AFTER what has now been said, it is hardly necessary to add that it has been the prevailing opinion of the orthodox world that much the larger portion of the human race will be irretrievably lost. From such a theological system no other result could naturally be expected, and hence from the time of Augustine, at least, both the Roman and the Protestant Churches, of all sects and parties, have, till within a single lifetime, steadily maintained that many more would finally be lost than saved, and hell be far more populous than heaven. Thus Augustine tells us that multo plures (many more) are left under the vengeance of God than are made objects of his saving grace; and he accounts for such an unequal division of the human race by saying that it shows what all deserved, and so magnifies the divine favor in redeeming the smaller number. Even the Church itself he compares to a threshing-floor, in which “there is more chaff than wheat, more to be damned than saved.” By the Athanasian creed, so called,—though Athanasius never saw it,—we are taught that, “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith; which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
“And the Catholic faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;” and then follows a metaphysical juggle, which it may be easy for some to say they believe, but which no mortal ever understood, or of which he could form any conception. The Roman Church has always been rather distinguished for the narrowness of salvation, believing in the damnation of all the heathen, and confining all saving grace within its own pale, in accordance with its maxim, extra ecclesiam nulla salus; but while none can be saved who are outside of its communion, there are multitudes to be damned who are within it. Drexelius reports a story from Hieronymus Plautus, that “a certain woman hearing Bertoldus, a very eminent and powerful preacher, inveigh bitterly against a sin of which she knew herself guilty, fell down dead; but after a while, being brought to life again by the pious prayers of the congregation, she gave them an account of what she had seen in her trance, which was to this effect: I stood, she said, before God’s tribunal together with sixty thousand souls, who were summoned from all parts of the universe to appear before the Judge; and they were all sentenced to eternal death, three only excepted! “The learned Cornelius à Lapide has a large note upon this point, in which he argues that “the far greater part of mankind will be damned,” because the far greater part are “infidels, Turks, Saracens, and heretics.”
“After reciting a number of types, as he calls them, illustrating the smallness of the number to be saved, he says: “Finally, the multitude of the damned may be determined from the magnitude of hell, which is sixteen hundred stadia (Rev. 14:20), that is, two hundred Italian miles, and this in all directions, to wit, as hell is two hundred miles deep, so it is the same in length and breadth, which is a space capable of holding many thousand millions of the damned.” What would the honest Jesuit have thought had he heard some of our modern divines speak of hell, not as a prison of two hundred miles on a side, but as a “world of woe,”a universe of death?
Some of the Jewish Rabbins represented hell as so extensive that it would take a man three hundred years to pass through it; and even Milton described it as so wide that an angel’s eye could not comprehend it. Massillon has an eloquent sermon on the small number of the saved: “In glancing at the history of the just from age to age, you will observe that at all times the elect have been very few. The family of Noah was alone saved from the general flood; Abraham only was distinguished from the rest of the world, and became the depositary of the covenant; Joshua and Caleb only, out of six hundred thousand Hebrews, entered the land of promise; Job was the only just man in the land of Uz; Lot in Sodom; and the three Jewish children in Babylon. To such frightful images succeed the expressions of the prophets. . . .
The gospel adds new traits to the fearfulness of these images. I have spoken to you of two ways, one of which is straight and rough, the way of a very small number; the other broad and spacious, strewed with flowers, which is the common way, as it were, of all men. In a word, you will observe that through the Sacred Scriptures the multitude is always reprobate, and the elect compared with the rest of mankind make only a little flock, which almost escapes our notice.”
If we now turn from the Roman to the Protestant Church, we shall find the same general opinion prevalent upon this subject. Calvin drank so largely at the well of Augustine that one would expect to meet no essential difference here: we therefore hear him declaring it as a Scripture doctrine, that “the whole world does not belong to the Creator; only that grace delivers from the curse and wrath of God, and from eternal death, a few who would otherwise perish, but leaves the world in the destruction to which it has been destined;” again he speaks of “the rejection of all mankind, and the election of the small number of the faithful.” The excellent Rev. Christopher Love has a whole discourse, in which he discusses the question, “Whether shall most men be tormented in hell, yea or no?” and resolves it, as he says, “in the affirmative, that the most men and women that God hath made, it shall be their portion and misery to be tormented in hell forevermore.”
Indeed, after looking the field over, he concludes that “of all sorts and ranks of men, the fewest will be saved.” This pious man tells us that “God would show more mercy, if he saved but one man in the world, than he would show extreme justice in damning all the world. . . . And therefore for men to cavil against the mercies of a God, what is this but to be imperious with thy Maker?”
