THAT endless punishment, as it has now been described, horrible beyond conception as it is, is strictly just, must of necessity be maintained by all who, believe in its existence.
No one, professing faith in a God of moral perfections, can admit that any of his acts are unjust, and, least of all, that which determines the eternal destiny of his creatures. Many who have great difficulty in reconciling such punishment with their conceptions of the divine goodness and mercy still insist that it is clearly in harmony with perfect justice. But the manner in which it is generally attempted to show this carries with it evidence of the little serious thought the subject has received, and the very slight apprehension men have of the problem with which they are dealing. From the numerous quotations I have made from the writings of President Edwards, it might be confidently expected that he, at least, must have entertained most impressive notions of endless punishment, and deeply felt what a terrible thing, what a nameless horror, it is.
Yet the facile, not to say superficial and utterly fallacious, way in which he attempts to prove its justice, clearly shows how slight a hold after all it must have taken of a mind like his to permit him to justify it on grounds so wholly assumptive and untenable. Had he been vindicating the shooting of a mad dog, he could hardly have done it in a more summary way than he employed to prove the justice of the punishment— inconceivable in its severity, and endless in its duration—of countless millions of beings made originally in the image of God!
Let us consider for a moment the prominent facts of the problem before us. We all professedly believe in God and in his infinite wisdom, goodness, and power, as well as his justice, mercy, and love. We gladly acknowledge him as our Creator, and ought to rejoice in his moral government over us. It is wise and beneficent. Having made man in his own image, a moral being, endowed with reason and the power of self-determination, he placed him under a moral law, or code of laws, wisely designed to promote his welfare and secure his happiness. But since man is a moral being, and therefore free, he is at liberty to choose whether he will obey the law his Creator has given him, and enjoy the rewards that follow obedience, or disobey and suffer the just punishment that is attached to transgression. Now, it is a fact of universal experience, observation, and history, that men disobey, and thereby become sinners, and hence proper subjects of God’s righteous retributions. Not that men sin always, and in everything, as some pretend, but all are more or less guilty of transgressing the divine laws, so that, as the Apostle says, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”
Now, orthodoxy assumes and insists that any and every dereliction from the path of duty, the slightest violation of the law of God, is “an infinite evil,” and deserves an endless punishment. Thus President Edwards declares that “every sin deserves eternal death for its punishment;” and in another place says that “any sin deserves death and damnation, which, in the least degree of it, is the total destruction of the creature.” So the Westminster Divines affirm that “there is no sin so small but it deserves damnation;” and we know what these terms mean in the orthodox vocabulary. It is exclusion “from the comfortable presence of God,” and with that, as we have seen, exclusion from all good, and the suffering of what Dr. Watts calls “exquisite pain,” the least degree, the mildest form of which is, as President Edwards says, “the total destruction of the creature.”
In imperfect human governments crimes are not only recognized as having a great variety of shades, but efforts are made to proportion the penalty to the various degrees of guilt they imply. All this is done very imperfectly, I need not say, here on earth, but the principles involved are clearly recognized, and civilized governments endeavor to apply them, as far as possible, in practice. In the divine government, as orthodoxy interprets it, all sins, in one aspect, are alike; that is, they all deserve an endless punishment. They all involve an endless banishment from God, and a condition that forever forbids any return, any possible improvement of temper or purpose. In human governments all penalties are not absolutely destructive to the transgressor, but some are designed to reform him. In the divine government, however, this can never be the case, because the first sin of which one is guilty seals his endless damnation. It is as if, in teaching a child to write, the master should cut off the fingers of all who did not at once write perfectly.
It would be a very summary way of punishing. In the same manner, if God’s-children do not obey him perfectly, he sends them to hell forever, which certainly proves decisive. It would seem more reasonable that a good and holy Being, loving holiness, would rather correct and improve his intelligent creatures than to consign them to a state where all moral improvement is impossible, and suffering is at once severe, unintermitted, without object, and without end. But orthodoxy does not regard the matter in this light. This state of endless sin and suffering has, in its theory, the most important uses. It adds to the happiness of the saints, it glorifies God, and it satisfies justice. The sinner deserves it, and unless it is inflicted, at least in some cases, the character and administration of God would be dishonored forever.
