7.06. Hell
Hell History of the Doctrine The common opinion in the ancient church was that the future punishment of the impenitent wicked is endless. This was the catholic faith, as much so as belief in the Trinity. But as there were some church fathers who deviated from the creed of the church respecting the doctrine of the Trinity, so there were some who dissented from it in respect to that of eternal retribution. The deviation in eschatology, however, was far less extensive than in trinitarianism. The Semiarian and Arian heresies involved and troubled the ancient church much more seriously than did the universalism of that period. Long controversies ending in ecumenical councils and formulated statements were the consequence of the trinitarian errors, but no ecumenical council and no authoritative counterstatement was required to prevent the spread of the tenet of restoration. Having so little even seeming support in Scripture and reason, it gradually died out of the ancient church by its own intrinsic mortality. Neander (History 2.737), speaking of the second period in his arrangement (312-590), when there was more restorationism than in the first, says: The doctrine of eternal punishment continued, as in the preceding period, to be dominant in the creed of the church. Yet, in the oriental church, in which, with the exception of those subjects immediately connected with the doctrinal controversies, there was greater freedom and latitude of development, many respectable church teachers still stood forth, without injuring their reputation for orthodoxy, as advocates of the opposite doctrine, until the time when the Origenistic disputes caused the agreement with Origen in respect to this point also [namely, restorationism] to be considered as something decidedly heretical.
Hagenbach (History of Doctrine §78) says of the period down to a.d. 250: “Notions more or less gross prevailed concerning the punishment of the wicked, which most of the fathers regarded as eternal.” The principal deviation from the catholic doctrine of endless retribution was in the Alexandrine school, founded by Clement and Origen. The position taken by them was that “the punishments of the condemned are not eternal, but only remedial, the devil himself being capable of amelioration” (Gieseler 1.214). Thus early was the question raised whether the suffering to which Christ sentences the wicked is for the purpose of correcting and educating the transgressor or of vindicating and satisfying the law he has broken: a question which is the key to the whole controversy. For if the individual criminal is of greater consequence than the universal law, then the suffering must refer principally to him and his interests. But if the law is of more importance than any individual, then the suffering must refer principally to it.
Origen’s restorationism grew naturally out of his view of human liberty. He held that the liberty of indifference and the power of contrary choice, instead of simple self-determination, are the substance of freedom. These belong inalienably and forever to the nature of the finite will. They cannot be destroyed, even by apostasy and sin. Consequently, there is forever a possibility of a self-conversion of the will in either direction. Free will may fall into sin at any time; and free will may turn to God any time. This led to Origen’s theory of an endless alternation of falls and recoveries, of hells and heavens; so that practically he taught nothing but a hell. For, as Augustine (City of God 21.17) remarks, in his refutation of Origen, “heaven with the prospect of losing it is misery.”1[Note: 1. WS: “Qui existimabat posse se miserum esse, beatus non erit” [AG: he who considers that it is possible for him to be unhappy will not be happy]; Cicero, On Ends 2.27.] “Origen’s theory,” says Neander (1.656), “concerning the necessary mutability of will in created beings led him to infer that evil, ever germinating afresh, would still continue to render necessary new processes of purification and new worlds destined for the restoration of fallen beings, until all should again be brought back from manifoldness to unity, so that there was to be a constant interchange between fall and redemption, between unity and manifoldness.” (See supplement 7.6.1.)
Traces, more or less distinct, of a belief in the future restoration of the wicked are found in Didymus of Alexandria, the two Gregories, and Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, the leaders of the Antiochian school. All of these were more or less under the influence of Origen. Origen’s opinions, however, both in trinitarianism and eschatology, were strongly combated in his own time by the great body of contemporary fathers and subsequently by the church under the lead of Epiphanius, Jerome, and Augustine. The medieval church was virtually a unit in holding the doctrine of endless punishment. The Reformation churches, both Lutheran and Calvinistic, adopted the historical and catholic opinion.
Since the Reformation, universalism, restorationism, and annihilation have been asserted by some sects and many individuals. But these tenets have never been adopted by those ecclesiastical denominations which hold, in their integrity, the cardinal doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation, the apostasy and redemption, although they have exerted some influence within these denominations. None of the evangelical churches have introduced the doctrine of universalism, in any form of it, into their symbolical books. The denial of endless punishment is usually associated with the denial of those tenets which are logically and closely connected with it: such as original sin, vicarious atonement, and regeneration. Of these, vicarious atonement is the most incompatible of any with universal salvation, because the latter doctrine, as has been observed, implies that suffering for sin is remedial only, while the former implies that it is retributive. Suffering that is merely educational does not require a vicarious atonement in order to release from it. But suffering that is judicial and punitive can be released from the transgressor only by being inflicted upon a substitute. He, therefore, who denies personal penalty must, logically, deny vicarious penalty. If the sinner himself is not obliged by justice to suffer in order to satisfy the law he has violated, then, certainly, no one needs suffer for him for this purpose.
Within the nineteenth century, universalism has obtained a stronger hold upon German theology than upon any other and has considerably vitiated it. It grew up in connection with the rationalism and pantheism which have been more powerful in Germany than elsewhere. Rationalism has many of the characteristics of deism and is vehemently polemic toward evangelical truth. That it should combat the doctrines of sin and atonement is natural. Pantheism, on the other hand, has to some extent been mingled with evangelical elements. A class of antirationalistic theologians in Germany, whose opinions are influenced more or less by Spinoza and Schelling, accept the doctrines of the Trinity, incarnation, apostasy, and redemption and assert the ultimate salvation of all mankind. Schleiermacher, the founder of this school, whose system is a remarkable blending of the gospel and pantheism, has done much toward the spread of restorationism. The following are the objections which this theologian (Doctrine §163, app.) makes to eternal damnation:
1. Christ’s words in Matthew 25:46; Mark 9:44; and John 5:29 are figurative.
2. 1 Corinthians 15:25-26 teaches that all evil shall be overcome.
3. Misery cannot increase, but must decrease. If it is bodily misery, custom habituates to endurance, and there is less and less suffering instead of more and more.2[Note: 2. WS: In Milton’s Paradise Lost 2.274-78, Satan suggests that custom may mitigate the pains of hell: Our torments also may, in length of time, Become our elements; these piercing fires As soft as now severe; our temper changed Into their temper; which must needs remove The sensible of pain.] If, on the other hand, it is mental suffering, this is remorse. The damned suffer more remorse in hell than they do upon earth. This proves that they are better men in hell than upon earth. They cannot, therefore, grow more wretched in hell, but grow less so as they grow more remorseful.
4. The sympathy which the saved have with their former companions, who are in hell, will prevent the happiness of the saved. The world of mankind and also the whole universe are so connected that the endless misery of a part will destroy the happiness of the remainder.3[Note: 3. WS: Respecting this very common objection, Müller (Sin 1.239) makes the following remark: “The primary meaning of krisis (κρίσις = judgment) is discrimination and separation and implies that themain contrast between man and man in relation to the future state is made manifest by the cessation of intercourse between those who obey God and those who resist him. Beings whose relations to God are diametrically opposite, and persistently so, differ so greatly from each other that other ties of relationship become as nothing in comparison. Bonds of union among men arising out of the relationships of natural life must give way of themselves, if the tie which binds man’s spiritual consciousness and will to his Creator be on either side wholly severed. For those bonds have not in themselves an eternal significance, save so far as they are included in that relation to God which is of everlasting importance.”]
These objections appeal mainly to reason. But the two assumptions that hell is abolished by becoming used to it and that remorse is of the nature of virtue do not commend themselves to the intuitive convictions.
Besides the disciples of Schleiermacher, there are trinitarian theologians standing upon the position of theism who adopt some form of universalism. Nitzsch (Dogmatics §219) teaches restorationism. He cites in support of it only two passages out of the entire Scriptures: 1 Peter 3:19, which speaks of the “preaching to the spirits in prison”; and Hebrews 11:39-40 : “These received not the promises.” These two passages Nitzsch explains as teaching that “there are traces of a capacity in another state of existence for comprehending salvation and for a change and purification of mind”; and upon them, solely, he founds the sweeping assertion that “it is the apostolic view that for those who were unable in this world to know Christ in his truth and grace, there is a knowledge of the Redeemer in the other state of existence which is never inoperative, but is either judicial or quickening.”
Rothe (Dogmatics 2.2.46-49, 124-31) contends for the annihilation of the impenitent wicked in the sense of the extinction of self-consciousness. Yet he asserts that the aim of penalty is requital and the satisfaction of justice, an aim that would be defeated by the extinction of remorse. Julius Müller (Sin 2.418-25) maintains that the sin against the Holy Spirit is never forgiven because it implies such a hardness in sin as is incapable of penitence. But he holds that the offer of forgiveness through Christ will be made to every human being, here or hereafter: “Those who have never in this life had an opportunity of knowing the way of salvation will certainly be placed in a position to accept and enter upon this way of return, if they will, after their life on earth is ended. We may venture to hope that in the interval between death and the judgment many serious misconceptions, which have hindered men from appropriating truth in this life, will be removed.”4[Note: 4. WS: In placing the time of repentance “between death and the judgment” (2.425), Müller appears to contradict what he says in 2.426, 429: “It is clear that those theories of an apokatastasis (ἀποκατάστασις = restoration) which represent it as taking place in the interval between death and the general resurrection directly violate the New Testament eschatology. If the idea, therefore, is to be maintained, it must be referred to a period lying beyond the general resurrection. The aiōn mellōn (αἰών μέλλων = world to come) does not mean the time and state immediately ensuing upon death, but the period when the kingdom of the Messiah shall be fully realized and revealed: the period which follows the resurrection and the judgment. Christ’s words [Matthew 12:32], therefore, inspire the glorious hope that in ‘the world to come,’ in far distant eons, they who here harden their hearts against God’s revelation and can expect only a verdict of condemnation in the day of judgment shall find forgiveness and salvation.”] The use of the term misconception would seem to imply that some who had the offer of salvation in this life but had rejected it will have the opportunity in the next life to correct their error in this. Dorner (Christian Doctrine 4.416-28), after the arguments for and against endless punishment, concludes with the remark that “we must be content with saying that the ultimate fate of individuals, namely, whether all will attain the blessed goal or not, remains veiled in mystery.”His further remark that “there may be those eternally damned, so far as the abuse of freedom continues eternally, but in this case man has passed into another class of beings” looks in the direction of annihilation and suggests that sin may finally destroy the humanity of man and leave him a mere brute. Respecting the future offer of mercy, Dorner (3.77) asserts that “the final judgment can take place for none before the gospel has been so addressed to him that free appropriation of the same was possible.” (See supplement 7.6.2.)
Universalism has a slender exegetical basis. The biblical data are found to be unmanageable and resort is had to human sentiment and self-interest. Its advocates quote sparingly from Scripture. In particular, the words of Christ relating to eschatology are left with little citation or interpretation. Actual attempts by the restorationist to explain what the words depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels really mean are rare. The most common device is to dismiss them, as Schleiermacher does, with the remark that they are figurative. Some words of St. Paul, on the other hand, whose views upon sin, election, and predestination, however, are not especially attractive to this class, are made to do yeoman’s service. Texts like Romans 5:18 (“as judgment came upon all men unto condemnation, so the free gift came upon all men unto justification”) and 1 Corinthians 15:22 (“as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive”) are explained wholly apart from their context and by emphasizing the word all. When St. Paul asserts that “the free gift upon all men unto justification,” this is severed from the preceding verse, in which the “all” are described as “those which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness.” And when the same apostle affirms that “in Christ shall all be made alive,” no notice is taken of the fact mentioned in the succeeding verse that not all men are “in Christ”-the clause they that are Christ’s at his coming implying that there are some who are not “Christ’s at his coming.”
Biblical Argument The strongest support of the doctrine of endless punishment is the teaching of Christ, the Redeemer of man. Though the doctrine is plainly taught in the Pauline epistles and other parts of Scripture, yet without the explicit and reiterated statements of God incarnate, it is doubtful whether so awful a truth would have had such a conspicuous place as it always has had in the creed of Christendom. If, in spite of that large mass of positive and solemn threatening of everlasting punishment from the lips of Jesus Christ which is recorded in the four gospels, the attempt has nevertheless been made to prove that the tenet is not an integral part of the Christian system, we may be certain that had this portion of revelation been wanting, this attempt would have been much more frequent and much more successful. The apostles enter far less into detailed description and are far less emphatic upon this solemn theme than their divine Lord and master. And well they might be. For as none but God has the right and would dare to sentence a soul to eternal misery for sin and as none but God has the right and would dare to execute the sentence, so none but God has the right and should presume to delineate the nature and consequences of this sentence. This is the reason why most of the awful imagery in which the sufferings of the lost are described is found in the discourses of our Lord and Savior. He took it upon himself to sound the note of warning. He, the judge of quick and dead, assumed the responsibility of teaching the doctrine of endless retribution: “I will forewarn you whom you shall fear: Fear him who after he has killed has power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.” “Nothing,” says Dr. Arnold, “is more striking to me than our Lord’s own description of the judgment. It is so inexpressibly forcible, coming from his very own lips, as descriptive of what he himself would do” (Stanley, Life of Arnold 1.176).
Christ could not have warned men so frequently and earnestly as he did against “the fire that never shall be quenched” and “the worm that dies not” had he known that there is no future peril fully corresponding to them. That omniscient being who made the statements respecting the day of judgment and the final sentence that are recorded in Matthew 25:31-46 could neither have believed nor expected that all men without exception will eventually be holy and happy. To threaten with “everlasting punishment” a class of persons described as “goats upon the left hand” of the eternal judge, while knowing at the same time that this class would ultimately have the same holiness and happiness with those described as “sheep upon the right hand” of the judge, would have been both falsehood and folly. The threatening would have been false. For even a long punishment in the future world would not have justified Christ in teaching that this class of mankind are to experience the same retribution with “the devil and his angels,” for these were understood by the Jews, to whom he spoke, to be hopelessly and eternally lost spirits.5[Note: 5. WS: Edersheim (Life of Jesus 2.789) asserts that the schools of Shammai and Hillel both taught the doctrine of eternal punishment: “These schools represented the theological teaching in the time of Christ and his apostles, showing that the doctrine of eternal punishment was held in the days of our Lord, however it may have been afterward modified.” Edersheim adds that “the doctrine of the eternity of punishment seems to have been held by the synagogue throughout the whole first century. In the second century, there is a decided difference in rabbinic opinion; some denying the doctrine of endless retribution. In the third century, there is a reaction and a return to former views.”] And the threatening would have been foolish, because it would have been a brutum fulmen,6[Note: 6. an unfeeling thunder (i.e., an empty threat)] an exaggerated danger, certainly in the mind of its author. And for the persons threatened, it would have been a terror only because they took a different view of it from what its author did-they believing it to be true, and he knowing it to be false! (See supplement 7.6.3.) The mere perusal of Christ’s words when he was upon earth, without note or comment upon them, will convince the unprejudiced that the Redeemer of sinners knew and believed that for impenitent men and devils there is an endless punishment. We solicit a careful reading and pondering of the following well-known passages: When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory; and before him shall be gathered all nations, and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall he say unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment. (Matthew 25:31-33; Matthew 25:41; Matthew 25:46)
If your right hand offend you, cut it off: it is better for you to enter into life maimed than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched, where their worm dies not and the fire is not quenched. And if your foot offend you, cut if off: it is better for you to enter into life than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched, where their worm dies not and the fire is not quenched. And if your eye offend you, pluck it out: it is better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye than having two eyes to be cast into hellfire, where their worm dies not and the fire is not quenched. (Mark 9:43-48)
What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? What is a man advantaged if he gain the whole world and be cast away? (Mark 8:36; Luke 9:25) The rich man died and was buried, and in hell he lifted up his eyes being in torments. (Luke 16:22-23)
Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. (Matthew 10:28) The Son of Man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend and them which do iniquity and shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. (Matthew 13:41-42)
Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name? Then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, you that work iniquity. (Matthew 7:22-23)
He that denies me before men shall be denied before the angels of God. Unto him that blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, it shall never be forgiven. (Luke 12:9-10)
Woe unto you, you blind guides. You serpents, you generation of vipers, how can you escape the damnation of hell? (Matthew 23:16; Matthew 23:33)
Woe unto that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It had been good for that man if he had not been born. (Matthew 26:24) The Lord of that servant will come in a day when he looks not for him and at an hour when he is not aware and will cut him in sunder and appoint him his portion with unbelievers. (Luke 12:46) He that believes not shall be damned. (Mark 16:16) You, Capernaum, which are exalted unto heaven, shall be brought down to hell. (Matthew 11:23) At the end of the world, the angels shall come forth and sever the wicked from among the just and shall cast them into the furnace of fire. (Matthew 13:49-50)
Then said Jesus again to them, I go my way, and you shall seek me and shall die in your sins: whither I go you cannot come. (John 8:21) The hour is coming in which all that are in their graves shall hear my voice and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation. (John 5:28-29) To all this, add the description of the manner in which Christ will discharge the office of the eternal judge. John the Baptist represents him as one “whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor and gather his wheat into the garner, but will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12). And Christ describes himself as a householder who will say to the reapers, “Gather together first the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them” (13:30); as a fisherman “casting a net into the sea and gathering of every kind, which when it was full he drew to the shore and sat down and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away” (13:47-48); as the bridegroom who took the wise virgins “with him to the marriage” and shut the door upon the foolish (25:10); and as the man traveling into a far country who delivered talents to his servants and afterward reckons with them, rewarding the “good and faithful” and “casting the unprofitable servant into outer darkness, where there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (25:19-20).
