I HAVE thus exhibited somewhat at length, and in the very words of its friends and advocates, the formidable doctrine of endless punishment. The reader has seen, without disguise or modification, what it is, and how through many centuries it has been preached and believed. And the terrible conclusions to which this exposition brings us are:—
1. That the great majority of the human race will finally be damned. This is not only the logical inference from avowed orthodox principles, but has till recently been the acknowledged belief of the orthodox church in all its branches for the last twelve or fifteen centuries, and is undoubtedly the belief of far the greater part of it to-day.
2. That this damnation involves every form of possible torment, whether of body or mind, and that in the extremest degree. All orthodox writers unite, as we have seen, in pronouncing the torments of hell as beyond all the powers of human language to express, or thought to conceive. As President Edwards says, “We have reason to suppose that after we have said our utmost and thought our utmost, all that we have said and thought is but a faint shadow of the reality.” “This torment,” says Jeremy Taylor, “is so great that it cannot be expressed, since it comprises as many torments as the body of man hath joints, sinews, arteries, etc., and especially being caused by that penetrating and real fire of which this temporal fire is but a painted fire in respect of that of hell.” Augustine declares hell to be full of “unspeakable evils which can neither be expressed nor conceived.”
3. That these various torments, unspeakable and inconceivable in severity as they are, are to continue without intermission or mitigation through all eternity. As Minucius Felix expressed it, to these torments of hell “there is neither measure nor end.” As long as God exists, so long are the damned to remain under his infinite wrath and suffer all the tortures it is possible for them to endure or God to inflict. On this point the whole orthodox church, Catholic and Protestant, is, with rare exceptions, fixed and immovable.
4. The destiny of every human soul is irrevocably determined by its condition at the moment of death in regard to repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ; and this without reference to its age, its outward condition, or its past opportunities for securing salvation. If to this there is any exception, it pertains only to “elect infants dying in infancy,” or other elect persons, who live beyond the reach of the preached word, whom the Calvinist graciously permits to be regenerated by the Holy Spirit, “who worketh when and where and how he pleaseth.” To allow that ignorant souls may be enlightened and sinful souls converted and saved beyond the present life, would require a reconstruction of the whole scheme of their religion, and presently work a revolution in their theology.
5. It is unnecessary to add that a punishment which contemplates no termination cannot be designed to reform the punished, or accomplish, so far as any mortal can see or rationally conjecture, any benevolent purpose whatever; and it therefore becomes a problem for orthodoxy to solve, what object worthy of the divine government such an immeasurable mass of human suffering is to subserve, and how this suffering can at all consist with either the goodness or justice of God.
That the doctrine here presented, whose portrait I have faithfully sketched, is not beautiful or attractive, no intelligent Christian of this generation pretends. On the contrary, it is, and is everywhere coming to be acknowledged to be, a simple, unmitigated, nameless horror, which no language can express, no thought can reach. And it is not unworthy of remark that it loses nothing of its awful and revolting character under careful study and the most thoughtful contemplation. So far from this, it only becomes the more abhorrent and astounding the more seriously it is considered and the better it is understood. As Niagara grows in grandeur and majesty upon the beholder the more he gazes upon it and takes in the awful proportions of the scene, so the doctrine before us grows in its terribleness and atrocity the more it is properly studied and its dreadful nature recognized. No one can think of it as he ought without seeing and feeling that in every aspect it is most extraordinary and amazing.
Indeed, it stands infinitely apart from all the other doctrines of religion, whether natural or revealed, and is emphatically sui generis. It has no analogue in the universe. Nothing can equal it; there is nothing that resembles it. In the whole realm of human thought it stands alone and unapproachable in its solitary ugliness, its sublime horror.
Now, how is such a tremendous doctrine to be proved? And till it is proved, no one certainly should either ask his neighbor to believe it, or believe it himself. It is clearly not a matter to be taken for granted. It is too awful, too shocking, for that. To accept it without proof, or upon inadequate reasons, would be an offence against one’s own soul, and still more against one’s Maker, and no proof should be admissible upon a doctrine so exceptional and astounding that is not direct and clear, conclusive and irrefragable. To convince me of confessedly the worst thing that can possibly occur in relation to any human soul, I demand the fullest and most positive evidence. Can such evidence be produced?
Next to the doctrine itself, the most amazing thing, it seems to me, is the ease, the flippancy, the nonchalance with which grave divines, men of learning and logic, men of human sympathies and Christian charity, profess to prove it to their own satisfaction, and, as they would have us think, to the rational conviction of all others. Now, in the first place, have these good men considered the subject in such a manner as to understand and appreciate what it is they are attempting to prove? Have they formed any conception, I might almost say the faintest, of what the doctrine of endless punishment is in itself, and the various implications it necessarily carries along with it? From the manner in which the subject is generally treated, it is obvious that, how much soever they may talk and argue upon it, they have really thought and felt very little. They give no evidence of entertaining any just notions of the gravity and solemnity of the thing to be proved. To this remark President Dwight is a rare exception.
