WHAT is to add immeasurably to all the torments of the damned—what is to give accent and emphasis to their misery, and thus complete the wretchedness of their condition— is the fact that it is to be absolutely without remedy and without end. On this point the whole orthodox world is agreed. Genuine orthodoxy admits no lessening of the variety of hell-torments, nor will it allow of any mitigation of their severity. After describing them in all the colors that human language is capable of giving, or that the human imagination, in its loftiest flights, can conceive, we are told that this is nothing to the dread reality. “There is no reason,” says President Edwards, “to suspect that possibly ministers set forth this matter beyond what it really is, that possibly it is not so dreadful and terrible as it is pretended, and that ministers strain the description of it beyond just bounds. . . . There is no reason to think that ministers describe the misery of the wicked beyond what it is, because the Scripture teaches that this is one end of ungodly men, to show the dreadful power of God’s wrath . . .
“The Scripture teaches that the wrath of God on wicked men is dreadful beyond all that we can conceive. . . . As it is but little that we know of God, as we know and can conceive but little of his power and his greatness, so it is but little that we know or can conceive of the dreadfulness of his wrath; and therefore there is no reason to suppose that we set it forth beyond what it is. We have rather reason to suppose that after we have said our utmost, and thought our utmost, all that we have said or thought is but a faint shadow of the reality,” or, as he says in another place, it is “but painted fire.”
But “unspeakable and inconceivable” as this punishment is, its eternity is the one element lacking to give it its full power and efficiency. It matters not how multiplied its pains may be, nor how severe, nor how long they may be continued, though it were countless millions of ages, it avails nothing if it is not positively without end. It is its eternity alone that gives to the divine punishment all its distinctive weight and terror. Deduct a single day from its duration, and you strip it of its proper force. Drexelius, a learned Jesuit; well expresses the orthodox thought and feeling on this point when he says: “If for every sin, or for every hour of a man’s life, he was doomed to a year in hell, and no longer, the punishment would be tolerable. Upon such a presumption men would be tempted to continue in their sins; and I do not doubt that a great many would never leave them, could they be assured that the torments of the damned would ever have an end.” Hence the imperious necessity of maintaining the absolute endlessness of this punishment.
As orthodoxy reasons, the torments inflicted upon the wicked must be as great as possible, and as long as possible, in order to be effective; and yet, as Archbishop Tillotson well observed, they prove all too mild to answer that important purpose; which led the good Archbishop to think that God would undoubtedly have made them more dreadful if it had been in his power to do so! What seems quite remarkable, and greatly needs explanation, is the momentous fact that those who professedly believe in the eternity of this most fearful punishment are not at all distinguished by exceptional virtues or general worth from their neighbors of a less alarming faith. Whether it may not be possible to represent punishment so terrible as to render it practically incredible, and hence powerless; or whether it happens that those who believe it have come to look upon it as belonging chiefly to their neighbors,—a good thing to preach to others, but from which they themselves have happily nothing to fear,—are questions which it would do my orthodox friends no harm to consider, but with which at present I have nothing to do.
But however this may be, it is still a very serious fact that orthodoxy insists upon the eternity of punishment as if the salvation of the world depended upon it. Dr. Watts, indeed, ingenuously says: “I never knew but one person in the whole course of my ministry who acknowledged that the first emotions of religion in their own heart arose from a sense of the goodness of God, and that they were gently and sweetly led at first to this inquiry: What shall I render to the Lord who hath dealt so bountifully with me? But I think all besides, who have come within my notice, have rather been first awakened, by the passion of fear, to fly from the wrath to come.” But, according to President Edwards, this solitary exception, acknowledged by Dr. Watts, must have been a spurious conversion; for the President teaches explicitly that before any will seek for grace and salvation, they must be sensible “that they hang over the pit of eternal misery,” and, further, “that it would be just with God to do as he hath threatened in his holy law, namely, make them objects of his wrath and curse in hell to all eternity:” thus every sinner who is saved must see and feel that he is not only in imminent danger of being damned forever, but also that he deserves it.
Hence it must be impossible for any person to be saved, or ever to make any effort, or even form a resolution, to seek salvation, if he does not first thoroughly believe in the doctrine of endless punishment, and that, too, not in the manner generally done, as something to which one’s neighbors are chiefly exposed, but as a personal danger of the most alarming kind. And this, if I do not mistake, is the proper orthodox position. It is the ground on which Universalists to-day are denied the name of Christian, or at least the title of “Evangelical,” and so excluded from the fraternity of those sects which assume this distinguishing appellative.