Let the reader now ask himself the question: Do these representations and this phraseology make the impression that the future punishment of sin is to be remedial and temporary? Are they adapted to make this impression? Were they intended to make this impression? Is it possible to believe that that holy and divine person who uttered these fearful and unqualified warnings, eighteen hundred years ago, respecting the destiny of wicked men and devils, knew that a time is coming when there will be no wicked men and devils in the universe of God and no place of retributive torment? Did Jesus of Nazareth hold an esoteric doctrine of hell: a different view of the final state of the wicked from that which the common and natural understanding of his language would convey to his hearers and has conveyed to the great majority of his readers in all time? Did he know that in the far-off future, a day will come when those tremendous scenes which he described-the gathering of all mankind, the separation of the evil from the good, the curse pronounced upon the former and the blessing upon the latter-will be looked back upon by all mankind as “an unsubstantial pageant faded,” as a dream that is passed and a watch in the night?
Jesus Christ is the person responsible for the doctrine of eternal perdition. He is the being with whom all opponents of this theological tenet are in conflict. Neither the Christian church nor the Christian ministry are the authors of it. The Christian ministry never would have invented the dogma; neither would they have preached it in all the Christian centuries, like Jeremiah, with shrinking and in tears, except at the command of that same Lord God who said to the weeping prophet, “Whatsoever I command you, you shall speak” (Jeremiah 1:7).
Having given, in the discussion of the intermediate state, the proof from Scripture that sheol and hades signify the place of punishment for the wicked, we proceed to consider the nature and duration of the suffering inflicted in it.7[Note: 7. WS: There is no dispute that gehenna denotes the place of retributive suffering. It is employed seven times in Matthew’s Gospel, thrice in Mark’s, and once in Luke’s. In every one of these instances, it is Christ who uses the term. The only other person who has used it is James (3:6). It is derived from gê hinnōm (âÌÅé äÄðÌÉí) = valley of Hinnom; Aramaic gĕhinnām (âÌÀäÄðÌÈí) = geenna (γέεννα); Septuagint hennom (ἑννομ). It was a valley southeast of Jerusalem, in which Molech worship was practiced (2 Kings 23:10;Ezekiel 23:37; Ezekiel 23:39). It was called Tophet (abomination) inJeremiah 31:32. King Josiah caused the filth of Jerusalem to be carried thither and burned (2 Kings 23:10). Robinson asserts that there is no evidence that the place was used in Christ’s day for the deposit and burning of offal. Gehenna at the time of the advent had become a technical term for endless torment; as paradise and Abraham’s bosom had for endless blessedness.]
The Old Testament is comparatively silent upon these particulars. Sheol is represented vaguely as an evil to be dreaded and avoided, and little description of its fearfulness is given by the “holy men of old who spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.” The New Testament makes a fuller revelation and disclosure; and it is principally the Redeemer of the world who widens the outlook into the tremendous future. The suffering in hades and gehenna is described as “everlasting (aiōnios)8[Note: 8. αἰώνιος] punishment” (Matthew 25:46), “everlasting (aiōnios)9[Note: 9. αἰώνιος] fire” (18:8), “the fire that never shall be quenched” (Mark 9:45), “the worm that dies not” (9:46), “flaming fire” (2 Thessalonians 1:8), “everlasting (aidios)10[Note: 0 10. ἀΐδιος] chains” (Jude 1:6), “eternal (aiōnios)11[Note: 1 11. αἰώνιος] fire” (Jude 1:7), “the blackness of darkness forever” (Jude 1:13), “the smoke of torment ascending up forever and ever” (Revelation 14:11; Revelation 19:3), “the lake of fire and brimstone” in which the devil, the beast, and the false prophet “shall be tormented day and night, forever and ever” (20:10).
Sensible figures are employed to describe the misery of hell, as they are to describe the blessedness of heaven. It cannot be inferred from the mere use of metaphors that the duration of either is temporary. Figures are employed to describe both temporal and eternal realities. The psalmist describes God as rock, fortress, shield, etc.; and man as vapor, flower, etc. A figure by its form, as the rhetoricians call it, indicates the intention of the writer. No one would employ the figure of a rock to denote transiency, or of a cloud to denote permanence. Had Christ intended to teach that future punishment is remedial and temporary, he would have compared it to a dying worm and not to an undying worm, to a fire that is quenched and not to an unquenchable fire. The ghost in Hamlet describes the “glowworm’s fire” as “ineffectual,” that is, harmless (1.5). None of the figures employed in Scripture to describe the misery of the wicked are of the same rhetorical form with those of the morning cloud, the early dew, etc. They are invariably of the contrary form and imply fixedness and immutability. The “smoke of torment” ascends forever and ever. The “worm” of conscience does not die. The “fire” is unquenchable. The “chains” are eternal. The “blackness of darkness” overhangs forever. Had the sacred writers wished to teach that future punishment is for a time only, even a very long time, it would have been easy to have chosen a different species and form of metaphor that would have conveyed their meaning. And if the future punishment of the wicked is not endless, they were morally bound to have avoided conveying the impression they actually have conveyed by the kind of figures they have selected. “It is the willful deceit,” says Paley, “that makes the lie; and we willfully deceive when our expressions are not true in the sense in which we believe the hearer to apprehend them.” (See supplement 7.6.4.) The epithet aiōnios12[Note: 2 12. αἰώνιος] (everlasting) is of prime importance. In order to determine its meaning when applied to the punishment of the wicked, it is necessary, first, to determine that of the substantive from which the adjective is derived. Aiōn13[Note: 3 13. αἰών] signifies an “age.” It is a time word. It denotes “duration” more or less. Of itself, the word duration or age does not determine the length of the duration or age. God has duration, and angels have duration. The Creator has an aiōn14[Note: 4 14. αἰών] and the creature has an aiōn,15[Note: 5 15. αἰών] but that of the latter is as nothing compared with that of the former: “Behold you have made my days as a handbreadth; and my age is as nothing before you” (Psalms 39:5). In reference to man and his existence, the Scriptures speak of two and only two aiōnes16[Note: 6 16. αἰώνες] or ages: one finite and one infinite, one limited and one endless, the latter succeeding the former.17[Note: 7 17. WS: The common phrase here and hereafter denotes that human existence divides into only two sections. When Faust sells his soul to Mephistopheles, both parties understand that there are only two worlds: the temporal and the eternal. The latter covenants with the former as follows:
I to thy service here agree to bind me, To run and never rest at call of you; When over yonder you shalt find me, Then you shalt do as much for me. The same tremendous truth, that after the temporal the endless follows, is taught in the “mighty line” of Marlowe, in which he describes the emotions of Faustus as “the clock strikes eleven”:
Ah, Faustus, Now hast you but one bare hour to live, And then you must be damn’d perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make Perpetual day; or let this hour be but A year, a month, a week, a natural day, That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi! [O slowly, slowly run you horses of the night!] The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.] An indefinite series of limited eons with no final endless eon is a pagan and gnostic, not a biblical conception. The importation of a notion of an endless series of finite cycles, each of which is without finality and immutability, into the Christian system has introduced error, similarly as the importation of the pagan conception of hades has. The misconceiving of a rhetorical figure in the scriptural use of the plural for the singular, namely, tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn18[Note: 8 18. τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων = forever and ever] for ton aiōna,19[Note: 9 19. τόν αἰῶνα] has also contributed to this error. The two eons or ages known in Scripture are mentioned together in the following: “It shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world (aiōn)20[Note: 0 20. αἰών] nor in the world (aiōn)21[Note: 1 21. αἰών] to come” (Matthew 12:32); “he shall receive a hundredfold now in this time (kairos),22[Note: 2 22. καιρός] and in the world (aiōn)23[Note: 3 23. αἰών] to come eternal life” (Mark 10:30); “he shall receive manifold more in this present time (kairos),24[Note: 4 24. καιρός] and in the world (aiōn)25[Note: 5 25. αἰών] to come life everlasting” (Luke 18:30); “above every name that is named, not only in this world (aiōn)26[Note: 6 26. αἰών] but also in that which is to come” (Ephesians 1:21). The “things present” and the “things to come” mentioned in Romans 8:38 and 1 Corinthians 3:22 refer to the same two ages. These two eons or ages correspond to the two durations of “time” and “eternity,” in the common use of these terms. The present age or eon is “time”; the future age or eon is “eternity.”27[Note: 7 27. WS: It is relative, not absolute eternity; eternity a parte post [AG: in the direction of what comes after; i.e., looking forward in time], not a parte ante [AG: in the direction of what comes before; i.e., looking backward in time]. The future eon or age has a beginning, but no ending. This is the meaning when in common phrase it is said that “a man has gone into eternity” and that his happiness or misery is “eternal.” The absolutely eternal has no beginning as well as no ending; it is the eternity of God. The relatively eternal has a beginning but no end; it is the immortality of man and angel. The Schoolmen called the former eternitas; the latter sempiternitas. Scripture designates the absolute eternity of God by the phrase from everlasting to everlasting (Psalms 90:2). The punishment of the wicked is more properly endless than eternal.] (See supplement 7.6.5.) The present finite and limited age or eon is denominated in Scripture “this world” (ho aiōn houtos)28[Note: 8 28. ὁαἰών οὗτος] or ˓ôlāmḥzzeh29[Note: 9 29. òåÉìÈí äÇæÌÆä] (Matthew 12:32; Matthew 13:22; Luke 16:8; Luke 20:34; Romans 12:2; 1 Corinthians 1:20; 1 Corinthians 2:6). Another designation is “this present world” (ho nyn aiōn30[Note: 0 30. ὁνῦν αἰών] or ho enestōs aiōn)31[Note: 1 31. ὁ ἐνεστώς αἰών] (1 Timothy 6:17; 2 Timothy 4:10; Titus 2:12; Galatians 1:4). Sometimes the present limited age or eon is denoted by aiōn32[Note: 2 32. αἰών] without the article: “Which he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the world began (ap’ aiōnos)”33[Note: 3 33. ἀπ᾽αἰῶνος] (Luke 1:70); “it was not heard since the world began (ap’ aiōnos)”34[Note: 4 34. ἀπ᾽αἰῶνος] (John 9:39). For rhetorical effect, the present limited age or eon is sometimes represented as composed of a number of lesser ages or cycles, as in modern phrase the sum total of finite earthly time is denominated “the centuries” or “the ages.” The following are examples: “The hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages (pro tōn aiōnōn)”35[Note: 5 35. πρό τῶν αἰώνων] (1 Corinthians 2:7; cf. Ephesians 3:9; Colossians 1:26). In 1 Timothy 1:17 God is denominated basileus tōn aiōnōn36[Note: 6 36. βασιλεύς τῶν αἰώνων] (king of the ages of time) and therefore “the king eternal” (Authorized Version). In Romans 16:25 a “mystery” is said to have been kept secret chronois aiōniois37[Note: 7 37. χρόνοις αἰωνίοις] (during eonian times; Authorized Version: since the world began). The ages of the limited eon are meant. The secret was withheld from all the past cycles of time. In Titus 1:2 “eternal life” is said to have been promised pro chronōn aiōniōn38[Note: 8 38. πρὸχρόνων αἰωνίων] (before eonian times; Authorized Version: before the world began). The ages of the limited eon are meant. God promised eternal life prior to all the periods of time, that is, eternally promised. In these passages, “eonian times” is equivalent to “the centuries” or the “long ages.”39[Note: 9 39. WS: The Revisers make the reference to be to the unlimited eon or to eternity. Their rendering ofTitus 1:2by “before times eternal” involves the absurdity that a divine promise is made prior to eternity and ofRomans 16:25by “through times eternal” represents the mystery as concealed during eternity; that is to say, as forever concealed.] This rhetorical plural does not destroy the unity of the limited age or eon. To conceal a mystery from the past “eonian ages” or the past centuries and cycles of finite time is the same as to conceal it from past finite time as a whole.40[Note: 0 40. WS: The phrases end of the ages (telē tōn aiōnōn,τέλη τῶν αἰώνων;1 Corinthians 10:11), fullness of the time (Galatians 4:4), fullness of times (Ephesians 1:10), and these last days (eschatos tōn hēmerōn toutōn,ἐσχάτος τῶνἡμερῶν τούτων;Hebrews 1:2) denote the time of the Messiah’s first advent, that epoch in the temporal aiōn (αἰών) when the incarnation occurred (Hodge onEphesians 1:10).] (See supplement 7.6.6.) The future infinite and endless age or eon is denominated in Scripture “the future world” (Authorized Version and Revised Version: the world to come, aiōn ho mellōn41[Note: 1 41. αἰώνὁμέλλων] or ˓ôlām habbā˒;42[Note: 2 42. òåÉìÈí äÇáÌÈà]Matthew 12:32; Hebrews 2:5; Hebrews 6:5). Another designation is “the world to come” (aiōn ho erchomenos;43[Note: 3 43. αἰώνὁ ἐρχόμενος]Mark 10:30; Luke 18:30). Still another designation is “that world” (aiōn ekeinos;44[Note: 4 44. αἰώνἐκεῖνος]Luke 20:35). Frequently, the endless age is denoted by aiōn45[Note: 5 45. αἰών] simply, but with the article for emphasis (ho aiōn):46[Note: 6 46. ὁαἰών] “Has never forgiveness (eis ton aiōna)”47[Note: 7 47. εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα = unto eternity] (Mark 3:29; cf. Matthew 51:29; John 4:14; John 6:51; John 6:58; John 8:35; John 8:51-52; John 10:28; John 11:26; John 12:34; John 13:8; John 14:16; 2 Corinthians 9:9; Hebrews 5:6; Hebrews 6:20; Hebrews 7:17; 2 Peter 2:17; 1 John 2:17; Jude 1:13). The same use of the plural for rhetorical effect employed in the case of the limited eon is also employed in that of the unlimited. The future infinite aiōn48[Note: 8 48. αἰών] is represented as made up of lesser aiōnes49[Note: 9 49. αἰώνες] or cycles, as in English “infinity” is sometimes denominated “the infinities,” “eternity,” “the eternities,” “immensity,” and “the immensities.” The rhetorical plural, in this instance as in the other, does not conflict with the unity of the infinite age or eon. The following are examples of this use: “The Creator is blessed forever (eis tous aiōnas)”50[Note: 0 50. εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας] (Romans 1:25; Romans 9:5; Romans 11:36; Romans 16:27; 2 Corinthians 11:31; Php 4:20; Galatians 1:5 [eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn];51[Note: 1 51. εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων = lit., unto the ages of the ages]1 Timothy 1:17; Revelation 1:6; Revelation 1:18; Revelation 4:9-10; Revelation 5:13; Revelation 7:12). The phrases eis tous aiōnas52[Note: 2 52. εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας = forever] and eis tous aiōnas tōn aiōnōn53[Note: 3 53. εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων = forever and ever (lit., unto the ages of the ages)] are equivalent to eis ton aiōna.54[Note: 4 54. εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα = forever] All alike denote the one infinite and endless eon or age.