It is just, we are told. Let us see how this is shown. And to do this I shall first present in full the argument of President Edwards: “I am to show that it is not contrary to the divine perfections. . . . I shall briefly show that it is not inconsistent with the justice of God to inflict an eternal punishment. To evince this, I shall use only one argument, viz., that sin is heinous enough to deserve such a punishment, and such a punishment is no more than proportionable to the evil or demerit of sin. If the evil of sin be infinite, as the punishment is, then it is manifest that the punishment is no more than proportionable to the sin punished, and is no more than sin deserves. And if the obligation to love, honor, and obey God be infinite, then sin, which is the violation of this obligation, is a violation of infinite obligation, and so is an infinite evil.
“Again, if God be infinitely worthy of love, honor, and obedience, then our obligation to love, honor, and obey him is infinitely great. So that God, being infinitely glorious, or infinitely worthy of our love, honor, and obedience, our obligation to love, honor, and obey him, and so to avoid all sin, is infinitely great. Again, our obligation to love, honor, and obey God being infinitely great, sin is the violation of infinite obligation, and so is an infinite evil. Once more, sin being an infinite evil, deserves an infinite punishment, an infinite punishment is no more than it deserves. Therefore such a punishment is just; which was the thing to be proved. There is no evading the force of this reasoning but by denying that God, the sovereign of the universe, is infinitely glorious; which I presume none of my hearers will venture to do.”
This mode of reasoning is much older than President Edwards, though I do not know that it was ever drawn out in the form of a mathematical demonstration before, and the several parts knit together with such apparent skill and perfection. There is no doubt that he himself regarded the argument as absolutely unanswerable; and it has probably carried conviction to thousands and thousands of ingenuous minds, and, in a manner, reconciled them to a doctrine against which their whole better nature instinctively rebelled. Then the reputation of President Edwards as a thinker and a prince among metaphysicians has given additional weight to this reasoning, and led many to accept it under the supposition that, on a point of this importance, he could hardly fall into error. Yet, when considered for a moment, the whole argument is seen to be a house built upon sand,—a piece of logical filigree work, not worth the paper on which it was written,—a fallacy, indeed, so egregious that the wonder is how such a mind as Edwards’s could have been amused by it, and much more how he could have sent it forth into the world as affording a rational and stable ground for the most horrible dogma ever associated with any religion, human or divine.
In this famous argument it will be observed that we have nothing but a series of infinites. God is infinite, and infinitely glorious, and infinitely worthy of love, honor, and obedience; and hence the obligation to love, honor, and obey him is infinitely great; and the violation of this infinite obligation is, therefore, infinite, and an infinite evil, or, in other words, an infinite sin; and an infinite sin deserves an infinite punishment; an infinite punishment is only proportionate to the sin or the offence punished. Now, were it a fact that man also is infinite, able to comprehend infinity, to recognize the infinite gloriousness of God, and to feel the infinite obligation to love and obey him; in a word, were he a God instead of a man, the argument might have been valid, if one infinite being could be supposed dependent upon another, and under obligation to love and serve him. But man is very clearly not a God of infinite capacities and powers, but a mere creature, of a finite nature, who talks about infinity, but cannot comprehend it, and whose obligations cannot transcend the limits God has assigned him.
As a finite being, all his acts, duties, obligations, responsibilities, are necessarily finite; and to talk as President Edwards does of his being under infinite obligations, in the strict sense of the term, is not merely nonsense, but an absurdity. It is a thing that is a self-contradiction, and cannot be. The whole argument, therefore, rests on a gross assumption, an assumption so enormous that it is a marvel how any thoughtful man could ever be guilty of making it. Yet, as far as I have observed, it runs through all of President Edwards’s works. He never speaks of sin otherwise than as infinite, and is always guilty of drawing its infinity, not from the nature of the sinner, but from that of God, against whose law the sin is committed. “Why should not that majesty, which thou hast despised,” he asks, “be manifested in the greatness of thy punishment?. . . Thou hast despised the mighty power of God; thou hast not been afraid of it. Now, why is it not fit that God should show the greatness of his power in thy ruin?. . .