It necessarily follows that this great doctrine of endless punishment is not only fundamental in the Christian religion, but, like the existence of God and the Messiahship of Jesus, cannot be denied or doubted without vitiating one’s whole faith, and unavoidably casting him out of the Christian Church. It should excite no surprise, therefore, that this doctrine, at once so momentous and so indispensable, should have received great attention from its advocates, and been insisted upon with a frequency and zeal in some small degree commensurate with its vital importance.
Thus Rev. Mr. Boston, after describing the torments of the damned as manifold, as most vehement and exquisite, as uninterrupted, and, indeed, as universal, adds: “Lastly, to complete their misery, their torments shall be eternal. Ah! what a frightful case is this, to be tormented in the whole body and soul, and that not with one kind of torment, but many; all of these most exquisite, and all this without any intermission, and without pity from any! What heart can conceive those things without horror! Nevertheless, if this most miserable case were at length to have an end, that would afford some comfort; but the torments of the damned will have no end.” In another place he says: “The last aggravation of that torment is the eternal duration thereof; they must depart into ever-lasting fire. That is it that puts the cape-stone upon their misery, namely, that it shall never have an end.” He afterwards endeavors to give some notion of that eternity of which he speaks. He calls it “the creature’s eternity,” because it has a beginning, while the Creator’s eternity has no beginning. “But who can measure the waters of the ocean, or who can tell you the days, years, and ages of eternity, which are infinitely more than the drops of the ocean?
“None who can comprehend eternity but the eternal God! Eternity is an ocean, whereof we shall never see the shore; ’t is a deep sea where we can find no bottom; a labyrinth from whence we cannot extricate ourselves. . . . The first who entered into an eternity of woe is as far from the end of it as the last who shall go thither will be at his entry. They who have launched out farther into that ocean are as far from land as they were the first moment they went into it. And thousands of ages after this they will be as far from it as ever. . . . God’s wrath in hell will ever be the wrath to come. But there is no middle in eternity. When millions of ages are past in eternity, what is past bears no proportion to what is to come; no, not so much as one drop of water falling from the tip of one’s finger bears to all the waters of the ocean. There is no end of it. While God is, it shall be.”
On this point President Edwards dwells frequently, and with great force. “Well may there be weeping and gnashing of teeth in hell,” he says, “where there is such misery. . . . The misery is not only amazingly great and extreme, but of long continuance; yea, of infinitely long continuance. It never will have an end. There will be no deliverance, no rest, no hope, but they will last throughout all eternity. Eternity is a thing in the thought of which our minds are swallowed up. As it is infinite in itself, so it is infinitely beyond the comprehension of our minds. The more we think of it, the more amazing will it seem to us. Eternity is a duration to which a long period of time bears no greater proportion than a short period. A thousand years or a thousand ages bear no greater proportion to eternity than a minute; or, which is the same thing, a thousand ages are as much less than eternity as a minute.
“A minute comes as near an equality to it; or you may take as many thousand ages out of eternity as you can minutes. If a man by the utmost skill in arithmetic should denote or enumerate a great number of ages, and should rise by multiplication to ever so prodigious numbers, should make as great figures as he could, and rise in multiplying as fast as he could, and should spend his life in multiplying, the product of all would be no nearer equal to the duration which the wicked must spend in the misery of hell, than one minute! Eternity is that which cannot be made less by subtraction. If we take from eternity a thousand years or ages, the remainder is not the less for it. Eternity is that which will forever be but beginning, and that because all the time which is past, let it be ever so large, is but a point to what remains. The wicked, after they have suffered millions of ages, will be, as it were, but at the first point, only setting out in their sufferings.
“It will be no comfort to them that so much is gone, for they will have none the less to bear. There will never come a time when, if what is past is compared to what is to come, it will not be as a point. The continuance of their torment cannot be measured out by revolutions of the sun or moon or stars, by centuries or ages. They shall continue suffering after these heavens and this earth shall wax old as a garment, till the whole visible universe is dissolved. Yea, they shall remain in misery through millions of such ages as are equal to the age of the sun, moon, and stars, and still it will be all one as to what remains, still no nearer the end of their misery.”
This is the doctrine of the orthodox church, Catholic and Protestant. Cornelius à Lapide, a learned Jesuit commentator, asks: “How long shall the wicked burn in hell? Forever! How long is that? Imagine a hundred thousand years: but that is nothing in respect to eternity. Imagine ten hundred thousand years, yea, as many ages: but that is nothing in respect to eternity. Imagine a thousand millions of years: still they are nothing. Eternity is the same, and always will be so. Proceed and number as many more as you can; add millions of millions more, as long as you please, and then suppose the damned in hell to burn all this vast duration; and, when you have done all this, you have not found the beginning of eternity. Imagine again as many millions of millions of years as there are drops in the sea, and you have not yet come to the beginning of eternity. Such is the duration of that eternity of torment which God hath decreed to the damned in hell.”