Since the word eon (aiōn)55[Note: 5 55. αἰών] or age in Scripture may denote either the present finite age or the future endless age, in order to determine the meaning of eonian (aiōnios),56[Note: 6 56. αἰώνιος] it is necessary first to determine in which of the two eons-the limited or the endless-the thing exists to which the epithet is applied, because anything in either eon may be denominated “eonian.” The adjective follows its substantive in meaning. Onesimus, as a slave, existed in this world (aiōn)57[Note: 7 57. αἰών] of “time,” and when he is called an eonian or “everlasting” (aiōnios)58[Note: 8 58. αἰώνιος] servant (Philem. 15), it is meant that his servitude continues as long as the finite eon in which he is a servant; and this is practically at an end for him, when he dies and leaves it. The mountains are denominated eonian or “everlasting” (aiōnia)59[Note: 9 59. αἰώνια] in the sense that they endure as long as the finite world (aiōn)60[Note: 0 60. αἰών] of which they are a part endures. God, on the other hand, is a being that exists in the infinite aiōn61[Note: 1 61. αἰών] and is therefore aiōnios62[Note: 2 62. αἰώνιος] in the endless signification of the word. The same is true of the spirits of angels and men, because they exist in the future eon as well as in the present one. If anything belongs solely to the present age or eon, it is eonian in the limited signification; if it belongs to the future age or eon, it is eonian in the unlimited signification. If, therefore, the punishment of the wicked occurs in the present eon, it is eonian in the sense of temporal; but if it occurs in the future eon, it is eonian in the sense of endless. The adjective takes its meaning from its noun.63[Note: 3 63. WS: “Aiōn [αἰών] de quocunque temporis spatio ita dicitur, ut, quale sit, judicari debeat in singulis locis ex orationis serie et mente scriptoris, rebus adeo et personis de quibus sermo est” [AG: The word eon is used for any duration of time, which must be judged in each individual passage from the flow (serie) of the language, from the mind of the writer, and from the matters and persons thus far under discussion]; Schleusner, entry aiōn.]
The English word forever has the same twofold meaning both in Scripture and in common use. Sometimes it means as long as a man lives upon earth. The Hebrew servant that had his ear bored with an awl to the door of his master was to be his servant “forever” (Exodus 21:6). Sometimes it means as long as the Jewish state should last. The ceremonial laws were to be statutes “forever” (Leviticus 16:34). Sometimes it means as long as the world stands: “One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever” (Ecclesiastes 1:4). In all such instances, “forever” refers to the temporal eon and denotes finite duration. But in other instances, and they are the great majority in Scripture, “forever” refers to the endless eon, as when it is said that “God is over all blessed forever.” The limited signification of “forever” in the former cases does not disprove its unlimited signification in the latter. That Onesimus was an “everlasting” (aiōnios)64[Note: 4 64. αἰώνιος] servant and that the hills are “everlasting” (aiōnia)65[Note: 5 65. αἰώνια] no more disproves the everlastingness of God, the soul, heaven, and hell than the term forever in a title deed disproves it. To hold land “forever” is to hold it “as long as grass grows and water runs,” that is, as long as this world or eon endures. The objection that, because aiōnios66[Note: 6 66. αἰώνιος] or “eonian” denotes “that which belongs to an age,” it cannot mean endless rests upon the assumption that there is no endless aiōn67[Note: 7 67. αἰών] or age. It postulates an indefinite series of limited eons or ages, no one of which is final and everlasting. But the texts that have been cited disprove this. Scripture speaks of but two eons which cover and include the whole existence of man and his whole duration. If, therefore, he is an immortal being, one of these must be endless. The phrase ages of ages applied to the future endless age does not prove that there is more than one future age, any more than the phrase the eternities proves that there is more than one eternity or the phrase the infinities proves that there is more than one infinity. The plural in these cases is rhetorical and intensive, not arithmetical, in its force. This examination of the scriptural use of the word aiōnios68[Note: 8 68. αἰώνιος] refutes the assertion that eonian means “spiritual” in distinction from “material” or “sensuous” and has no reference at all to time or duration, that when applied to “death” it merely denotes that the death is mental and spiritual in its nature without saying whether it is long or short, temporary or endless. Beyond dispute, some objects are denominated “eonian” in Scripture which have nothing mental or spiritual in them. The mountains are “eonian.” The truth is that the term aiōn69[Note: 9 69. αἰών] denotes time only-and never denotes the nature and quality of an object. All the passages that have been quoted show that duration, either limited or endless, is intended by the word. Whenever this visible world in the sense of the matter constituting it is meant, the word employed is kosmos,70[Note: 0 70. κοσμός] not aiōn.71[Note:1 71. αἰών] It is only when this world in the sense of the time of its continuance is intended that aiōn72[Note: 2 72. αἰών] is employed. St. Paul combines both meanings in Ephesians 2:2 : the heathen, he says, “walk according to the course [duration] of this world [of matter] (kata ton aiōna tou kosmou toutou).”73[Note: 3 73. κατὰτὸν αἰώνα τοῦκόσμου τούτου] In Hebrews 1:2; Hebrews 11:3, where aiōnes74[Note: 4 74. αἰώνες] denotes the worlds created by God, it is, as Lewis (“Ecclesiastes” in Lange’s Commentary, 47) remarks in opposition to Winer and Robinson, “the time sense of worlds after worlds,” not “the space sense of worlds beyond or above worlds,” that is intended. In by far the greater number of instances, aiōn75[Note: 5 75. αἰών] and aiōnios76[Note: 6 76. αἰώνιος] refer to the future infinite age and not to the present finite age, to eternity and not to time. Says Stuart (Exegetical Essays, 13, 16):
Aiōnios77[Note: 7 77. αἰώνιος] is employed 66 times in the New Testament. Of these, 51 relate to the future happiness of the righteous; 7 relate to future punishment (Matthew 18:8; Matthew 25:41; Matthew 25:46; Mark 3:29; 1 Thessalonians 1:9; Hebrews 6:2; Jude 1:6); 2 relate to God; 6 are of a miscellaneous nature (5 relating to confessedly endless things, as covenant, invisibilities; and one, in Philem. 15, to a perpetual service). In all the instances in which aiōnios78[Note: 8 78. αἰώνιος] refers to future duration, it denotes endless duration; saying nothing of the instances in which it refers to future punishment. Hebrew ˓ôlām79[Note: 9 79. òåÉìÈí = eternity] is translated in the Septuagint by aiōn80[Note: 0 80. αἰών] 308 times. In almost the whole of these instances the meaning is time unlimited: a period without end. In the other instances, it means aiōn81[Note: 1 81. αἰών] in the secondary, limited sense; it is applied to the mountains, the levitical statutes, priesthood, etc. The younger Edwards (Reply to Chauncy, 14) says that “aiōn,82[Note: 2 82. αἰών] reckoning the reduplications of it, as aiōnes tōn aiōnōn,83[Note: 3 83. αἰώνες τῶν αἰώνων = forever and ever] to be single instances of its use, occurs in the New Testament in 104 instances, in 32 of which it means a limited duration. In 7 instances, it may be taken in either the limited or the endless sense. In 65 instances, including 6 instances in which it is applied to future punishment, it plainly signifies an endless duration.” An incidental proof that the adjective aiōnios84[Note: 4 84. αἰώνιος = everlasting] has the unlimited signification when applied to future punishment is the fact that the destiny of lost men is bound up with that of Satan and his angels: “Then shall he say unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41). These are represented in Scripture as hopelessly lost: “The devil that deceived them shall be tormented day and night forever and ever” (Revelation 20:10). The Jews to whom Christ spoke understood the perdition of the lost angels to be absolute. If the positions of the restorationist are true in reference to man, they are also in reference to devils. But Scripture teaches that there is no redemption for the lost angels: “Christ took not on him the nature of angels” (Hebrews 2:16).
Respecting the nature of the “everlasting punishment,” it is clear from the biblical representations that it is accompanied with consciousness: Dives is “in torments” (Luke 16:23); “the smoke of their torment ascends up forever and ever” (Revelation 14:11); “fear has torment” (1 John 4:18); and the lost fear “the wrath of the Lamb” (Revelation 6:16). The figures of “fire” and “worm” are intended to denote conscious pain. An attempt has been made to prove that the punishment of the wicked is the extinction of consciousness. This doctrine is sometimes denominated annihilation. Few of its advocates, however, have contended for the strict annihilation of the substance of the soul and body. The more recent defenders maintain the doctrine of conditional immortality. According to this view, the soul is not naturally immortal. Some of this class contend that it is material. It gains immortality only through its redemption by Christ.85[Note: 5 85. WS: This theory was presented by Dodwell, Epistolary Discourse: That the Soul Is a Principle Naturally Mortal Immortalized by the Pleasure of God (London, 1706).] All who are not redeemed lose all consciousness at the death of the body, and this is the “spiritual death” threatened in Scripture. As the death of the body is the extinction of sensation, so the death of the soul is the extinction of consciousness. The falsity of the theory of annihilation in both of its forms is proved by the following considerations:
1. Death is the opposite of birth, and birth does not mean the creation of substance. The conception and birth of an individual man is the uniting of a soul and a body, not the creation ex nihilo of either; and the physical death of an individual man is the separation of a soul and body, not the annihilation of either. Death is a change of the mode in which a substance exists and supposes that the substance itself continues in being:
Ne, when the life decays and forme does fade, Doth it consume and into nothing goe, But chaunged is and often altered to and froe. The substaunce is not chaunged nor altered, But th’ only forme and outward fashion.
-Faery Queen 3.6 The death of an animal substance makes an alteration in the relations of certain material atoms, but does not put them out of existence. Dead matter is as far from nonentity as living matter. That physical death is not the annihilation of substance is proved by 1 Corinthians 15:36 : “That which you sow is not quickened except it die” (cf. John 12:24). In like manner, the death of the soul, or spiritual death, is only a change in the relations of the soul and its mode of existence, and not the annihilation of its substance. In spiritual death the soul is separated from God, as in physical death the soul is separated from the body. The union of the soul with God is spiritual life; its separation from God is spiritual death: “He that has the Son has [spiritual] life, and he that has not the Son has not [spiritual] life” (1 John 5:12).
2. The spiritually dead are described in Scripture as conscious: “In the day you eat thereof, you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17) compared with “hid themselves” (3:8). After Adam and Eve’s fall they were spiritually dead and filled with shame and terror before God. The “dead in trespasses and sins walk according to the course of this world” (Ephesians 2:1-2); “she that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives” (1 Timothy 5:6); “you being dead in your sins has he forgiven” (Colossians 2:13); “you live and are dead” (Revelation 3:1). Spiritual death is the same as the “second death,” and the second death “hurts” (2:11); and its smoke of torment “ascends forever and ever” (19:3).
3. The extinction of consciousness is not of the nature of punishment. The essence of punishment is suffering, and suffering is consciousness. In order to be punished, the person must be conscious of a certain pain, must feel that he deserves it, and know that it is inflicted because he does. All three of these elements are required in a case of punishment. To reduce a man to unconsciousness would make his punishment an impossibility. If God by a positive act extinguishes at death the remorse of a hardened villain by extinguishing his self-consciousness, it is a strange use of language to denominate this a punishment. Still another proof that the extinction of consciousness is not of the nature of punishment is the fact that a holy and innocent being might be deprived of consciousness by his Creator, but could not be punished by him. God is not obliged by his justice to perpetuate a conscious existence which he originated ex nihilo. For wise ends, he might suffer an unfallen angel not only to lose consciousness, but to lapse into his original nonentity. But he could not, in justice, inflict retributive suffering upon him.
4. The extinction either of being or of consciousness admits no degrees of punishment. All transgressors are “punished” exactly alike. This contradicts Luke 12:47-48 and Romans 2:12.
5. According to this theory, brutes are punished. In losing consciousness at death, the animal like the man incurs an everlasting loss. The annihilationist contends that the substance of punishment is in the result and not in its being felt or experienced. If a transgressor is put out of conscious existence, the result is an everlasting loss to him, though he does not know it. But the same thing is true of a brute. And if the former is punished, the latter is also.
6. The advocate of conditional immortality, in teaching that the extinction of consciousness is the “eternal death” of Scripture, implies that the continuance of consciousness is the “eternal life.” But mere consciousness is not happiness. Judas was conscious, certainly, when he hung himself, even if he is not now. But he was not happy.
7. The extinction of consciousness is not regarded by sinful men as an evil, but a good. They substitute the doctrine of the eternal sleep of the soul for that of its eternal punishment. This shows that the two things are not equivalents. When Mirabeau lay dying, he cried passionately for opium, that he might never awake. The guilty and remorseful have, in all ages, deemed the extinction of consciousness after death to be a blessing; but the advocate of conditional immortality explains it to be a curse. “Sight and hearing and all earthly good, without justice and virtue,” says Plato (Laws 2.661), “are the greatest of evils, if life be immortal; but not so great, if the bad man lives a very short time.”
8. The fact that the soul depends for its immortality and consciousness upon the upholding power of its maker does not prove either that it is to be annihilated or to lose consciousness. Matter also depends for its existence and operations upon the Creator. Both matter and mind can be annihilated by the same being who created them from nothing. Whether he will cease to uphold any particular work of his hand can be known only by revelation. In the material world, we see no evidence of such an intention. We are told that “the elements shall melt with fervent heat,” but not that they shall be annihilated. And, certainly, all that God has said in revelation respecting creation, redemption, and perdition implies and teaches that he intends to uphold, not to annihilate the human spirit; to perpetuate, not extinguish its self-consciousness. The form of universalism which is the most respectable-and therefore the most dangerous-is that which concedes the force of the biblical and rational arguments respecting the guilt of sin and its intrinsic desert of everlasting punishment, but contends that redemption from it through the vicarious atonement of Christ is extended into the next world. The advocates of this view assert that between death and the final judgment the application of Christ’s work is going on, that the Holy Spirit is regenerating sinners in the intermediate state, and they are believing and repenting as in this life. This makes the day of judgment, instead of the day of death, the dividing line between “time” and “eternity,” between ho aiōn houtos86[Note: 6 86. ὁαἰών οὗτος = this age] and aiōn ho mellōn.87[Note: 7 87. αἰώνὁμέλλων = the age to come] And this makes the intermediate state a third eon by itself, lying between “time” and “eternity,” between “this world” and “the world to come.” That the “intermediate state” is not a third eon, but a part of the second endless eon, is proved by the following considerations:
First, by the fact that in Scripture the disembodied state is not called “intermediate.” This is an ecclesiastical term which came in with the doctrine of purgatory and along with the exaggeration of the difference between paradise and heaven and between hades and gehenna. Second, by the fact that in Scripture death is represented as the deciding epoch in a man’s existence. It is the boundary between the two biblical eons or worlds. Until a man dies, he is in “this world” (ho nyn aiōn);88[Note: 8 88. ὁνῦν αἰών] after death, he is in “the future world” (aiōn ho mellōn).89[Note: 9 89. αἰώνὁμέλλων] The common understanding of the teaching of Scripture is that men are in “time” so long as they live, but when they die they enter “eternity”: “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after that judgment” (Hebrews 9:27). This teaches that prior to death man’s destiny is not decided, he being not yet sentenced; but after death his destiny is settled. When he dies, the “private judgment,” that is, the immediate personal consciousness either of penitence or impenitence, occurs. Every human spirit, in that supreme moment when it “returns to God who gave it,” knows by direct self-consciousness whether it is a child or an enemy of God in temper and disposition; whether it is humble and contrite or proud, hard, and impenitent; whether it welcomes or rejects divine mercy in Christ. The article of death is an event in human existence which strips off all disguises and shows the person what he really is in moral character. He “knows as he is known,” and in this flashing light passes a sentence upon himself that is accurate. This “private judgment” at death is reaffirmed in the “general judgment” of the last day.