“Think it not strange that God should deal so severely with thee, or that the wrath which thou shalt suffer should be so great. For great as it is, it is no greater than that love of God which thou hast despised.” In another place he says: “If there be any evil or faultiness in sin against God, there is certainly infinite evil; for if it be any fault at all, it has an infinite aggravation, viz., that it is against an infinite object. If it be ever so small upon other accounts, yet, if it be anything, it has one infinite dimension; and so is an infinite evil, which may be illustrated by this: if we suppose a thing to have infinite length, but no breadth and thickness (a mere mathematical line), it is nothing; but if it have any breadth; and thickness, though never so small, and infinite length, the quantity of it is infinite; it exceeds the quantity of any thing, however broad, thick, and long, wherein these dimensions are all finite.”
It is in this way President Edwards always speaks on this subject. Sin is infinite, and deserves an infinite punishment, not because man is infinite, but because God is so. In like manner, though with evident hesitancy and some qualification, Dr. Watts says: “There is a sort of infinite evil in sin, arising from the consideration of the person against whom it is committed, that is, the great and blessed God. . . . All sin being an offence against God, an infinite object, and a violation of his law, is a dishonor of infinite Majesty, an affront of the divine authority, and therefore its aggravations arise in that proportion to a sort of infinity, and require an equal punishment. . . . When divine justice pronounces a sentence against the sinner equal to the demerit of sin, it must be infinite, that is, eternal; and the prisoner shall never be released from the prison and the punishment till he has paid the uttermost farthing, and till he has made satisfaction to God equal to his demands and the demerit of his offence.”
So the learned Pareus reasons. “It belongs to justice,” he says, “to maintain the proportion between the offence and the punishment. But a sin committed against God is an infinite sin.
God is an infinite being, and an infinite punishment is, therefore, due to a sin committed against an infinite God. Justly, therefore, does he threaten the sinner with temporal and eternal death.”
“So foul and horrid a thing is mortal sin, in its own nature,” says Jeremy Taylor, “that though it passed only in thought, and none knew it but God and he who committed it, and which endured no longer than an instant, yet it deserves the torments of hell for all eternity; for by how much greater is the majesty of God, which is despised, by so much greater is the injury offered him; and therefore, as the majesty of God, which is despised by sin, is infinite, so the despite of it must contain, in itself, a certain kind of infinity.”
Thus, if the advocates of endless punishment are permitted to invent premises for their argument to suit their fancy, and to assume as facts whatever they think necessary to their purpose, there should be no great difficulty in demonstrating the absolute justice of any possible degree or duration of hell-torments. Let them take for granted that sin is infinite, and must it not appear reasonable that the punishment should be so? This point, however, which they so readily assume, is the very thing to be proved. Is sin infinite? Has it any element of infinity in it? And, if so, whence is it derived? To say that it is infinite because it is a violation of divine law amounts to nothing; for in that case obedience to divine law should be infinite, which none will allow. Then the absurdity of the whole argument may be shown in the following simple manner.
Let us suppose a human being to commit one sin only, and that the least conceivable; let us further suppose that the punishment is nicely adjusted to the sin, and is therefore the least known in “the world of woe,” but endless in its duration. Now, it is easily shown that this punishment, though the mildest, must in the ages of eternity amount to more suffering than has been endured by the whole human race, in all its individual members, since its creation! Nay, this is but the beginning of its punishment. For as the ages go on, though it be not at all increased, as some have dreamed it will be, it must keep adding more and more to the dread amount already suffered; and the time will by and by come when it will have endured more misery than the whole human race will have endured on earth, should it continue for a million or ten millions of years in the future! Now, will any man, in his senses, pretend to say that such an amount of suffering, and, I must add, hopeless suffering, is the just punishment of the least sin mortal ever committed? What, then, would be an adequate punishment for the greatest sin?
