well to stop and ask whether, after all, there may not be a profound philosophy in the speculation of Aquinas, which finds some support in the science of æsthetics, and in the psychology of pleasure and pain.”
Here, then, we are brought back to the old doctrine of President Edwards by the new path of æsthetics and high art. The divine plan of creation is a sublime specimen of imperial painting, and painting, we know, is nothing but dull outline without light and shade. Taken out of the realm of æsthetics and poetry, and reduced to the plain prose of common-sense, Dr. Patton’s opinion is our modern doctrine of relativity run mad, and amounts simply to this: That goodness is not good unless it stands over against evil; that holiness is nothing if it is not confronted by sin; that happiness owes its chief value to corresponding misery; that the saints in glory find their highest joy in contemplating the torments of the damned in hell; that the throne of heaven gathers its brightest light from the darkness of the bottomless pit; and, finally, that God owes much of his greatness and goodness to the devil. Hence sin and misery are essentially necessary, and must be so to all eternity, to give life and worth to holiness and happiness, and furnish Dr. Patton with the requisite light and shade for his immortal painting.
Tertullian had not scientifically studied theological æsthetics, as it has been the privilege of Dr. Patton to do, but he enjoyed in a high degree the same æsthetic feeling, and expressed it in barbarous Latin, with a genuine African warmth. And it is pleasant to set, side by side, this ancient Father—who would doubtless have been a saint if he had not been a Montanist —and our modern Christian philosopher of Chicago, and to observe how charmingly they agree in temper and spirit, though they express themselves in a somewhat different manner. He was writing upon the subject of spectacles, of which the Romans were very fond, and many of which they made very cruel and demoralizing; and, wishing to impress the minds of his heathen countrymen with an idea of the grander spectacles of the Christian religion, as he held it, he exclaimed: “What a spectacle is at hand at the advent of the Lord, once disbelieved, now in glory, and then triumphant! What rejoicing among the angels! What glory of the rising saints! What a kingdom thence forth of the just! What a city, the new Jerusalem! But there are other spectacles still remaining,—that last perpetual day of Judgment, that day unanticipated, derided by the Gentiles, when the whole course of time and all its nations are swallowed up in one common conflagration!
“What a profusion of spectacles will then be exhibited! How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I see so many mighty kings, said to have been received into heaven, with Jupiter himself, and his worshippers, groaning together in the profoundest darkness, and rulers, persecutors of the Lord’s name, liquefying in flames more raging than they ever caused to rage against Christians; when I shall see sage philosophers blushing for shame in the presence of their disciples, and burning together with those whom they persuaded that nothing pertains to God, and to whom they declared, either that they had no souls, or that they would never return to their former bodies; and also the poets trembling before the tribunal, not of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the unexpected Christ. Then the tragedians will be heard more vocal with their own calamity. Then shall the dramatist be more extravagant by means of the fire; then shall the charioteer be seen all red in his blazing car; then shall the athletes be thrown, not in the accustomed lists, but in the fire.”
We can easily frame apologies for such an outburst of savage temper on the part of Tertullian. He was not a saint in his own day, though really worth scores of those the Church has honored with this title, but he was an earnest, honest man, who spared nothing in the propagation and defence of the Christian religion as he had received and understood it. Exposed to constant and bitter opposition, living in the midst of bloody persecutions, and suffering day by day from the enemies of the religion he loved, should we feel surprise if at times he forgot the gentleness of the Christian in the indignation of the man; and looked forward with a feeling of satisfaction, if not of revenge, to the approaching hour when these enemies of Christ should suffer the vengeance their conduct had provoked?
But what shall we say of the Christian philosopher who, in this nineteenth century of grace, sits quietly in his study and coolly speculates and argues in favor of an eternity of human sin and suffering as a necessary means of reflecting glory upon the throne of God, and appeals to the miseries of the damned as an essential element in the happiness of the blessed? To such a mind and heart the love and holiness of God must either never have been revealed, or been revealed in vain. There can be no doubt, however, that this indifference of the saints in glory to the miseries of the damned in hell, and still more, this fiendish joy in heaven, in view of the torments of their fellow-creatures in the pit below, must, if it were to exist, prove a most bitter ingredient in their cup of woe. Bad and lost, as they may be, it can hardly fail to add another pang to their grief, and increase the measure of their wretchedness, to see that all goodness, all mercy, all pity, is dead in the universe, and that heaven itself, through excess of holiness, has become as hard and unsympathetic as the depths of hell.