Accordingly, our Lord teaches distinctly that death is a finality for the impenitent sinner. Twice in succession, he says with awful emphasis to the Pharisees, “If you believe not that I am he, you shall die in your sins” (John 8:21; John 8:24). This implies that to “die in sin” is to be hopelessly lost. Again, he says, “Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walks in darkness knows not whither he goes. While you have light, believe in the light, that you may be the children of light” (12:35-36). According to these words of the Redeemer, the light of the gospel is not accessible in the darkness of death: “The night comes, wherein no man can work” (9:4). The night of death puts a stop to the work of salvation that is appointed to be done in the daytime of this life. St. Paul teaches the same truth in 1 Thessalonians 5:5-7 : “You are all the children of light and the children of the day: we are not of the night nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober. For they that sleep sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night.” “God said unto him, You fool, this night your soul shall be required of you: then whose shall those things be which you have provided? So is he that lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:20-21). The end of a man’s life on earth is often represented as the decisive moment in his existence: “He that endures to the end shall be saved” (Matthew 10:22; Matthew 24:13); “Jesus Christ shall confirm you unto the end” (1 Corinthians 1:8); “whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end” (Hebrews 3:6); “we are made partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end” (3:14); “we desire that every one of you do show the same diligence to the full assurance of hope unto the end” (6:11); “he that overcomes and keeps my works unto the end to him will I give power over the nations” (Revelation 2:26). In these passages, the end of life or of this world is meant. No one would think of the end of the intermediate state or of eternity as the telos90[Note: 0 90. τέλος = end] or telous91[Note: 1 91. τέλους = end] in the mind of the writer. With these New Testament teachings agrees the frequent affirmation of the Old Testament that after death nothing can be done toward securing salvation: “The wicked is driven away in his wickedness [at death]; but the righteous has hope in his death” (Proverbs 14:32); “when a wicked man dies, his expectation shall perish” (11:7); “in death there is no remembrance of you: in the grave who shall give you thanks?” (Psalms 6:5); “will you show wonders to the dead? shall the dead arise and praise you? shall your loving-kindness be declared in the grave?” (88:10-11); “the dead praise not the Lord, nor any that go down into silence” (115:17); “to him that is joined to all the living, there is hope: for the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward” (Ecclesiastes 9:4-6). These passages do not teach the utter unconsciousness of the soul after death, in flat contradiction to that long list already cited (p. 844) which asserts the contrary, but that there is no alteration of character in the next life: “In death, there is no [happy] remembrance of God [if there has been none in life]”; “the dead shall not arise and praise God [in the next world, if they have not done so in this world]”; “shall God declare his loving-kindness [to one] in the grave [if he has not declared it to him when upon earth]?” (See supplement 7.6.7.) The parable of Dives proves that death is the turning point in human existence and fixes the everlasting state of the person. Dives asks that his brethren may be warned before they die and enter hades; because after death and the entrance into hades, there is an impassable gulf between misery and happiness, sin and holiness. This shows that the so-called intermediate state is not intermediate in respect to the essential elements of heaven and hell, but is a part of the final and endless state of the soul. It is “intermediate” only in reference to the secondary matter of the presence or absence of the body. The asserted extension of redemption into the endless eon or age is contradicted by Scripture. Salvation from sin is represented as confined to the limited eon by the covenant between the Father and the Son. The most important and explicit passage bearing upon this point is 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 : “Then comes the end, when Christ shall have delivered up the kingdom of God, even the Father, when he shall have put down all [opposing] rule and all [opposing] authority and power. For he must reign till he has put all enemies under his feet.” St. Paul here states the fact disclosed to him by revelation from God that the redemption of sinners will not go on forever, but will cease at a certain point of time. The mediator will carry on his work of saving sinful men until he has gathered in his church and completed the work according to the original plan and covenant between himself and his Father, and then he will surrender his mediatorial commission and office (basileian).92[Note: 2 92. βασιλείαν] There will then no longer be any mediation going on between sinners and God. The redeemed will be forever united to their divine head in heaven, and the wicked will be shut up in the “outer darkness.” That Christ’s mediatorial work does not secure the salvation of all men during the appointed period in which it is carried on is proved by the fact that when “the end comes” some men are described as the “enemies” of Christ and as being “put under his feet” (1 Corinthians 15:24-25). All of Christ’s redeemed “stand before his throne” (Revelation 14:3; Revelation 19:4-7; Revelation 21:3). They are in the “mansions” which he has “prepared” for them (John 14:2-3). The reason assigned for Christ’s surrender of his mediatorial commission is “that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28); not that “God even the Father may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:24). It is the Trinity that is to be supreme. To Christ, as an incarnate trinitarian person and an anointed mediator, “all power is [temporarily] given in heaven and upon earth” (Matthew 28:29) for the purpose of saving sinners. As such, he accepts and holds a secondary position of condescension and humiliation, when compared with his original unincarnate position (see pp. 675-76). In this reference, he receives a “commandment” (John 10:18) and a “kingdom” (1 Corinthians 15:24). In this reference, as believers “are Christ’s,” so “Christ is God’s” (1 Corinthians 3:23); and as “the head of the woman is the man,” so “the head of Christ is God” (1 Corinthians 11:3). But when Christ has finished his work of mediating between the triune God and sinful men and of saving sinners, this condition of subjection to an office and a commission ceases. The dominion (basileian)93[Note: 3 93. βασιλείαν] over heaven and earth, temporarily delegated to a single trinitarian person incarnate for purposes of redemption and salvation, now returns to the eternal three whence it came and to whom it originally belongs. The Son of God, his humanity exalted and glorified and his divine-human person united forever to his church as their head, no longer prosecutes that work of redemption which he carried forward through certain ages of time, but, with the Father and Spirit, three in one, reigns over the entire universe: over the holy “who stand before the throne” and over the wicked who are “under his feet” and “in the bottomless pit.” The confinement of the work of redemption to the limited eon, which terminates practically for each individual at the death of the body, is taught in many other passages of Scripture: “My spirit shall not always [Revised Version: forever] strive with man, for that he also is [sinful] flesh; yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years” (Genesis 6:3). This teaches that the regenerating agency of the divine Spirit in the sinner’s heart was to be restricted to the hundred and twenty years which for a time was the average length of human life. “O that they were wise, that they would consider their latter end” (Deuteronomy 32:29); “teach us so to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalms 90:12); “everyone that is godly shall pray unto you in a time when you may be found” (32:6); “because I have called, and you refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; but you have set at naught all my counsel and would none of my reproof; I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear comes; then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me” (Proverbs 1:24-28); “whatsoever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work nor device nor knowledge nor wisdom in the grave whither you go” (Ecclesiastes 9:10); “seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near” (Isaiah 55:6); “take heed to yourselves lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness and cares of this life and so that day come upon you unawares: for as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the earth” (Luke 21:34-35); “watch, therefore, for you know not what hour your Lord comes; the Lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looks not for him and shall cut him asunder and appoint him his portion with unbelievers: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 24:42; Matthew 24:50); “if you had known, even you, at least in this your day, the things which belong unto your peace! but now they are hid from your eyes” (Luke 19:42); “strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able; when once the master of the house is risen up and has shut the door, and you begin to stand without and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us, he shall answer and say unto you, I know you not whence you are” (13:24-25); “we beseech you that you receive not the grace of God in vain; for he says, I have heard you in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succored you: behold now is the accepted time; behold now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2); “today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Hebrews 3:7). The argument in 3:7-19 is to the effect that as God swore that those Israelites who did not believe and obey his servant Moses during the forty years of wandering in the desert should not enter the earthly Canaan, so those who do not “while it is called today”-that is, while they are here in time-believe and obey his Son Jesus Christ, shall not enter the heavenly Canaan: “Take heed lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief. But exhort one another daily, while it is called today” (3:12-13); “God limits a certain day, saying in David, today after so long a time [of impenitence], today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (4:7). Hebrews 10:26 speaks of a time when “there remains no more sacrifice for sins, but a fearful looking-for of judgment and fiery indignation which shall devour the adversaries of God.” “Behold I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give to every man according as his work shall be. He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still” (Revelation 22:11-12).
If sinners are redeemed beyond the grave, man must be informed of the fact by God himself. There is no other way of finding it out. He has not been so informed, but, if language has any meaning, has been informed of the contrary. Bishop Butler (Analogy 1.2) states the case with his usual conciseness and clearness:
Reason did, as it well might, conclude that it should finally be well with the righteous and ill with the wicked; but it could not be determined upon any principles of reason whether human creatures might not have been appointed to pass through other states of life and being, before that distributive justice should finally and effectually take place. Revelation teaches us that the next state of things after the present is appointed for the execution of this justice; that it shall no longer be delayed, but the mystery of God, the great mystery of his suffering vice and confusion to prevail, shall then be finished; and he will take to him his great power and will reign by rendering to everyone according to his works. The asserted extension of redemption into the period between death and the resurrection cannot be placed upon the ground of obligation and justice; and the only other ground possible, that of the divine promise so to extend it, is wanting. Our Lord teaches that men prior to his coming into the world are “condemned already” (John 3:16). His advent to save them supposes that they are already lost; and they are lost by sin; and sin is man’s free self-determination.94[Note: 4 94. WS: The strange position has recently been taken that the rejection of Christ is the only sin that brings eternal death. “No one,” says Dorner (Christian Doctrine 4.167), “will be damned merely on account of the common sin and guilt. But everyone is definitely brought to [guilty] personal decision only through the gospel.” Says a writer in the Dec. 1885 Andover Review: 574: “No one can be lost without the knowledge of Christ.” This implies that man’s sin against the moral law is not sufficient to condemn him to eternal death. He must sin against the gospel before he can be so condemned. Neither original sin nor actual transgression, neither evil inclination nor outward disobedience, both of which are sins against the law, expose a man to hell. This is an entirely new position, not to be found in the history of eschatology and invented, apparently, to furnish a basis for the doctrine of a future offer of redemption. The objections to it are the following: (a) It contradicts the whole tenor of Scripture. Christ teaches that he came to call actual and guilty sinners to repentance (Luke 5:32); that he came to seek and save that which was really and truly lost (19:10); that he did not come into the world to condemn the world, because it was already condemned, but to save the world (John 3:17-18). St. Paul affirms that the whole world, prior to redemption and irrespective of it, is guilty before God (Romans 3:19). St. John asserts that the whole world, Gentile and Jewish, unevangelized and evangelized, lies in wickedness (1 John 5:19). To quote all the passages in which the Bible teaches that men are exposed to eternal death on account of their transgression of the law of God would be to quote a large part of the Bible. The rejection of the gospel adds a new sin and a very aggravating one to the already existing sin against divine law (John 15:22), but it is not the primary and original ground of condemnation. Men are punished, first of all, because they “have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). (b) Unless man has first sinned against the law, he cannot sin against the gospel. If he has not previously committed a damning sin for which Christ has atoned, he cannot reject Christ’s atonement any more than an innocent angel can. The rejection of salvation is meaningless if no damnation has been incurred. If there is no disease, there can be no cure nor rejection of a cure. (c) If no human soul is in danger of perdition until it has rejected Christ, then if Christ had never been offered to man no man would be lost. For if he were not offered, he could not be rejected. In this case, it would have been infinitely better for mankind had Christ never come into the world on an errand of salvation. Had he remained unincarnate, as he had been from eternity, no one could have refused belief in him, and as unbelief is the only damning sin no one could have been damned. (d) If “no man can be lost without the knowledge of Christ,” then none of the past heathen world who died without this knowledge incurred perdition for the “deeds done in the body,” and none of the existing heathen world who are destitute of this knowledge are liable to perdition from this cause. In this case, it is matter of rejoicing that the past generations of pagans never heard of the Redeemer, and it should be an earnest endeavor of the church to prevent all of the present generation of pagans from hearing of him. Dorner’s theory that “no one will be damned merely on account of the common sin and guilt” is full of inconsistency and self-contradiction. First, he holds that man is in a state of “common sin and guilt,” but it is a species of sin and guilt that does not deserve endless punishment and is not in danger of it. Second, he holds that man needs “salvation” from such an unendangered state. Third, he holds that God is bound in justice to provide “salvation” from such an unendangered state. “The gospel,” he says (4.167), “repentance, and forgiveness of sins are to be preached to all nations. This cannot refer merely to nations as unities, but must refer also to every individual; for otherwise the universality of the gracious purpose would not be sincerely meant; and if God refused what is indispensable to salvation to the individual, condemnation would be impossible.” Fourth, he holds that God exhibits mercy when he does what he is obligated to do. To all this self-stultifying soteriology, the principle enunciated by St. Paul (Romans 11:6) is a conclusive reply: “If by grace, then it is no more of works; otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then it is no more grace; otherwise work is no more work.” If man’s “common sin and guilt” is not damning, then it is no more sin and guilt; otherwise sin and guilt are no more sin and guilt. If Christ’s salvation is not from death and hell, then it is no more salvation; otherwise salvation is no more salvation. And if Godmercy is justly due to man, then it is no more mercy; otherwise mercy is no more mercy. Julius Müller, though holding (on the ground ofMatthew 12:32) “the glorious hope that in the world to come, in far distant eons, some who here harden their hearts against God’s revelation and can expect only a verdict of condemnation in the day of judgment, shall find forgiveness and salvation” (Sin 2.437), denies and combats Dorner’s position that sin against the gospel is the only damning sin (Sin 2.400). For a very able argument in proof that both evil inclination and outward transgression are damning, see Sin 1.198-214.] Consequently, man the sinner has no claim upon God for redemption. Forgiveness is undeserved, whether offered here or hereafter. The exercise of mercy is optional with God: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy” (Romans 9:15). It follows from this that the length of time during which the offer of mercy is made to transgressors is likewise optional with God. It may be long or short, according to the divine will. Should God say to a sinner: “I will pardon your sin today, if you will penitently confess it, but not tomorrow,” this sinner could not complain of injustice, but would owe gratitude for the mercy thus extended for a limited time. It cannot be said that unless God offers to pardon man forever and ever he is not a merciful being. Neither can this be said, if he confines redemption to this life and does not redeem sinners in the intermediate state.95[Note: 5 95. WS: Shedd, Sermons to the Natural Man, sermon 18.]
It is here that the logical inconsistency of such theologians as Müller and Dorner appears. Lessing, the first of German critics, makes the following remark respecting the German mind: “We Germans suffer from no lack of systematic books. No nation in the world surpasses us in the faculty of deducing from a couple of definitions whatever conclusions we please, in most fair and logical order” (Preface to Laocoon). The truth of this remark is illustrated by some of the systems of theology and philosophy constructed in Germany. The reasoning is close, consecutive, and true in some sections; but loose, inconsequent, and false as a whole. The mind of the thinker when moving in the limited sphere moves logically; but moving in the universe and attempting to construct a philosophy or theology of the infinite fails utterly. Many of the trains of reasoning in Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre are profound, closely reasoned, and correct, but the system as a whole has fatal defects. No one will deny the rigor of Hegel’s logical processes in segments, but the total circle of his thinking is pantheistic and full of inconsistency.