It has been a favorite employment of the advocates of endless torments to invent various devices intended to give some notion of the extent of eternity. All such attempts necessarily fail, because our faculties are finite, and cannot comprehend the infinite. Drexelius, another good Jesuit, says: “Should God say to the damned: Let the earth be covered with the finest sand, and let the world be filled therewith; let heap be piled upon heap, till it reaches up to the highest heavens; and let an angel every thousand years take one grain from it, and when the whole shall be removed, after so many thousand years as there were grains, I will release you out of hell: should God, I say, make any such promise to those miserable spirits, what a mighty consolation it would be to them! How would they exult and rejoice! Their damnation would seem somewhat easy to them. But alas! after millions and millions of years, there remain more millions, and still more millions forever and ever.”
Gulielmus Peraldus, “a very learned and religious man,” as we are assured, and once Bishop of Lyons, adopted a different mode of illustration. “Should the damned,” says he, “every day distil from their eyes but one tear only, and should the tears they thus distil day after day be preserved in a convenient place, they would at length exceed the vast ocean of waters. The drops of the sea have their number and measure; it is an easy thing for God to say they are just so many, and no more; but the tears of the damned can never be numbered.” Another ingenious advocate of this great doctrine, with a particularly sharp arithmetical turn of mind, supposes a strip of parchment—I do not see why paper would not serve the purpose as well—long enough to encircle the globe, say 25,000 miles, and this to be filled with the cypher 9 from beginning to end, so close together as to have no space between them. Who could express, who could conceive, the number they would represent? And yet, if these figures expressed years, ages, or centuries, or thousands or millions of ages, they would no more represent eternity than would a single day or hour!
Father Furniss, whose little tract on the Sight of Hell I have taken occasion to mention, surpasses all other writers whom I have chanced to meet in his inventive powers here. He supposes our globe to be solid cast-iron, and that every million years a little bird should fly over it and once touch it with the tip of its wing! Imagine how long a time it would take to wear off the thickness of this sheet of paper over the space of one’s finger-nail; and calculate, if you can, the millions and millions of ages necessary to wear away a single cubic inch. Then find the number of cubic inches in our globe; and multiply these two factors together, and have you made any approximation to eternity? None at all! After these countless millions of millions of ages were exhausted, there would be an eternity still remaining!
“Think of the extent of eternity!” exclaims Rev. Austin Dickinson, of our own age and country. “Oh, send an angel forward on the awful deep, with the speed of lightning, for millions and millions of centuries, and the dread waves of perdition are still rising and rolling beyond!” “Let imagination stretch her wings again,” said the celebrated Dr. Griffin, of Park Street Church, Boston, “and follow the excruciated soul through ages of unutterable endurance—through fire intense enough to melt down all the planets! One period after another passes by it as it flies, until it looks back on the first million of years as on a speck in the horizon, and still it hears the tormented soul exclaim: My agony is just begun!”
And this thought of eternity as the duration of their misery, President Edwards suggests, must be a great aggravation to the torments of the damned. “The more the damned in hell think of the eternity of their torments, the more amazing it will appear to them; and alas! they will not be able to keep it out of their minds. Their tortures will not divert them from it, but will fix their attention to it. Oh, how dreadful will eternity appear to them after they shall have been thinking on it for ages together, and shall have so long an experience of their torments! The damned in hell will have two infinites perpetually to amaze them and swallow them up. One is an infinite God, whose wrath they will bear, and in whom they will behold their perfect, irreconcilable enemy. The other is the infinite duration of their torment. If it were possible for the damned in hell to have a comprehensive knowledge of eternity, their sorrow and grief would be infinite in degree. The comprehension of so much sorrow, which they must endure, would cause infinite grief for the present. Though they will not have a comprehensive knowledge of it, yet they doubtless will have a vastly more lively and strong apprehension of it than we can have in this world.