But the least punishment in hell, if we may believe the advocates of its torments, is something fearful in degree as well as endless in duration. We have already seen some descriptions of its variety of pains and their terrible severity. “If one were cast into some deep dungeon,” says Jeremy Taylor, “without clothes, exposed to the inclemency of the cold and moisture of the place, where he should not see the light of heaven; should have nothing to feed on, but once a day some little piece of hard barley-bread; and that he were to continue there six years without speaking or seeing of anybody; and not to sleep on other bed but the cold ground; what a misery were this! One week of that habitation would appear longer than a hundred years. Yet compare this with what shall be in the banishment and prison of hell, and you shall find the miserable life of that man to be a happiness; there, in all his troubles, he should not meet any one to scoff at his misfortunes, none to torment and whip him; but in hell he shall find both; the devils shall not cease to deride, whip, and cruelly torment him: there should be no horrid sights, no fearful noises of howlings, groanings, and lamentations; in hell the eyes and ears of the damned shall never be free from such affrights: there should be no flames of fire to scorch him; in hell they shall burn into his bowels: there he might move and walk; in hell not stir a foot: there he may breathe the air without stink; in hell he shall suck in nothing but flames, stink, and sulphur: there he might hope for coming forth; in hell there is no redemption: there that little piece of hard bread would seem every day a dainty; but in hell, in millions of years, his eyes shall not behold a crumb of bread nor a drop of water, but shall eternally rage with hunger and a burning thirst: this is to be the calamity of that land of darkness.”
One great factor of the torments of hell, upon which all insist with frequency and eloquence, is fire; and this is described as so much more penetrating and terrible than any with which we are acquainted, that the fiercest earthly fire, a blazing furnace, would seem a delight, or, as Father Müller expresses it, “a pleasure-garden,” in comparison. The reader will not forget the declaration of Jeremy Taylor, before quoted, that “such are the torments and miseries of hell, that if all the trees in the world were put in one heap and set on fire, I would rather burn there till the day of judgment than suffer only for the space of one hour that fire of hell.” And this is but a single example of the intensity of all hell-torments. Everything there is represented on a similar scale of severity. The following is the declaration of the good Jesuit Drexelius, embracing the whole round of the punishments of the future world.
“If,” says he, “all the severest and most barbarous tortures which were ever invented by the tyrants of the earth, who, by anxious thoughts and hellish contrivances, improved and refined the art of cruelty, and brought it to perfection; if these, I say, were to be heaped upon the head of one man, and he were to endure them for a hundred years, yet they would not come near the pains of the damned even for one day!”
I do not know that I have ever met so bold and, at the same time, so sweeping a statement as this in any other writer, but something like it is implied by all writers on this subject. It is involved in the very spirit of the doctrine, and is thought to be necessary to make it effective to the purpose in hand. Men are to be terrified from sin, and frightened into religion and heaven; and the more dreadful the punishments before them, so much the more efficient the doctrine becomes. But this statement of Drexelius—and the same may be said of the statements of President Edwards, Jeremy Taylor, Dr. Watts, and the whole rank and file of the advocates of endless punishment—carries an implication that seems to me not simply profane, but would be blasphemous if those who utter it knew or had any sense of what they are saying; for what is it but saying that God is about to act as much worse than all the tyrants of the world have ever acted, as he is greater and more potent than they. They have, by anxious thoughts and hellish contrivances, improved and refined the art of cruelty, and brought it to such perfection as it is capable of here on earth and in the hands of such mortals as they; but God will outdo them all!
In the way of cruelty, of inflicted torments, of all forms of suffering, of all imaginable horrors; hell is to be the masterwork of the Almighty. Clothe the Devil with omnipotence, give him all the knowledge and wisdom of God,—if wisdom can be used to such devilish purposes,—and what could he do worse than these saints, so anxious to honor their Creator, habitually ascribe to their heavenly Father? Here in this world, even the wicked are generally tender of the reputation of their parents, and look at their character through the eyes of filial affection, and speak of them in tones to reflect what honor they can on their life and memory. But these good people, who claim to be the children of God and his especial favorites, seem to find high satisfaction in representing him as the most cruel, the most unrelenting being in the universe, who finds joy and gains glory in tormenting his sinful creatures through all eternity; and his saints share in his joy and triumph.