Lessing’s remark applies to that type of universalism of which Müller and Dorner are the best representatives and the ablest advocates. In the first place, upon “a couple” of obscure and dubious scriptural texts, they rear the whole great fabric of a future redemption, in direct contradiction to some scores of perfectly plain texts that teach the confinement of redemption to this life. And, second, after laying down a theory of sin which represents it as pure self-determination and guilt, sin is then discussed as an evil that is entitled to the offer of a pardon and a remedy. Müller and Dorner, both alike, explain sin as originating in the free and guilty agency of the finite will and as requiring an atonement in order to its remission.96[Note: 6 96. WS: The merit of Müller, in particular, in respect to a profound and true view of sin is very great. No theological treatise of the nineteenth century has more value on this subject than his.] And yet both alike, when they come to eschatology, assume tacitly, but do not formally assert, that divine perfection requires that the offer of forgiveness be made sooner or later to every sinner, that there will be a defect in the benevolence and a blemish in the character of the Supreme Being if he does not tender a pardon to every transgressor of his law. Their eschatology thus contradicts their hamartiology. The extension of the work of redemption into the future world is made to rest very much for its support upon the cases of the heathen and of infants. Respecting the former, it is certain that the heathen are voluntary transgressors of the moral law and therefore have no claim upon divine mercy. Scripture teaches that they perish because of their sin and impenitence in sin. It is wicked to sin and still more wicked not to repent of it. The heathen are chargeable with both. St. Paul describes them as those “who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them” (Romans 1:32); “there is no respect of persons with God; for as many as have sinned without [written] law shall also perish without [written] law” (2:11); “the Gentiles show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts accusing, in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ” (2:14-15); “the Gentiles walk in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart, who being past feeling have given themselves over into lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greediness” (Ephesians 4:17); “remember that you being in time past Gentiles were at that time without hope and without God in the world” (2:11-12); “murderers, whoremongers, and idolaters shall have their part in the lake of fire and brimstone: which is the second death” (Revelation 21:8). Jesus Christ said from heaven to Saul of Tarsus that he had appointed him to be “a minister and witness to the Gentiles, to open their eyes, to turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and inheritance among them that are sanctified by faith” (Acts 26:16-18). There is, consequently, no ground for asserting that justice and obligation require that the pardon of sins be tendered to the heathen in the next life.97[Note: 7 97. WS: “The distinction,” says Müller (Sin 1.207), “between superable and insuperable ignorance will affect our calculation of the degree of guilt. A man cannot be reproached on account of ignorance regarding things accidental and changeable; but to be ignorant of those fundamental truths whereof conscience informs him, and of their bearing upon conduct, is the sign of a sinful perversion of the inner life. If, from the moment when he first heard the voice of conscience, his aim always had been simply and solely to know what that voice tells him and unconditionally to obey, there would be no sins of ignorance to be laid to his charge. But the sinfulness of human nature, in this respect, prevents our exculpating him thus from the guilt of particular sins. It is the unrighteousness of man that hinders the development of truth in his consciousness (Romans 1:18). And hence we find that savages, when they have been converted from the abominations of idolatry-from lust and murder and unbridled selfish impulse-to the faith of Christ never excuse themselves on the ground of ignorance, but in deep humiliation feel the reproaches of an awakened conscience. St. Paul recognizes the mitigation of guilt in the case of the heathen, when he says that ‘God overlooked’ the chronoi tēs agnoias (χρόνοι τῆςἀγνοίας = times of ignorance) (Acts 17:30) but he by no means considers the sinful heathen to be free from guilt.” For a powerful description of heathen depravity, see Thucydides, History 2.53; 3.82. And for a powerful specimen of human depravity, see the “Plebeian’s Speech” in Machiavelli, History of Florence 3.3.]
It does not follow, however, that because God is not obliged to offer pardon to the unevangelized heathen, either here or hereafter, therefore no unevangelized heathen are pardoned. The electing mercy of God reaches to the heathen. It is not the doctrine of the church that the entire mass of pagans, without exception, have gone down to endless impenitence and death. That some unevangelized men are saved in the present life by an extraordinary exercise of redeeming grace in Christ has been the hope and belief of Christendom. It was the hope and belief of the elder Calvinists, as it is of the later.98[Note: 8 98. WS: The following extract from Witsius (Apostles’ Creed, diss. 2) exhibits the hopeful view which the elder Calvinism took of the possible extent to which God’s decree of election reaches: “Doctrines may be said to be necessary either to salvation or to religion or to the church. A doctrine, without the knowledge and belief of which God does not save persons who have come to years of moral consciousness, is necessary to salvation; a doctrine, without the profession and practice of which no one can be considered religious, is necessary to religion; and a doctrine, without which no one is admitted to the communion of the visible church, is necessary to the church. There may be articles without which persons ought not to be admitted to the fellowship of the church, that should not, for that reason, be regarded as absolutely essential either to religion or to salvation. Although we might not dare to pronounce a sentence of condemnation against a particular man, we ought not, in defiance of order and discretion, to receive him forthwith into the bosom of our church, whatever sentiments he might hold and to whatever sect he might belong. And with respect to religion, what falls within the sphere of duty is manifest. But how far it may please a gracious God or how far it may be possible for him in consistency with his perfections and character to extend his forbearance to anyone and save his soul, notwithstanding his errors and sins; or, in short, what are the lowest attainments without which no man is saved-who can tell? For this distinction in doctrines, I am indebted to the celebrated Hoornbeck (Confutation of Socinianism 1.209). Again, the knowledge of those doctrines which are necessary to salvation admits various degrees. It is in different measures of clearness, abundance, and efficacy that divine revelation, the means of grace, and the communications of the Spirit are enjoyed; and a corresponding diversity takes place in the degrees of knowledge which the saints attain. In some it is clear, distinct, steady, and accompanied with a very firm and decided assent; in others it is more confused, more implicit and latent, subject to occasional wavering, and attended with an assent that is yielded with difficulty. The command of God indeed lays an indispensable obligation upon all men to make every possible effort to attain a most clear, distinct, and assured knowledge of divine truth. It cannot, however, be questioned that the deity in his unbounded goodness receives many to the abodes of bliss whose knowledge even of the principal articles is very indistinct and such as they are hardly capable of expressing in their own words. The smallest measure of the requisite knowledge appears to be this, namely, that when an article of faith is explained, the mind so far at least apprehends it as to recognize and embrace it as true. Furthermore, times must be distinguished. It admits no doubt that under the bright dispensation of the gospel, a more extensive and explicit knowledge is necessary to salvation than was required under the Old Testament economy; for it is reasonable that both knowledge and the necessity of knowledge should increase in proportion to the measure of revelation afforded. Under the old dispensation, nay, during the time of our Savior’s abode on the earth, it was possible for a man to be a true believer and in a state of grace who was ignorant of the sufferings, the death, and the resurrection of Christ and who even presumed to object to the testimony of Christ himself respecting these momentous topics, as is clear from the instance of Peter (Matthew 16:21-23), or who, though he believed in general in the Messiah, yet knew not that Jesus is the Christ, as appears from the history of Cornelius the centurion (Acts 10:2-4). No one, however, I suppose, would now acknowledge any person [in Christendom] as a true believer who should discover ignorance of these truths respecting the Lord Jesus, and still less a person who should contradict them when represented to him. On this subject, the remark of Thomas Aquinas (Summa 2.2.1.7) deserves to be quoted: ‘The articles of faith,’ says he, ‘have increased with the lapse of time, not indeed with respect to the faith itself, but with respect to explicit and express profession. The same things which are believed explicitly and under a greater number of articles by the saints in latter days were all believed implicitly and under a smaller number by the fathers in ancient times.’ ”] The Second Helvetic Confession, after the remark that the ordinary mode of salvation is by the instrumentality of the written words, adds (1.7): “We acknowledge, meanwhile, that God can illuminate men even without the external ministry, how and when he pleases, for such lies within his power.”99[Note: 9 99. Agnoscimus, interim, deum illuminare posse homines etiam sine externo ministerio, quo et quando velit: id quod ejus potentiae est.] Westminster Confession 10.3, after saying that “elect infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who works when and where and how he pleases,” adds: “So also are all other elect persons [regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit] who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the word.” This is commonly understood to refer not merely, or mainly, to idiots and insane persons, but to such of the pagan world as God pleases to regenerate without the use of written revelation. One of the strictest Calvinists of the sixteenth century, Zanchi, whose treatise on predestination was translated by Toplady, after remarking that many nations have never had the privilege of hearing the word, says (chap. 4) that “it is not indeed improbable that some individuals in these unenlightened countries may belong to the secret election of grace, and the habit of faith may be wrought in them.” By the term habit (habitus), the elder theologians meant an inward disposition of the heart. The “habit of faith” involves penitence for sin and the longing for its forgiveness and removal. The “habit of faith” is the broken and contrite heart, which expresses itself in the prayer, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” It is certain that the Holy Spirit can produce, if he please, such a disposition and frame of mind in a pagan without employing, as he commonly does, the written word. The case of the blind man in John 9:36-38 is an example of the “habit of faith,” though produced in this instance through the instrumentality of the written law: “Jesus says unto him, Do you believe on the Son of God? He answered and said, Who is he, Lord, that I might believe on him? And Jesus said unto him, You have both seen him, and it is he that talks with you. And he said, Lord, I believe. And he worshiped him.” Here was sorrow for sin and a desire for redemption from it wrought in the heart by the divine Spirit, prior to the actual knowledge of Christ as the Savior of sinners. The cases of the centurion Cornelius and the Ethiopian eunuch are also examples of the “habit of faith.” These men, under the teaching of the Spirit, were conscious of sin and were anxiously inquiring if and how it could be forgiven. That there is a class of persons in unevangelized heathendom who are the subjects of gracious influences of this kind is implied in St. Paul’s affirmation that “they are not all Israel, which are of Israel” (Romans 9:6) and that “they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham” (Galatians 3:7). It is taught also in Matthew 8:11 and Luke 13:30 : “Many shall come from the east and west and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, but the children of the kingdom [those who have had the written word] shall be cast out. And, behold, there are last which shall be first, and there are first which shall be last.” This affirmation of Christ was called out by the “habit of faith or disposition to believe in that Gentile centurion, respecting whom he said, “I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel” (Matthew 8:5-10).100[Note: 00 100. WS: “It is a very significant fact that the subject of the Book of Ruth is a heathen woman; she is, indeed, the third heathen woman in the genealogy of David and Christ, being preceded by the Canaanitess Tamar (Genesis 38:1-30) and the Canaanitess Rahab. Ruth is the most noble of all; a consecrated flower of paganism turning with a longing desire to the light and salvation of Israel. The fact that these three females are brought forward and engrafted on the chosen line or family conveys a very expressive lesson to the Israelites, abases their national pride, and bears testimony (by being both a fulfillment and a type) to all that had been promised to Abraham respecting his seed, namely, that in him should ‘all families of the earth be blessed’ (Genesis 12:3). Of those who are blessed in the seed of Abraham, Naomi represents the people of God who are to proceed from the ancient people of the covenant, and Ruth represents those proceeding from the heathen world” (Kurtz, Sacred History §66).]
The true reason for hoping that an unevangelized heathen is saved is not that he was virtuous, but that he was penitent. A penitent man is necessarily virtuous; but a virtuous man is not necessarily penitent. Sorrow for sin produces morality; but morality does not produce sorrow for sin. A great error is committed at this point. The Senecas, the Antonines, the Plutarchs, and such like have been singled out as the hopeful examples in paganism. It is not for man to decide what was the real state of the heart; but the writings of these men do not reveal the sense of sin, do not express penitence, do not show a craving for redemption. There is too much egotism, self-consciousness, and self-righteousness in them. The man, judged by his books, is moral, but proud. He is virtuous, but plumes himself upon it. This is not a hopeful characteristic, when we are asking what are the prospects of a human soul, before the bar of God: “To this man will I look, says the Lord, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2); “blessed are the poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). (See supplement 7.6.8.) This line of remark holds good in Christendom as well as in heathendom. There is a class of men in modern society marked by morality and lofty self-respect, but by no consciousness of sin and no confession of it. And judged by New Testament principles, no class of mankind is farther off from the kingdom of heaven. There is no class that scorns the publican’s cry and spurns the atoning blood with such decision and energy as they. To them, the words of Christ in a similar case apply: “The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you” (Mark 21:31). The Magdalen is nearer divine pity than the Pharisee. And upon the same principle, those benighted children of ignorance and barbarism who feel their sin and degradation and are ready to listen with docility to the missionary when he comes with the tidings of the infinite compassion are nearer to heaven than the children of a gilded and heartless civilization who have no moral unrest and turn a deaf ear to all the overtures of mercy.101[Note: 01 101. WS: The passage “in every nation, he that fears God and works righteousness is accepted with him” (Acts 10:35) is often explained as teaching that there are in every nation some who live virtuous and exemplary lives and upon this ground obtain the rewards and blessedness of the future. This would be salvation by works, which is impossible, according to St. Paul. This is the error in the question put by Dante to the “eagle” (Paradise 19.66-67): A man Is born on Indus’ banks, and none is there Who speaks of Christ, nor who doth read nor write; And all his inclinations and his acts, As far as human reason sees, are good; And he offendeth not in word or deed: But unbaptized he dies, and void of faith. Where is the justice that condemns him? This is an imaginary case of perfect obedience. There is no such man. It is with reference to such an interpretation of this text, that Westminster Confession 10.4 asserts that “men not professing the Christian religion cannot be saved in any other way whatever, be they never so diligent to frame their lives according to the light of nature and the law of that religion which they do profess,” because their “diligence” is a failure. The Thirty-nine Articles §18 assert that no man, either in Christendom or heathendom, can be saved by his morality and virtue: “They also are to be had accursed that presume to say that every man shall be saved by the law or sect which he professes, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to the law and the light of nature. For Holy Scripture does set out unto us only the name of Jesus Christ, whereby men must be saved.” In the passage above cited, the phrases fearer of God and worker of righteousness are employed technically by St. Peter to denote a man inquiring after the way of salvation: somewhat as it was among the Jews, to signify a proselyte of the gate (Güricke, Church History, 29). This is evident from the fact that to this “devout” Cornelius who “feared God with all his house” (Acts 10:2), the apostle preached Christ as the Savior of sinners, “through whose name, whosoever believes in him shall receive remission of sins,” and that Cornelius believed and was baptized (10:36-48). He would not have done this had he expected that his “fearing God” and “working righteousness,” in other words his own morality and virtue, would save him. In 13:26 the “fearers of God” (hoi phoboumenoi ton theon, οἱφοβούμενοι τὸν θεόν) are distinguished from “the stock of Abraham” or native-born Jews. They were the proselytes of the gate. Into this class of “fearers of God” fall the “devout Greeks” (hoi sebōenoi hellēnes,οἱσεβόμενοιἑλλήνες; 17:4), the “devout persons” (hoi sebōenoi,οἱσεβόμενοι; 17:17), and Lydia, “a worshiper of God” (sebōenē ton theon,σεβομένη τὸν θεόν; 16:14). Lydia went to the Jewish oratory (proseuchē,προσεύχη) in which the audience was divided into Jews and proselytes, each class occupying seats by themselves. As examples of inquirers after salvation, take Augustine and his friends Alypius and Nebridius (Confessions 6.10).]
This extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit is mentioned by the Redeemer to illustrate the sovereignty of God in the exercise of mercy, not to guide his church in their evangelistic labor. His command is to “preach the gospel to every creature.” The extraordinary work of God is not a thing for man to expect and rely upon, either in the kingdom of nature or of grace. It is his ordinary and established method which is to direct him. The law of missionary effort is that “faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 11:17).
Two errors, therefore, are to be avoided: First, that all men are saved; second, that only a few men are saved. Some fifty years ago, Schleiermacher surprised all Lutheran Germany with a defense of the Calvinistic doctrine of election; but the surprise was diminished when it appeared that he held that God has elected and will save every human creature without exception. This cannot be squared with Scripture. On the other hand, some Calvinists have represented the number of the reprobated as greater than that of the elect or equal to it.102[Note: 02 102. WS: Cf. Augustine, City of God 21.12.] They found this upon the words of Christ, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” But this describes the situation at the time when our Lord spoke and not the final result of his redemptive work. Christ himself, in the days of his flesh, called many, but few responded to the call from his gracious lips. Our Lord’s own preaching was not as successful as that of his apostles and of many of his ministers. This was a part of his humiliation and sorrow. But when Christ shall have “seen of the travail of his soul” and been “satisfied” with what he has seen, when the whole course of the gospel shall be complete and shall be surveyed from beginning to end, it will be found that God’s elect or church is “a great multitude which no man can number, out of all nations and kindreds and peoples and tongues,” and that their voice is as the voice of many waters and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, “Hallelujah, for the Lord God omnipotent reigns” (Revelation 7:9; Revelation 19:6). The circle of God’s election is a great circle of the heavens and not that of a treadmill.
Respecting the more difficult case of infants: the Scriptures do not discriminate and except them as a class from the mass of mankind, but involve them in the common sin and condemnation: “Suffer little children to come unto me [their Redeemer]” (Luke 18:16); “the promise [of salvation] is unto you and to your children” (Acts 2:39). The fall in Adam explains their case. Adopting the Augustino-Calvinistic statement of this fall, it can then be said that infants, like all others of the human family, freely and responsibly “sinned in Adam and fell with him in his first transgression” (Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 16). This is no more impossible and no more of a mystery, in the case of infants than of adults. If it be conceded that the whole race apostatized in Adam, infants are righteously exposed to the punishment of sin and have no claim upon divine mercy. The sin which brings condemnation upon them is original sin and not actual transgressions. But original sin is the sinful inclination of the will. An infant has a rational soul, this soul has a will, this will is wrongly inclined, and wrong inclination is self-determined and punishable.103[Note: 03 103. WS: “Quamvis infantes non sint legis capaces quoad actum, sunt tamen quoad habitum, utpote creaturae rationales, quibus lex praescribit omnimodam sanctitatem, tam habitualem quam actualem” [AG: Although infants are not capable of the law with respect to action, they nevertheless are with respect to disposition (habitus), seeing that they are rational creatures to whom the law prescribes every kind of holiness, both dispositional (habitualem) and actual]; Turretin 9.1.9.] If sinful inclination in an adult needs to be expiated by the atoning blood of Christ, so does sinful inclination in an infant. Infants, consequently, sustain the very same relation to the mercy of God in Christ that the remainder of the human race do. They need divine clemency like the rest of mankind. The “salvation” of infants supposes their prior damnation. Whoever asserts that an infant is “saved,” by implication concedes that it is “lost.” The salvation of an infant, like that of an adult, involves the remission and removal of sin and depends upon the unmerited and optional grace of God. This being so, it cannot be said that God would treat an infant unjustly if he did not offer him salvation in the intermediate state. And upon the supposition, now common in the evangelical churches, that all infants dying in infancy, being elect, are “regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who works when and where and how he pleases” (Westminster Confession 10.3), there is no need of any such offer.104[Note: 04 104. WS: Toplady, one of the highest Calvinists of the Church of England, remarks as follows respecting the salvation of all infants dying in infancy: “The rubric of the Church of England declares that ‘it is certain by God’s word that children which are baptized, dying before they commit actual sin, are undoubtedly saved.’ I believe firmly the same. Nay, I believe more. I am convinced that the souls of all departed infants whatever, whether baptized or unbaptized, are with God in glory. And I think my belief warranted by an authority which cannot err:Matthew 18:14” (Church of England Vindicated). The elder Alexander remarks on this point: “As the Holy Scriptures have not informed us that any of the human family departing in infancy will be lost, we are permitted to hope that all such will be saved” (Life, 585).] (See supplement 7.6.9.) Rational Argument The chief objections to the doctrine of endless punishment are not biblical, but speculative. The great majority of students and exegetes find the tenet in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. Davidson, the most learned of English rationalistic critics, explicitly acknowledges that if a specific sense be attached to words, never-ending misery is enunciated in the Bible. On the presumption that one doctrine is taught, it is the eternity of hell torments. Bad exegesis may attempt to banish it from the New Testament Scriptures, but it is still there, and expositors who wish to get rid of it, as Canon Farrar does, injure the cause they have in view by misrepresentation. It must be allowed that the New Testament record not only makes Christ assert everlasting punishment, but Paul and John. But the question should be looked at from a larger platform than single texts: in the light of God’s attributes and the nature of the soul. The destination of man and the Creator’s infinite goodness, conflicting as they do with everlasting punishment, remove it from the sphere of rational belief. If provision be not made in revelation for a change of moral character after death, it is made in reason. Philosophical considerations must not be set aside even by Scripture. (Last Things, 133, 136, 151)
Consequently, after presenting the biblical argument for endless punishment, it becomes necessary to present the rational argument for it. So long as the controversy is carried on by an appeal to the Bible, the defender of endless retribution has comparatively an easy task. But when the appeal is made to human self-love and sentiment or to ratiocination the demonstration requires more effort. And yet the doctrine is not only biblical, but rational. It is defensible on the basis of sound ethics and pure reason. Nothing is requisite for its maintenance but the admission of three cardinal truths of theism, namely, that there is a just God; that man has free will; and that sin is voluntary action. If these are denied, there can be no defense of endless punishment-or of any other doctrine except atheism and its corollaries. (See supplement 7.6.10.) The Bible and all the creeds of Christendom affirm man’s free agency in sinning against God. The transgression which is to receive the endless punishment is voluntary. Sin, whether it be inward inclination or outward act, is unforced human agency. This is the uniform premise of Christian theologians of all schools. Endless punishment supposes the freedom of the human will and is impossible without it. Could a man prove that he is necessitated in his murderous hate and his murderous act, he would prove, in this very proof, that he ought not to be punished for it, either in time or eternity. Could Satan really convince himself that his moral character is not his own work, but that of God or of nature, his remorse would cease and his punishment would end. Self-determination runs parallel with hell.105[Note: 05 105. WS: Many of the arguments constructed against the doctrine of endless punishment proceed upon the supposition that original sin, or man’s evil inclination, is the work of God: that because man is born in sin (Psalms 51:5), he was created in sin. All the strength and plausibility of John Foster’s celebrated letter lies in the assumption that the moral corruption and impotence of the sinner, whereby it is impossible for him to save himself from eternal death, is not self-originated and self-determined, but infused by his maker. “If,” says he, “the very nature of man, as created by the sovereign power, be in such desperate disorder that there is no possibility of conversion and salvation except in instances where that power interposes with a special and redeeming efficacy, how can we conceive that the main portion of the race, thus morally impotent (that is, really and absolutely impotent), will be eternally punished for the inevitable result of this moral impotence?” If this assumption of concreated depravity and impotence is correct, Foster’s objection to eternal retribution is conclusive and fatal.]
Guilt, then, is what is punished, and not misfortune. Free and not forced agency is what feels the stroke of justice. What, now, is this stroke? What do law and justice do when they punish? Everything depends upon the right answer to this question. The fallacies and errors of universalism find their nest and hiding place at this point. The true definition of punishment detects and excludes them.106[Note: 06 106. WS: For a discriminating and thorough statement of the aim of punishment and its distinction from chastisement, see Müller, Sin 1.244-51.]
Punishment is neither chastisement nor calamity. Men suffer calamity, says Christ, not because they or their parents have sinned, “but that the works of God should be made manifest in them” (John 9:3). Chastisement is inflicted in order to develop a good, but imperfect character already formed: “The Lord loves whom he chastens,” and “what son is he whom the earthly father chastens not?” (Hebrews 11:6-7). Punishment, on the other hand, is retribution and is not intended to do the work of either calamity or chastisement, but a work of its own. And this work is to vindicate law, to satisfy justice. Punishment, therefore, as distinguished from chastisement is wholly retrospective in its primary aim. It looks back at what has been done in the past. Its first and great object is requital. A man is hung for murder, principally and before all other reasons, because he has voluntarily transgressed the law forbidding murder. He is not hung from a prospective aim, such as his own moral improvement or for the purpose of deterring others from committing murder. The remark of the English judge to the horse thief, in the days when such theft was capitally punished, “You are not hung because you have stolen a horse, but that horses may not be stolen,” has never been regarded as eminently judicial. It is true that personal improvement may be one consequence of the infliction of penalty. But the consequence must not be confounded with the purpose: cum hoc non ergo propter hoc.107[Note: 07 107. with this, not therefore on account of this. The meaning here is that an action may effect results that lie beyond the purpose for which the action was performed. The unintended results are connected “with” the action, but the action was not performed “on account of” or so as to effect these results.] The criminal may come to see and confess that his crime deserves its punishment and in genuine unselfish penitence may take sides with the law, approve its retribution, and go into the presence of the final judge, relying upon that great atonement which satisfies eternal justice for sin; but even this, the greatest personal benefit of all, is not what is aimed at in man’s punishment of the crime of murder. For should there be no such personal benefit as this attending the infliction of the human penalty, the one sufficient reason for inflicting it still holds good, namely, the fact that the law has been violated and demands the death of the offender for this reason simply and only. Says Kant (Practical Reason, 151 [ed. Rosenkranz]): The notion of ill desert and punishableness is necessarily implied in the idea of voluntary transgression; and the idea of punishment excludes that of happiness in all its forms. For though he who inflicts punishment may, it is true, also have a benevolent purpose to produce by the punishment some good effect upon the criminal, yet the punishment must be justified, first of all, as pure and simple requital and retribution, that is, as a kind of suffering that is demanded by the law without any reference to its prospective beneficial consequences; so that even if no moral improvement and no personal advantage should subsequently accrue to the criminal, he must acknowledge that justice has been done to him and that his experience is exactly conformed to his conduct. In every instance of punishment, properly so called, justice is the very first thing and constitutes the essence of it. A benevolent purpose and a happy effect, it is true, may be conjoined with punishment; but the criminal cannot claim this as his due, and he has no right to reckon upon it. All that he deserves is punishment, and this is all that he can expect from the law which he has transgressed.
These are the words of as penetrating and ethical a thinker as ever lived.108[Note: 08 108. WS: Beccaria and Bentham are the principal modern advocates of the contrary theory that punishment is founded on utility and expediency. Beccaria’s position is that the standard of crime is the injury which it does to society. He refers exclusively to the public good and never appeals to the moral sentiment (“Beccaria” in Penny Cyclopaedia). Bentham takes the same view, connecting it with the utilitarian ethics. From these writers, this theory has passed considerably into modern jurisprudence. Austin, a popular writer on law, follows Bentham. Hobbes (Leviathan 2.28) maintains it. The theory which founds morality upon righteousness and punishment upon justice is historical. Plato (Laws 10.904-5) held that punishment is righteous and retributive. Cicero (On the Laws 1.14-15) contends that true virtue has regard to essential justice, not to utility. Grotius defines penalty as “the evil of suffering which is inflicted on account of the evil of doing.” The great English jurists Coke, Bacon, Selden, and Blackstone explain punishment by crime, not by expediency. Kant, Herbart, Stahl, Hartenstein, Rothe, and Woolsey define punishment as requital for the satisfaction of law and justice (Woolsey, Political Science 2.8; cf. Coleridge, Works 5.447).]
Neither is it true that the first and principal aim of punishment, in distinction from chastisement, is the protection of society and the public good. This, like the personal benefit in the preceding case, is only secondary and incidental. The public good is not a sufficient reason for putting a man to death,109[Note: 09 109. WS: Hence, those who found punishment upon utility and deny that is it retributive endeavor to abolish capital punishment. And if their theory of penalty is true, they are right in their endeavor.] but the satisfaction of law is. This view of penalty is most disastrous in its influence as well as false in its ethics. For if the good of the public is the true reason and object of punishment, the amount of it may be fixed by the end in view. The criminal may be made to suffer more than his crime deserves, if the public welfare in suppressing this particular kind of crime requires it. His personal desert and responsibility not being the one sufficient reason for his suffering, he may be made to suffer as much as the public safety requires. It was this theory of penalty that led to the multiplication of capital offenses. The prevention of forgery, it was once claimed in England, required that the forger should forfeit his life, and upon the principle that punishment is for the public protection and not for strict and exact justice, an offense against human property was expiated by human life. Contrary to the Noachic statute, which punishes only murder with death, this statute weighed out man’s lifeblood against pounds, shillings, and pence. On this theory, the number of capital offenses become very numerous, and the criminal code very bloody. So that, in the long run, nothing is kinder than exact justice. It prevents extremes in either direction: either that of indulgence or that of cruelty.110[Note: 10 110. WS: See the remarks of Graves (Pentateuch 2.2) on the excellence of the Mosaic code in this particular.]
This theory breaks down from whatever point it be looked at. Suppose that there were but one person in the universe. If he should transgress the law of God, then, upon the principle of expediency as the ground of penalty, this solitary subject of moral government could not be punished, that is, visited with a suffering that is purely retributive and not exemplary or corrective. His act has not injured the public, for there is no public. There is no need of his suffering as an example to deter others, for there are no others. But upon the principle of justice, in distinction from expediency, this solitary subject of moral government could be punished. (See supplement 7.6.11.) The vicious ethics of this theory of penalty expresses itself in the demoralizing maxim, “It is better that ten guilty men should escape than that one innocent man should suffer.” But this is no more true than the converse, “It is better that ten innocent men should suffer than that one guilty man should escape.” It is a choice of equal evil and equal injustice. In either case alike, justice is trampled down. In the first supposed case there are eleven instances of injustice and wrong; and in the last supposed case there are likewise eleven instances of injustice and wrong. Unpunished guilt is precisely the same species of evil with punished innocence. To say, therefore, that it is better that ten guilty persons should escape than that one innocent man should suffer is to say that it is better that there should be ten wrongs than one wrong against justice. The maxim assumes that the punishment of the guilty is not of so much consequence as the immunity of the innocent. But the truth is that both are equally required by justice. The theory that punishment is retributive honors human nature, but the theory that it is merely expedient and useful degrades it. If justice be the true ground of penalty, man is treated as a person; but if the public good is the ground, he is treated as a chattel or a thing. When suffering is judicially inflicted because of the intrinsic gravity and real demerit of crime, man’s free will and responsibility are recognized and put in the foreground; and these are his highest and distinguishing attributes. The sufficient reason for his suffering is found wholly within his own person in the exercise of self-determination. He is not seized by the magistrate and made to suffer for a reason extraneous to his own agency and for the sake of something lying wholly outside of himself-namely, the safety and happiness of others-but because of his own act. He is not handled like a brute or an inanimate thing that may be put to good use; but he is recognized as a free and voluntary person who is not punished because punishment is expedient and useful, but because it is just and right-not because the public safety requires it, but because he owes it. The dignity of the man himself, founded in his lofty but hazardous endowment of free will, is acknowledged.