That President Edwards anticipated the salvation of relatively very few is obvious, not only from many particular expressions, but from the general tendency and drift of his theology. In a sermon, designed to show that Scripture warnings are best adapted to awaken and convert sinners, after saying that “if these means will not answer the end of awakening and leading sinners to repentance, no other will, neither the working of miracles, nor the hearing of God speak with an audible voice from heaven, nor anything else,” he exclaims: “Yet how few are there who are effectually wrought upon by the word of God! They are very thinly sown; there is but here and there one.” In another place he says: “There are but few, comparatively, who are ever converted. But few of those, who have been natural persons in time past, have been converted. Most of them have died unconverted. So it has been in all ages, and hence we have reason to think that but few of them who are unconverted now will ever be converted; that most of them will die unconverted, and go to hell.”
It was the opinion of the pious Matthew Henry that “they that are going to heaven are but few compared to those that are going to hell; a remnant, a little flock, like the grape-gleanings of the vintage, as the eight that were saved by water.” Dr. Adam Clarke says: “There are few who find the way to heaven; fewer yet who abide any time in it; fewer still who walk in it; and fewest of all who persevere unto the end.” This reduces the number of the finally saved to a minimum. “What they will not believe,” says Boston, “they will then see, that but few are saved.“
Dr. Watts obviously adopts the same view of the future prospects of our race. He proposes an objection to the doctrine of endless punishment, which he expresses in the following words: “When we remember that Jesus Christ himself hath assured us that but few shall be saved, and that the broad way is full of sinners running down to destruction and death; if we suppose these punishments to be endless, some will be ready to say, What! shall the greater part of God’s creatures be made miserable forever and ever? Is this consistent with the wisdom and goodness of the blessed God to form such an immense multitude of souls, dwelling in bodies, to make them forever miserable? What will a God of goodness have to prove his goodness to his creatures, if far the greater part of them are left in everlasting sorrows?”
In the same manner President Dwight, speaking of endless punishment, says very justly: “The subject is immeasurably awful, and beyond all others affecting.” In this President Dwight differs from many, who see little awful and nothing affecting in it. “Few persons,” he adds, “can behold it in near vision with a steady eye. The very preacher who teaches the doctrine to others cannot but know, unless certainly assured of his own salvation (a case undoubtedly very rare), that he may, at that very time, be alleging arguments which are to affect himself, and to evince his own final destruction as well as that of others. If his heart is not made of stone, he cannot contemplate the subject, as it respects his fellow-men, without overwhelming amazement. The destiny of one immortal mind is an object whose importance no finite thought can conceive, no numbers estimate. How vast must be this object when the number of such minds becomes so great as to reach the lowest limit to which the most enlarged charity will be compelled to extend it!
“How entirely overwhelmed must he be who contemplates it, when he remembers, and beholds a melancholy experience verify, the declaration of our Savior, that Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction,P> and many there be who go in thereat”! As I have suggested above, President Dwight is singular in the treatment of this subject. I do not know that he was a better man or a better Christian than President Edwards, but he seems to have been far more humane, with greater sensibility and a better appreciation of the matter before him. He did not hesitate to confess that the subject was “perplexing as well as distressing;” and he had little patience with those who spoke of it otherwise.
“With our eyes open upon the Bible and the world,” says Dr. Pond, “we cannot reasonably call in question the melancholy fact that great numbers of the human family have failed of salvation. So it was in the early history of mankind, when the earth became so filled with violence that almost its entire population was swept away in the deluge. So it was all along under the former dispensation, when the heathen world lay in gross wickedness, and when the frequent apostasies of God’s chosen people called down upon them desolating judgments. So it was in the days of the Savior, when with deep concern he exhorted the surrounding multitude, ‘Enter ye in at the strait gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth unto destruction, and many there be who go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it’ (Matt. 7:13).
“Such, in general, has been the state of the world from the times of the Savior to the present. Such it is now. None who believe that heaven is a holy place, and that without holiness no man shall see the Lord, can resist the conviction, in view of the present moral aspect of the world, that a vast majority of its adult inhabitants are not saved. We are looking, indeed, for better days.”
And these are but instances of the general current of orthodox thought upon the extent of salvation. Nothing is better settled, whether by positive declarations or the logical result of adopted principles, than the fact that relatively few of our race will be saved and the great majority lost. Fortunately, most of our orthodox neighbors entertain a comfortable hope, first, with respect to their own future, and then as to all whom they love and in whose welfare they are more deeply interested. It is an instance of those wonderful arrangements of divine Providence by which mortals are made happier than they deserve, and where some light breaks out of the darkest scene. Could they behold the reality “in near vision,” according to their own theory of the divine government, there would hardly be a family in Christendom that would not live in perpetual and most distressing fear. “We are all Universalists,” said an eminent orthodox lady, the wife of a Doctor of Divinity, “when we bury our friends!”