But this argument for the justice of endless punishment from the infinity of sin has not been uniformly satisfactory. Dr. Dwight, while maintaining the eternity of punishment, and vindicating its justice on other grounds, speaks of this argument of President Edwards and others in the following manner: “It is not my design to deny this doctrine, nor to scrutinize the arguments by which it is usually supported. It is, however, but just to observe that neither the doctrine nor the arguments have appeared so satisfactory to the minds of others as they seem to have done to those by whom they have been alleged. We know nothing of infinity, but the fact that certain things are infinite. The nature of infinity we do not comprehend at all, nor form a conception what the phraseology means. It hardly needs be observed that where we have no conceptions we can form no comparisons, and therefore can make no propositions the truth of which can be perceived by our minds. Concerning the fact that some things are infinite, we may, with sufficient care, argue to some extent successfully.
Concerning the nature of infinity, I discern no manner in which such minds as ours can argue at all. But in our discussions concerning infinity, we are prone, insensibly, to blend these two things together, and often are amused with words only, when we suppose ourselves to be employed about ideas. Hence have arisen the perplexity and the want of satisfaction which have attended inquiries concerning this subject. I shall, therefore, not insist on these arguments, nor on the conclusion to which they conduct us.”
It should need no elaborate proofs of reasoning to convince any fair mind that it is not possible for a finite being to perform any infinite action, or any action of infinite desert, good or bad; God only is equal to that. And while we rightly ascribe infinite attributes and perfections to him, I do not know that we have proof that he has ever exercised either infinite power or infinite goodness in their full extent. In his works of power can we say with confidence that he could not do more than he has done; and in his works of grace is it not possible that he might have transcended all the exhibitions of his love? In both fields of activity he has acted in accordance with his infinite wisdom and sovereign will.
We speak of God’s infinite justice; but is infinite justice anything but perfect justice everywhere manifested? Besides, it is the peculiarity of justice which many of the writers I have quoted above seem to have overlooked,—that it must be just. It can never go beyond the limit of right without losing its character, and becoming unjust. The Scriptures uniformly represent the divine justice as proportioning the punishment to the sin punished. It renders to men “according to their works;” “he that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong that he hath done.” “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
If punishment exceeds the measure of guilt, it at once takes on the character of revenge. It loses its venerable aspect, and becomes an object of universal detestation. Every one, except him who is indulging this malignant passion, feels how brutal and base it is. It is essentially an unreasoning, savage passion that proposes no end but its own gratification by the pain of another. And it is clear that, if properly analyzed, the doctrine of endless punishment, as described above, is finally reduced to revenge, and far the most striking and revolting instance of it the universe has ever seen or can see. If we concede to the sinner the worst aims and the worst actions for his whole life of a hundred years, however vast the mischief he may do to his fellow-men, and the dishonor he may reflect upon his Maker, it is still finite, and may be measured. Infinite it is not; infinite it cannot be. If now we assume the doctrine of endless punishment as it has been exhibited in the words of its advocates in the preceding pages, “God takes this sinner in hand,” to use the phraseology of President Edwards, and shows us what He can do.
If the sinner has done the worst he could toward God, God now does the worst he can toward the sinner! The sinner during his hundred years never tired of sinning, and God through eternity will never tire in punishing him. He can never punish him enough. He proposes no object but to punish, unless it is “to satisfy his justice,” which had better be called revenge, and even that will never be satisfied; for, however long and however severely he may punish him, there is still an eternity remaining in which to punish him more. The very notion of endless punishment precludes all notion of any good to be accomplished in the punished. God does not propose to teach him anything, to lead him to better thoughts, to bring him to repentance, or quicken him to spiritual improvement of any kind. He punishes only to make his victim suffer, and to show his power in thus making him suffer; and orthodoxy beholds in this exhibition of the divine power the glory of God, and in this bitter, unrelenting revenge that will yield to no expostulations, that will hear no prayers, that will show no mercy, an eternal occasion for thanksgiving and joyous praise!
There may be beauties in this doctrine, but my eye has not been trained to behold them; it may have inexpressible charms, but my heart has not been taught to feel them. To my poor reason, an endless hell in the universe of God would be an endless reproach to its Maker; “a world of woe,” for which no adequate cause can be assigned, filled with sentient beings, which either should not have been created or, as a less evil and dishonor than endless torment, should now be annihilated.