Supposing it, now, to be conceded that future punishment is retributive in its essential nature, it follows that it must be endless from the nature of the case. For, suffering must continue as long as the reason for it continues. In this respect, it is like law, which lasts as long as its reason lasts: ratione cessante, cessat ipsa lex.111[Note: 11 111. after the reason ceases, the law itself ceases] Suffering that is educational and corrective may come to an end because moral infirmity and not guilt is the reason for its infliction, and moral infirmity may cease to exist. But suffering that is penal can never come to an end because guilt is the reason for its infliction, and guilt once incurred never ceases to be. The lapse of time does not convert guilt into innocence, as it converts moral infirmity into moral strength; and therefore no time can ever arrive when the guilt of the criminal will cease to deserve and demand its retribution. The reason for retribution today is a reason forever. Hence, when God disciplines and educates his children, he causes only a temporary suffering. In this case, “he will not keep his anger forever” (Psalms 103:9). But when, as the Supreme Judge, he punishes rebellious and guilty subjects of his government, he causes an endless suffering. In this case, “their worm dies not, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). The real question, therefore, is whether God ever punishes. That he chastises is not disputed. But does he ever inflict a suffering that is not intended to reform the transgressor and does not reform him, but is intended simply and only to vindicate law and satisfy justice by requiting him for his transgression? Revelation teaches that he does: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord” (Romans 12:19); “vengeance belongs unto me, I will recompense, says the Lord” (Hebrews 10:30). Retribution is here asserted to be a function of the Supreme Being and his alone. The creature has no right to punish except as he is authorized by the infinite ruler: “The powers that be are ordained of God. The ruler is the minister of God, an avenger to execute wrath upon him that does evil” (Romans 13:1; Romans 13:4). The power which civil government has to punish crime-the private person having no such power-is only a delegated right from the source of retribution. Natural religion, as well as revealed, teaches that God inflicts upon the voluntary transgressor of law a suffering that is purely vindicative of law. The pagan sages enunciate the doctrine, and it is mortised into the moral constitution of man, as is proved by his universal fear of retribution. The objection that a suffering not intended to reform but to satisfy justice is cruel and unworthy of God is refuted by the question of St. Paul: “Is God unrighteous who takes vengeance?” (3:5-6). It is impossible either to found or administer a government, in heaven or upon earth, unless the power to punish crime is conceded. The endlessness of future punishment, then, is implied in the endlessness of guilt and condemnation. When a crime is condemned, it is absurd to ask, “How long is it condemned?” The verdict “Guilty for ten days” was Hibernian. Damnation means absolute and everlasting damnation. All suffering in the next life, therefore, of which the sufficient and justifying reason is guilt, must continue as long as the reason continues; and the reason is everlasting. If it be righteous today in God’s retributive justice to smite the transgressor because he violated the law yesterday, it is righteous to do the same thing tomorrow and the next day and so on ad infinitum, because the state of the case ad infinitum remains unaltered. The guilt incurred yesterday is a standing and endless fact. What, therefore, guilt legitimates this instant, it legitimates every instant and forever. The demand that penal suffering shall stop when it has once begun is as irrational as the demand that guilt shall stop when it has once begun. The continuous nature of guilt necessitates the endlessness of retribution. A man, for illustration, is guilty of profanity today. God, we will suppose, immediately begins to cause him to suffer in his mind as the righteous requital for his transgression of the third commandment. The transgressor immediately begins to feel remorse for his sin. Why, upon principles of justice, should he feel remorse for his profanity today and not feel it tomorrow? Why should he feel it tomorrow and not feel it a million years hence? Why should he feel it a million years hence and not feel it forever? At what point should remorse stop? If we suppose the state of the case to be unchanged, if we suppose no penitence for the profanity and no appropriation of the only atonement that cancels guilt, then the mental suffering which the profanity deserves and experiences now it always must deserve and experience. The same reasoning will apply to whatever suffering besides remorse enters into the sum total of future punishment.112[Note: 12 112. WS: The intrinsic endlessness of guilt is vividly described by Carlyle: “From the purpose of crime to the act of crime there is an abyss, wonderful to think of. The finger lies on the pistol; but the man is not yet a murderer: nay, his whole nature staggering at such a consummation, is there not a confused pause rather-one last instant of possibility for him? Not yet a murderer; it is at the mercy of light trifles whether the most fixed idea may not yet become unfixed. One slight twitch of a muscle, the death-flash bursts; and he is it and will for eternity be it; and earth has become a penal Tartarus for him; his horizon girdled now not with golden hope, but with red flames of remorse; voices from the depths of nature sounding, Woe, woe on him! Of such stuff are we all made; on such powder mines of bottomless guilt and criminality-‘if God restrained not,’ as is well said-does the purest of us walk? There are depths in man that go to the length of lowest hell, as there are heights that reach highest heaven-for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, made by him, everlasting miracle and mystery as he is?” (French Revolution 3.1.4).]
Again, the endlessness of punishment follows from the indivisibility of guilt. The nature of guilt is such that it cannot be divided up and distributed in parts along a length of time and be expiated in parts, but is concentrated whole and entire at each and every point of time. The guilt of the sin of profanity does not rest upon the transgressor, one part of it at twelve o’clock and another part of it at half past twelve and another part of it at one o’clock and so on. The whole infinite guilt of this act of sin against God lies upon the sinner at each and every instant of time. He is no more guilty of the supposed act at half past twelve than at twelve, and equally guilty at both these instants. Consequently, the whole infinite penalty can justly be required at any and every moment of time. Yet the whole penalty cannot be paid at any and every moment by the suffering of that single moment. The transgressor at any and every point in his endless existence is infinitely guilty and yet cannot cancel his guilt by what he endures at a particular point. Too long a punishment of guilt is thus an impossibility. The suffering of the criminal can never overtake the crime. And the only way in which justice can approximately obtain its dues is by a never-ceasing infliction. We say approximately, because, tested strictly, the endless suffering of a finite being is not strictly infinite suffering; while the guilt of sin against God is strictly infinite. There is, therefore, no overpunishment in endless punishment.113[Note: 13 113. WS: It must be remembered that it is the degree, together with the endlessness of suffering, that constitutes the justice of it. We can conceive of an endless suffering that is marked by little intensity in the degree of it. Such, according to Augustine, is the suffering of unbaptized infants (mitissima omnium = the mildest of all). It is negative banishment, not positive infliction. An evil that is inflicted in a few hours may be greater than one inflicted in endless time. One day of such torment as that of Satan would be a greater distress than a slight physical pain lasting forever. The infinite incarnate God suffered more agony in Gethsemane than the whole finite human race could suffer in endless duration. Consequently, the uniformity in the endlessness must be combined with a variety in the intensity of suffering in order to adjust the future punishment to the different grades of sin (see p. 738).]
It will be objected that, though the guilt and damnation of a crime be endless, it does not follow that the suffering inflicted on account of it must be endless also, even though it be retributive and not reformatory in its intent. A human judge pronounces a theft to be endlessly a theft and a thief to be endlessly a thief, but he does not sentence the thief to an endless suffering, though he sentences him to a penal suffering. But this objection overlooks the fact that human punishment is only approximate and imperfect, not absolute and perfect like the divine. It is not adjusted exactly and precisely to the whole guilt of the offense, but is more or less modified, first, by not considering its relation to God’s honor and majesty; second, by human ignorance of the inward motives; and, third, by social expediency. Earthly courts and judges look at the transgression of law with reference only to man’s temporal relations, not his eternal. They punish an offense as a crime against the state, not as a sin against God. Neither do they look into the human heart and estimate crime in its absolute and intrinsic nature, as does the searcher of hearts and the omniscient judge.114[Note: 14 114. WS: “Human laws,” says Paley (Moral Philosophy 1.3), “omit many duties, such as piety to God, bounty to the poor, forgiveness of injuries, education of children, gratitude to benefactors. And they permit or, which is the same thing, suffer to go unpunished many crimes, such as luxury, prodigality, caprice in the disposition of property by will, disrespect to parents, and a multitude of similar examples.”] A human tribunal punishes mayhem, we will say, with a six-month imprisonment because it does not take into consideration either the malicious and wicked anger that prompted the maiming or the dishonor done to the Supreme Being by the transgression of his commandment. But Christ, in the final assize, punishes this offense endlessly, because his all-seeing view includes the sum total of guilt in the case, namely, the inward wrath, the outward act, and the relation of both to the infinite perfection and adorable majesty of God. The human tribunal does not punish the inward anger at all; the divine tribunal punishes it with hellfire: “For whosoever shall say to his brother, You fool, is in danger of hellfire” (Matthew 5:22). The human tribunal punishes seduction with a pecuniary fine because it does not take cognizance of the selfish and heartless lust that prompted it or of the affront offered to that immaculate holiness which from Sinai proclaimed, “You shall not commit adultery.” But the divine tribunal punishes seduction with an infinite suffering because of its more comprehensive and truthful view of the whole transaction. And, in addition to all this imperfection in human punishment, the human tribunal may be influenced by prejudice and selfishness: In the corrupted currents of this world, Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice; And oft ’tis seen, the wicked prize itself Buys out the law. But ’tis not so above.
There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature; and we ourselves compelled Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, To give in evidence.
-Hamlet 3.4
Again, human punishment, unlike the divine, is variable and inexact because it is to a considerable extent reformatory and protective. Human government is not intended to do the work of the supreme ruler. The sentence of an earthly judge is not a substitute for that of the last day. Consequently, human punishment need not be marked, even if this were possible, with all that absoluteness and exactness of justice which characterizes the divine. Justice in the human sphere may be relaxed by expediency. Human punishment may sometimes be more severe and sometimes less severe than exact requital demands, but divine punishment may not be. The retributive element must, indeed, enter into human punishment; for no man may be punished by a human tribunal unless he deserves punishment-unless he is a criminal. But retribution is not the sole element when man punishes. Man, while not overlooking the guilt in the case, has some reference to the reformation of the offender and still more to the protection of society. Here, in time, the transgressor is capable of reformation, and society needs protection. Hence civil expediency and social utility modify exact and strict retribution. For the sake of reforming the criminal, the judge sometimes inflicts a penalty that is less than the real guilt of the offense. For the sake of shielding society, the court sometimes sentences the criminal to a suffering greater than his crime deserves. Human tribunals, also, vary the punishment for the same offense: sometimes punishing forgery capitally and sometimes not, sometimes sentencing those guilty of the same kind of theft to one year’s imprisonment and sometimes to two. But the divine tribunal, in the last great day, is invariably and exactly just, because it is neither reformatory nor protective. In eternity, the sinner is so hardened as to be incorrigible, and heaven is impregnable. Hell, therefore, is not a penitentiary. It is righteous retribution, pure and simple, unmodified by considerations either of utility to the criminal or of safety to the universe. In the day of final account, penalty will not be unjustly mild for the sake of the transgressor nor unjustly severe for the sake of society. Christ will not punish incorrigible men and devils (for the two receive the same sentence and go to the same place; Matthew 25:41) for the purpose of reforming them or of screening the righteous from the wicked, but of satisfying the broken law. His punishment at that time will be nothing but just requital. The Redeemer of men is also the eternal judge; the Lamb of God is also the Lion of the tribe of Judah; and his righteous word to wicked and hardened Satan, to wicked and hardened Judas, to wicked and hardened pope Alexander VI, will be: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay. Depart from me, you cursed, that work iniquity” (Romans 12:19; Matthew 25:41; Matthew 7:23); “the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven, with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God and that obey not the gospel” (2 Thessalonians 1:7-8). The wicked will receive their desert and reap according as they have sown. The suffering will be unerringly adjusted to the intrinsic guilt: no greater and no less than the sin deserves: “That servant which knew his lord’s will [clearly] and did not according to his will shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not [clearly] and did commit things worthy of stripes shall be beaten with few stripes. As many have sinned without [written] law shall also perish without [written] law; and as many as have sinned under [written] law shall be judged by the [written] law” (Luke 12:47-48; Romans 2:12).
It is because the human court, by reason of its ignorance both of the human heart and the true nature of sin against a spiritual law and a holy God, cannot do the perfect work of the divine tribunal that human laws and penalties are only provisional and not final. Earthly magistrates are permitted to modify and relax penalty and pass a sentence which, though adapted to man’s earthly circumstances, is not absolute and perfect and is finally to be revised and made right by the omniscient accuracy of God. The human penalty that approaches nearest to the divine is capital punishment. There is more purely retributive element in this than in any other. The reformatory element is wanting. And this punishment has a kind of endlessness. Death is a finality. It forever separates the murderer from earthly society, even as future punishment separates forever from the society of God and heaven. The difference between human and divine punishment is well stated by Paley (Moral Philosophy 6.9): The proper end of human punishment is not the [exact] satisfaction of justice, but the prevention of crimes. By the satisfaction of justice, I mean the retribution of so much pain for so much guilt, which is the dispensation we expect at the hand of God and which we are accustomed to consider as the order of things that perfect justice requires. Crimes are not by any government punished in proportion to their [exact] guilt, nor in all cases ought to be so, but in proportion to the difficulty and the necessity of preventing them. The crime must be prevented by some means or other; and consequently whatever means appear necessary to this end, whether they be proportionable to the [exact] guilt of the criminal or not, are adopted rightly. It is in pursuance of this principle, which pervades indeed the whole system of penal jurisprudence, that the facility with which any species of crime is perpetrated has been generally deemed a reason for aggravating the punishment. This severity would be absurd and unjust, if the [exact] guilt of the offender was the immediate cause and measure of the punishment. On the other hand, from the justice of God we are taught to look for a gradation of punishment exactly proportioned to the guilt of the offender. When, therefore, in assigning the degrees of human punishment we introduce considerations distinct from that of guilt and a proportion so varied by external circumstances that equal crimes frequently undergo unequal punishments or the less crime the greater, it is natural to demand the reason why a different measure of punishment should be expected from God: why that rule which befits the absolute and perfect justice of the deity should not be the rule which ought to be preserved and imitated by human laws. The solution of this difficulty must be sought for in those peculiar attributes of the divine nature which distinguish the dispensations of supreme wisdom from the proceedings of human judicature. A being whose knowledge penetrates every concealment, from the operation of whose will no act or flight can escape and in whose hands punishment is sure-such a being may conduct the moral government of his creation in the best and wisest manner by pronouncing a law that every crime shall finally receive a punishment proportioned to the guilt which it contains, abstracted from any foreign consideration whatever, and may testify his veracity to the spectators of his judgments by carrying this law into strict execution. But when the care of the public safety is entrusted to men whose authority over their fellow creatures is limited by defects of power and knowledge, from whose utmost vigilance and sagacity the greatest offenders often lie hid, whose wisest precautions and speediest pursuit may be eluded by artifice or concealment, a different necessity, a new rule of proceeding results from the very imperfection of their faculties. In their hands, the uncertainty of punishment must be compensated by the severity. The ease with which crimes are committed or concealed must be counteracted by additional penalties and increased terrors. The very end for which human government is established requires that its regulations be adapted to the suppression of crimes. This end, whatever it may do in the plans of infinite wisdom, does not, in the designation of temporal penalties, always coincide with the proportionate punishment of guilt.
Blackstone also (Commentaries 4.1) alludes to the same difference in the following words: “The end or final cause of human punishments is not atonement or expiation for the crime committed, for that must be left to the just determination of the Supreme Being.” The argument thus far goes to prove that retribution in distinction from correction-or punishment in distinction from chastisement-is endless from the nature of the case, that is, from the nature of guilt. We pass, now, to prove that it is also rational and right.