He seems to have confronted the doctrine, and for a moment to have seen it face to face. “The subject,” says he, and I am glad to repeat his words, “is immeasurably awful, and beyond all others affecting. Few persons can behold it in near vision with a steady eye. . . . The destiny of one immortal mind is an object whose importance no finite thought can conceive, no numbers estimate.” What, then, shall we say when the question is not about the destiny of one human soul, but about the endless torment of countless millions of such souls, nay, the great majority of the human race? Cannot men see, and must they not confess, that the subject is too solemn and too awful to be handled lightly? Can they not see that it assumes proportions that quite take it out of all ordinary fields of even grave inquiry, and invest it with an importance that transcends all our conceptions and makes it simply infinite?
President Dwight seems to have been shocked by the manner in which orthodox divines treat this terrible subject, and calls attention and administers reproof to the two classes into which they are naturally divided. One class, we know, regard the doctrine as plain as the multiplication-table, and think it commends itself to the reason and conscience of mankind as naturally as does the duty of speaking the truth, or loving one’s family and friends. This was not precisely the view he took of it. On the contrary, he confessed that it was “undoubtedly perplexing,” and declared that there is “a prejudice against it,—the strongest, perhaps, cherished by the human mind. . . . There are, I know, persons,” he added, “who speak concerning it with an air of cool self-complacency, as being, in their view, easy of investigation and free from embarrassment. I am inclined, perhaps uncharitably, to give them little credit for candor, clearness of intellect, or soundness of character, and greatly doubt whether the doctrine has been investigated by them either to such an extent or with such a spirit as might furnish them with just views of its nature.”
That this severe censure was deserved any one may satisfy himself, who will take the trouble to read the published sermons and other writings of his time in maintenance of endless punishment, Those gentlemen who think the doctrine so easy and defensible, are here told that they have studied it neither sufficiently nor in such a temper as to enable them to understand and appreciate it. The subject is too grave for them to grasp. There is, in the second place, another class, who, without apprehending the matter better than their neighbors, go about its defence or advocacy in a different way. They are our thunderers. “They discourse of it,” says President Dwight, “in the phraseology, the style, and the utterance belonging to vehement eloquence, such as we often find attached to a strain of powerful invective or vigorous controversy.”
With this kind of preaching the country is only too familiar. President Dwight thinks it unfortunate, as it is apt to “terminate in awakening mere horror concerning the subject, and mere disgust at the preacher.” But it is a question whether this style of preaching does not best befit the subject. The doctrine of endless torments is not amiable, let it be preached as it may; and it naturally expresses itself in a manner that accords with its own spirit.
There is one fact, quite worthy of remark, which can hardly have escaped the observation of any one familiar with religious affairs. I allude to the delightful sense of personal security manifested by almost every preacher of the doctrine under consideration. They seem annoyed by no misgivings about their own salvation; and, this being satisfactorily adjusted, they have nothing to do but preach it the more vigorously to others. In all the passages which flame with descriptions of hell and its torments in the pages of President Edwards, I do not recall a single word that would suggest a suspicion on his part of having any personal interest in the matter, or being in any way exposed to the slightest of these miseries. It was his to proclaim the approaching “deluge of wrath” while he was here, and to witness it with satisfaction and joy hereafter. This comfortable state of things was admirably fitted to encourage that “cool self-complacency” of which President Dwight speaks, and to relieve the whole subject of several rather impressive difficulties.
In the view of President Dwight the case wore a very different aspect. He did not regard himself, or other preachers, as exempted from the dangers that threaten the race. “Were such preachers to remember,” says he, “that at this very time they may be pronouncing the final doom of their own parents, brothers, sisters, wives, children, and even of themselves, I cannot but believe that their mode of address would be essentially changed, would lose all its violence and exaggeration, and would become deeply humble, solemn, and affectionate.” Indeed, he does not hesitate to say that if the preacher’s “heart is not made of stone, he cannot contemplate the subject, as it respects his fellow-men, without overwhelming amazement.”
It must occur to every one that preaching the doctrine of hell-torments, under the conditions here prescribed by President Dwight, must be as novel an experience to the preachers as it would be to the world. Instead of the cool self-complacency so generally exhibited, the preacher would confess himself overwhelmed with amazement at the very thought of the final damnation of any single human soul. Then he would remember that, in these burning words he is uttering, he may be pronouncing the final doom of those nearest and dearest to his heart. And, as if this were not enough to tone down his spirit, he must at last know that what he is saying, these arguments he alleges with so much confidence and zeal, are to affect himself, and perhaps evince his own final destruction as well as that of others.
Now, I need not say that preaching this terrible doctrine, under such circumstances as these, would not only demand a change in the popular mode of address, but would inevitably lead to a reconsideration of the whole subject. It seems very easy to preach endless punishment to the world at large, but when it comes to our own household and our own souls, it must be a very different thing; and if I do not mistake, this is what our orthodox friends need more than almost anything else to understand and feel. It would bring the doctrine home to them as they seldom permit it to be brought, and give it a profound personal interest. One hour’s serious contemplation of endless torments, as it were face to face, would doubtless give them an impression of it such as they never experienced before, and would suggest a host of questions which they have never suffered to enter their minds.