“Their torments will give them an impression of it. . . . Besides, their capacities will probably be enlarged, their understandings will be quicker and stronger in the future state; and God can give them as great a sense and as strong an impression of eternity as he pleases, to increase their grief and torment.” “What a miserable unhappiness will it be,” says Jeremy Taylor, “to burn in these flames of hell, not only for an hour, but till the day of Judgment! yea, even for all eternity, and world without end! Who would not esteem it a hideous torment if he were to be burned alive a hundred times, and his torment was to last every time for the space of an hour? With what compassionate eyes would all the world [except the saints in glory] look upon such a miserable wretch! Nevertheless, without all doubt any of the damned in hell would receive this as a great happiness to end his torments with these hundred times burning; for what comparison is there betwixt a hundred hours burning, with some space of time betwixt every hour, and to burn a hundred years of continual torment?
“And what comparison will there be betwixt burning a hundred years’ space and to be burning without interruption as long as God is God?” So the Larger Catechism teaches that “the punishments of sin in the world to come are everlasting separation from the comfortable presence of God, and most grievous torments, in soul and body, without intermission, in hell-fire forever.” The pious Christopher Love says: “Lastly, the eternity of all this, the consideration of the eternity of these torments makes them the most grievous. Beloved, when a man lies upon a sick-bed, here is his comfort; though he hath grievous pain, is sadly afflicted, and cannot rest, night nor day, yet he hath hopes it will not last long: either I shall be killed or cured, and so my pain ended. But this consideration cannot comfort in hell; thou art there in pain, and thou shalt be there forever. And here saith Mr. Bolton: This word ever should break the hard heart of the sinner; thy pains are many, thy pains are universal, thy pains are extreme, and they shall be everlasting and eternal, and eternity makes all miserable.” President Edwards, having spoken of the fire of hell as a devouring fire, a furnace of fire, and illustrated the fierceness of it by a house all on fire, where “the heat in a particular place, besides the heat which proceeds out of the fuel in that place, is increased by the additional heat of the fire all around it,” says: “Hence we can conceive something of what fierceness that fire will be, when the Visible world shall be turned into one great furnace. . . .
“The whole world will probably be converted into a great lake or liquid globe of fire, a vast ocean of fire, in which the wicked shall be overwhelmed. It will be an ocean of fire, which will always be in a tempest, in which the wicked shall be tossed to and fro, having no rest, day nor night, vast waves or billows of fire continually rolling over their heads. But all this will be only an image of that dreadful fire of the wrath of God, which the wicked shall at the same time suffer in their souls. We read of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. . . Oh, what is that! the fierceness and rage or fury of Omnipotence! of a being of infinite strength! What an idea doth that give of the state of those worms that suffer the fierceness and wrath of such an Almighty Being!” But the damned will be “sensible that this devouring fire will be everlasting. If a man were brought to the mouth of a great furnace, to be cast into the midst of it, if at the same time he knew he should suffer but one minute, yet that minute would be so terrible to him that fearfulness would surprise and astonish him.
“How much more, if he were to be cast into a fire much fiercer; the fire in which wicked men are hereafter to be tormented! And if the thought of suffering this devouring fire for one minute would be enough to fill one with such surprising fearfulness, what will seize them when they know that they are to bear it, not for one minute, nor for one day, nor for one year, nor for one age, nor for a hundred ages, nor for a million of ages, one after another, but forever and ever, without any end, and never, never be delivered? They shall know that the fire itself shall be everlasting fire. . . . And they shall know that their torment in that fire never will have an end. They shall know that they shall forever be full of quick sense within and without; their heads, their eyes, their tongues, their hands, their feet, their loins, and their vitals, shall forever be full of glowing, melting fire, fierce enough to melt the very rocks and elements; and also that they shall eternally be full of the most quick and lively sense to feel the torment.
“They shall know that they shall never cease restlessly to plunge and roll in that mighty ocean of fire. They shall know that those billows of fire, which are greater than the greatest mountains, will never cease to roll over them, following one another forever and ever. At the same time they will have a more lively sense of eternity than we can have here.”
Father Furniss indulges a very odd, unorthodox conceit, and affirms that “there is one thing which would change hell into heaven.” He thinks that were an angel of God to go to the gates of hell and tell the damned that after burning there “almost countless millions of years,” a day would come when the pains of hell would cease, and they would be delivered, it would work an instant reformation in all its inhabitants. “If such a message came,” he says, “hell would no longer be hell. Hell would no longer be a house of blasphemy, but a house of prayer and thanksgiving and joy.” In other words, hell would be changed into purgatory, the damned be converted into saints, unfortunately conditioned for the time, and instead of rage and blasphemies, that world of woe would become the “house of prayer and thanksgiving.” Thus goodness would gain a victory that wrath cannot attain, and even the worst of men come to love God because convinced that he first loved them. The experiment seems worth trying.