They would see that this doctrine, popular as it is, and important as it is deemed, is, after all, the most improbable doctrine in the world; that it is the very last hypothesis any man in his senses ought to admit, since nothing worse is possible than what it teaches; and they would naturally be led to inquire whether God, whose hand they have seen in his works, and who has revealed himself in his Word, can be such a Being as this awful doctrine represents him, and whether human existence—his benevolent gift—can be hedged round by such infinite hazards.
And this leads to a practical reflection which I cannot allow myself to pass unnoticed. It has been well said by the late Archdeacon Hardwick that “the moral force and grandeur of religion are, in every case, to be determined by the worthiness of their ideas of God, his nature and attributes. It has been frequently remarked that as man is, so is the divinity he worships; but the converse is more rigorously correct,—What God is, such his worshipper becomes.” All history is full of illustrations of this observation. Describe the salient features, the distinctive characteristics, of the God or gods of any people, and, except in strangely anomalous cases, it is not a difficult task to say what the people themselves will be.
What, then, ought to be the moral influence and effect of acknowledging and worshipping such a God as the doctrine of endless punishment, as now portrayed, makes the Almighty,—a God of infinite wrath, who punishes the sins of this brief life with torments which have neither measure nor end; whose anger never cools; whom no repentance, no prayers, no tears, can placate; whose vengeance no lapse of time, no amount of suffering, can appease; who holds the objects of his displeasure in existence only to torture them, and whom he can never torture enough; and who finds a large part of his “glory” in these exhibitions of his power, in making wretched, through all eternity, a portion of his intelligent creation? If the gods of the pagan world impressed their image upon the character of their worshippers, might we not expect to see in Christendom some instances of a like influence from the “God of vengeance”? And perhaps a careful student of history might trace something of this influence in the unholy wars, in the bitter hatreds, the relentless persecutions, the horrors of the Inquisition, and often in the sternness, coldness, and indifference of private life.
Fortunately, the evil, great as it has been, has been mitigated in some instances in which the native impulses of the human heart have been better and more potent than these lessons of religion; and in other cases it has been counteracted by the prevailing spirit of love which permeates the New Testament, and which no system of theology, however false and cruel, can entirely overcome; and, finally, may we not thank God that in innumerable instances the very badness of the doctrine in question, the sheer diabolism of its temper and purpose, has shocked reverent minds, and thus counter worked itself? The Rev. Dr. Milner, formerly at the head of Queens College, Cambridge, said: “Now, whatever we may pretend, there are few who thoroughly believe God’s threatenings of eternal punishment to the wicked. It is not that men do positively deny this to be so; but they put off the thought, they start difficulties respecting it, they are prejudiced and selfish in forming their judgments, they half believe and half reject the awful denunciations. . . .
“In effect, the belief of the loss of the soul in hell is usually a motive that has laid very slight hold of the mind, and by consequence very little affects the practice.” This is the testimony of a professedly earnest believer in the doctrine of endless torments, and many others bear unwilling and melancholy witness to the same wide-spread scepticism. But Dr. Milner’s explanation of the fact is wholly unsatisfactory. Men do not need to “start difficulties” about it, for more difficulties start of themselves than they can solve; nor is it necessary that men should be “prejudiced and selfish” in forming their judgments upon it: the enormity of the doctrine; its utter inconsistency with the character of God, as made known in creation and providence, and revealed in the Scriptures; and the malignant influence it cannot fail to exert, as far as it has any influence at all, are more potent against it than any prejudice, or even selfishness, that the mind of man can summon.
In the eye of reason and conscience the doctrine is incredible; it is only by appealing to one’s fears that he can be brought to believe it; and observation shows that then he presently excuses himself from all interest in it, and henceforth only believes it for his neighbors. As the learned Dr. Lightfoot says of the Jews, “that all those curses and dreadful judgments which God in his Holy Writ threatens against wicked men, they post off wholly from themselves and their nation, devolving all upon the Gentiles.” It is one of the ill-features of the doctrine of endless punishment that few believe it for themselves, while many accept it quite too readily for others.
And thus I bring the task I proposed to a close. The reader will have observed that it did not enter into my design to refute the doctrine so much as to exhibit it, and enable him to see what it is and what it implies. As I took occasion to say in the earlier part of the work, some doctrines are best refuted by being fairly stated; and if this is true in any case, it is pre-eminently so with the doctrine under consideration, the character of which is confessedly so bad that no language can express it. With the arguments by which this doctrine is supposed to be maintained, I have had little or nothing to do, though a work of great interest and value might easily be prepared, whose object should be to examine the various proofs adduced in its support from the domains of reason, history, and Scripture.
Trusting that this volume may lead the candid reader to a more earnest consideration of the subject to which it is devoted, and so serve the interests of truth, promote the welfare of mankind, and contribute to the glory of God, I cheerfully submit it to the hands of my fellow-men and to the Divine providence.