Endless punishment is rational, in the first place, because it is supported by the human conscience. The sinner’s own conscience will “bear witness” and approve of the condemning sentence “in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ” (Romans 2:16). Dives, in the parable, when reminded of the justice of his suffering, is silent. Accordingly, all the evangelical creeds say with Westminster Larger Catechism 89 that “the wicked, upon clear evidence and full conviction of their own consciences, shall have the just sentence of condemnation pronounced against them.” If in the great day there are any innocent men who have no accusing consciences, they will escape hell. We may accommodate St. Paul’s words (Romans 13:3-4) and say: “The final judgment is not a terror to good works, but to evil. Will you, then, not be afraid of the final judgment? Keep the law of God perfectly, without a single slip or failure, inwardly or outwardly, and you shall have praise of the same. But if you do that which is evil, be afraid.” But a sentence that is justified by the highest and best part of the human constitution must be founded in reason, justice, and truth. It is absurd to object to a judicial decision that is confirmed by the man’s own immediate consciousness of its righteousness: For what, my small philosopher, is hell?
’Tis nothing but full knowledge of the truth, When truth, resisted long, is sworn our foe: And calls eternity to do her right.
-Young The opponent of endless retribution does not draw his arguments from the impartial conscience, but from the bias of self-love and desire for happiness. His objections are not ethical but sentimental. They are not seen in the dry light of pure truth and reason, but through the colored medium of self-indulgence and love of ease and sin.
Again, a guilty conscience expects endless punishment. There is in it what the Scriptures denominate “the fearful looking-for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries” of God (Hebrews 10:27). This is the awful apprehension of an evil that is to last forever, otherwise it would not be so “fearful.” The knowledge that future suffering will one day cease would immediately relieve the apprehension of the sinner. A guilty conscience is in its very nature hopeless. Impenitent men, in their remorse, “sorrow as those who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Unconverted Gentiles “have no hope and are without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12); “the hope of the wicked shall be as the giving up of the ghost” (Job 11:20); “the hypocrite’s hope shall perish” (8:13). Consequently, the great and distinguishing element in hell torment is despair, a feeling that is impossible in any man or fallen angel who knows that he is finally to be happy forever. Despair results from the endlessness of retribution. No endlessness, no despair.115[Note: 15 115. WS: “If,” says Pearson (On the Creed, art. 5), “we should imagine any damned soul to have received an express promise of God that after ten thousand years he would release him from those torments and make him everlastingly happy and to have a true faith in that promise and a firm hope of receiving eternal life, we could not say that that man was in the same condition with the rest of the damned or that he felt all that hell which they were sensible of or all that pain which was due unto his sins, because hope and confidence and relying upon God would not only mitigate all other pains but wholly take away the bitter anguish of despair.” It is obvious that if God makes any such promise in his word, either expressly or by implication, despair is not only impossible to the believer of Scripture, but is a sin. No man should despair. And if God does not make any such promise, but man makes it to his fellow sinner in saying, as Satan did to Eve, “you shall not surely die,” and the human promise is believed, the effect will be the same. There will be no despair until the reckless human falsehood is corrected by the awful demonstration at death.] Natural religion, as well as revealed, teaches the despair of some men in the future life. Plato (Gorgias 525), Pindar (Olympia 2), and Plutarch (On the Delay of the Deity in the Punishment of the Wicked) describe the punishment of the incorrigibly wicked as eternal and hopeless. In Scripture there is no such thing as eternal hope. Hope is a characteristic of earth and time only. Here in this life, all men may hope for forgiveness: “Turn, you prisoners of hope” (Zechariah 9:2); “now is the accepted time; now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). But in the next world, there is no hope of any kind, because there is either fruition or despair. The Christian’s hope is converted into its realization: “For what a man sees, why does he yet hope for it?” (Romans 8:24):
Soon shall close thine earthly mission, Soon shall pass thy pilgrim days;
Hope shall change to glad fruition, Faith to sight, and prayer to praise. And the impenitent sinner’s hope of heaven is converted into despair. Canon Farrar’s phrase eternal hope is derived from Pandora’s box, not from the Bible. Dante’s legend over the portal of hell is the truth: “All hope abandon, you who enter here.”116[Note: 16 116. WS: The words of Paul in1 Corinthians 13:13are sometimes cited to prove the eternity of hope, because it “abides.” But in this passage, “faith, hope, and charity” are contrasted with the supernatural charismata of1 Corinthians 12:1-31. These latter are transitory, but the former “abide,” because they are essential to the Christian life here on earth. But in respect to the eternity of “faith,” St. Paul teaches that it is converted into “sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7) and that “hope” is converted into “fruition” (Romans 8:24). Charity is “greater” than faith and hope, because it is not changed into something else, but is eternal.]
That the conscience supports endless retribution is also evinced by the universality and steadiness of the dread of it. Mankind believe in hell, as they believe in divine existence, by reason of their moral sense. Notwithstanding all the attack made upon the tenet in every generation, by a fraction of every generation, men do not get rid of their fear of future punishment. Skeptics themselves are sometimes distressed by it. But a permanent and general fear among mankind cannot be produced by a mere chimera or a pure figment of the imagination. Men have no fear of Rhadamanthus, nor can they be made to fear him, because they know that there is no such being: “An idol is nothing in the world” (1 Corinthians 8:4). But men have “the fearful looking-for of judgment” from the lips of God, ever and always. If the biblical hell were as much a nonentity as the heathen Atlantis, no one would waste his time in endeavoring to prove its nonexistence. What man would seriously construct an argument to demonstrate that there is no such being as Jupiter Ammon or such an animal as the centaur? The very denial of endless retribution evinces by its spasmodic eagerness and effort to disprove the tenet, the firmness with which it is entrenched in man’s moral constitution. If there really were no hell, absolute indifference toward the notion would long since have been the mood of all mankind; and no arguments, either for or against it, would be constructed. And finally, the demand, even here upon earth, for the punishment of the intensely and incorrigibly wicked proves that retribution is grounded in the human conscience. When abominable and satanic sin is temporarily triumphant, as it sometimes has been in the history of the world, men cry out to God for his vengeance to come down. “If there were no God, we should be compelled to invent one” is now a familiar sentiment. “If there were no hell, we should be compelled to invent one” is equally true. When examples of depravity occur, man cries: “How long, O Lord, how long?” The noninfliction of retribution upon hardened villainy and successful cruelty causes anguish in the moral sense. For the expression of it, read the imprecatory psalms and Milton’s sonnet on the massacre in Piedmont. (See supplement 7.6.12.) In the second place, endless punishment is rational because of the endlessness of sin. If the preceding view of the relation of penalty to guilt be correct, endless punishment is just, without bringing the sin of the future world into the account. Man incurs everlasting punishment for “the things done in his body” (2 Corinthians 5:10). Christ sentences men to perdition, not for what they are going to do in eternity, but for what they have already done in time. It is not necessary that a man should commit all kinds of sin or that he should sin a very long time in order to be a sinner: “Whosoever shall keep the whole law and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all” (James 2:10). One sin makes guilt, and guilt makes hell.117[Note: 17 117. WS:
O fearful thought! one act of sin Within itself contains the power of endless hate of God, And everlasting pains.
-Faber, Hymn on Predestination]
But while this is so, it is a fact to be observed that sin is actually being added to sin in the future life, and the amount of guilt is accumulating. The lost spirit is “treasuring up wrath” (Romans 2:5). Hence, there are degrees in the intensity of endless suffering. The difference in the grade arises from the greater resoluteness of the wicked self-determination and the greater degree of light that was enjoyed upon earth. He who sins against the moral law as it is drawn out in the Sermon on the Mount sins more determinedly and desperately than the pagan who sins against the light of nature. There are probably no men in paganism who sin so willfully and devilishly as some men in Christendom. Profanity or the blaspheming of God is a Christian and not a heathen characteristic.118[Note: 18 118. WS: It is related of Dr. Scudder that on his return from his mission in India, after a long absence, he was standing on the deck of a steamer with his son, a youth, when he heard a person using loud and profane language. “See, friend,” said the doctor, accosting the swearer, “this boy, my son, was born and brought up in a heathen country and a land of pagan idolatry; but in all his life he never heard a man blaspheme his maker until now.”] They are Christian peoples who force opium and rum on helpless pagans. These degrees of sin call for degrees of suffering. And there are degrees in future suffering, because it is infinite in duration only. In intensity, it is finite. Consequently, the lost do not all suffer precisely alike, though all suffer the same length of time. A thing may be infinite in one respect and finite in others. A line may be infinite in length and not in breadth and depth. A surface may be infinite in length and breadth and not in depth. And two persons may suffer infinitely in the sense of endlessly, and yet one experience more pain than the other. The endlessness of sin results, first, from the nature and energy of sinful self-determination. Sin is the creature’s act solely. God does not work in the human will when it wills antagonistically to him. Consequently, self-determination to evil is an extremely vehement activity of the will. There is no will so willful as a wicked will. Sin is stubborn and obstinate in its nature because it is enmity and rebellion. Hence, wicked will intensifies itself perpetually. Pride, left to itself, increases and never diminishes. Enmity and hatred become more and more satanic. “Sin,” says South, “is the only perpetual motion which has yet been found out and needs nothing but a beginning to keep it incessantly going on.” Upon this important point, Aristotle, in the seventh book of his Ethics, reasons with great truth and impressiveness. He distinguishes between akolasia119[Note: 19 119. ἀκολασία = viciousness] and akrasia,120[Note: 20 120. ἀκρασία = weakness] between strong will to wickedness and weak self-indulgence. The former is viciousness from deliberation and preference and implies an intense determination to evil in the man. He goes wrong not so much from the pull of appetite and passion as purposely, knowingly, and energetically. He has great strength of will, and he puts it all forth in resolute wickedness. The latter quality is more the absence than the presence of will; it is the weakness and irresolution of a man who has no powerful self-determination of any kind. The condition of the former of these two men Aristotle regarded as worse than that of the latter. He considered it to be desperate and hopeless. The evil is incurable. Repentance and reformation are impossible to this man; for the wickedness in this instance is not mere appetite; it is a principle; it is cold-blooded and total depravity.
Another reason for the endlessness of sin is the bondage of the sinful will. In the very act of transgressing the law of God, there is a reflex action of the human will upon itself, whereby it becomes unable to perfectly keep that law. Sin is the suicidal action of the human will. A man is not forced to kill himself; but if he does, he cannot bring himself to life again. And a man is not forced to sin, but if he does, he cannot of himself get back where he was before sinning. He cannot get back to innocency, nor can he get back to holiness of heart. The effect of vicious habit in diminishing a man’s ability to resist temptation is proverbial. An old and hardened debauchee, like Tiberius or Louis XV, just going into the presence of infinite purity, has not so much power of active resistance against the sin that has now ruined him, as the youth has who is just beginning to run that awful career. The truth and fact is that sin, in and by its own nature and operation, tends to destroy all virtuous force, all holy energy, in any moral being. The excess of will to sin is the same thing as defect of will to holiness. The human will cannot be forced and ruined from without. But if we watch the influence of the will upon itself, the influence of its own wrong decisions and its own yielding to temptations, we shall find that the voluntary faculty may be ruined from within, may surrender itself with such an absorbing vehemence and totality to appetite, passion, and selfishness that it becomes unable to reverse itself and overcome its own inclination and self-determination. And yet, from beginning to end, there is no compulsion in this process. The transgressor follows himself alone. He has his own way and does as he likes. Neither God nor the world nor Satan forces him either to be or to do evil. Sin is the most spontaneous of self-motion. But self-motion has consequences as much as any other motion. And moral bondage is one of them: “Whosoever commits sin is the slave of sin,” says Christ (John 8:35). The culmination of this bondage is seen in the next life. The sinful propensity, being allowed to develop unresisted and unchecked, slowly but surely eats out all virtuous force as rust eats out a steel spring, until in the awful end the will becomes all habit, all lust, and all sin: “Sin, when it is finished, brings forth death” (James 1:15). In the final stage of this process, which commonly is not reached until death, when “the spirit returns unto God who gave it,” the guilty free agent reaches that dreadful condition where resistance to evil ceases altogether and surrender to evil becomes demoniacal. The cravings and hankerings of long-indulged and unresisted sin become organic and drag the man; and “he goes after them as an ox goes to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks, till a dart strike through his liver” (Proverbs 7:22-23). For though the will to resist sin may die out of a man, the conscience to condemn it never can. This remains eternally. And when the process is complete, when the responsible creature in the abuse of free agency has perfected his moral ruin and his will to good is all gone, there remain these two in his immortal spirit: sin and conscience, “brimstone and fire” (Revelation 21:8).
Still another reason for the endlessness of sin is the fact that rebellious enmity toward law and its source is not diminished, but increased, by the righteous punishment experienced by the impenitent transgressor. Penal suffering is beneficial only when it is humbly accepted, is acknowledged to be deserved, and is penitently submitted to; when the transgressor says, “Father, I have sinned and am no more worthy to be called your son; make me as one of your hired servants” (Luke 15:18-19); when, with the penitent thief, he says, “We are in this condemnation justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds” (23:41). But when in this life retribution is denied and jeered at and when in the next life it is complained of and resisted and the arm of hate and defiance is raised against the tribunal, penalty hardens and exasperates. This is impenitence. Such is the temper of Satan; and such is the temper of all who finally become his associates. This explains why there is no repentance in hell and no meek submission to the Supreme Judge. This is the reason why Dives, the impenitent sensualist, on discovering that there is no reformation in hades, asks that Lazarus may be sent to warn his five brethren, “lest they also come into this place of torment.”121[Note: 21 121. WS: Müller (Sin 1.246) exposes the error of supposing that punishment is remedial in its nature and adapted to produce penitence and reformation, in the following terms: “The distinctive purpose of divine punishment cannot be the improvement of the person punished, because this is the object of redemption. If punishment were the means appropriate to this end, there would be no need for redemption; or rather, if this object is attained by redemption, of what use is the severity of punishment? Are we to suppose that when redemption proves ineffectual for the improvement of man, punishment must be resorted to, to attain the object? It would then follow that punishment is more effectual for man’s regeneration than redemption. The conflict between the sphere of punishment and that of redemption becomes all the more perplexing when we recollect that the main feature of redemption is the doing away with punishment by the forgiveness of sins. If punishment be remedial, is it a kindness to free man from it before it has accomplished its work? And how is it possible that redemption, which is the removal of punishment, should renovate, if punishment itself does so also? And yet the influence of punishment in preserving and reestablishing the power of moral goodness in the sufferer must not be wholly denied. Punishment, on the one hand, acts as a barrier against the desolating inroads of sin by reasserting the fixed ordainments of the law; and, on the other hand, it bears witness to the sinner of the crushing power wherewith evil recoils upon himself and makes him tremble when he surrenders himself to it. In these two ways, it prepares man for the work of redemption. But in its own distinctive nature, it is not adapted or calculated to produce a true improvement, an inward renovation of the sinner. On the contrary, the two spheres, that of redemption, which alone can accomplish a true renewal, and that of punishment, mutually exclude one another. Whenever a living participation in the blessings of redemption begins, punishment, properly so called-dikē (δίκη = punishment, vengeance), ekdikēsis (ἐκδίκησις = vengeance, punishment), timōria (τιμωρία = punishment)-ceases; but, so long as man continues to be the subject of God’s righteous punishment, he is excluded from those blessings (John 3:36).” Twesten (Dogmatik 2.39) argues in the same manner: “Punishment is not a proper means of reformation; for true reformation can issue only from free self-determination. It is voluntary in its nature. But a self-determination that is brought about by the fear of pain would not be moral and of the nature of virtue. Any reformation effected from a selfish motive is not genuine reformation. Furthermore if true reformation could be produced by punishment, why should not the legal and punitive method of the Old Testament have been the only one? The old economy was full of threatenings and penalties and of fearful examples of their actual execution. Why did God send his Son and make a new covenant and economy of mercy? Of what use is redemption or the remission of punishment if punishment is in itself healing and remedial? The Scriptures never represent punishment as reformatory. The proper punishment of sin is death (Romans 6:23). As temporal death, which is the extreme penalty in human legislation, is not intended to reform the criminal and reinstate him in human society, but forever cut him off from it, so eternal death in the biblical representation is not intended to be a means of educating the sinner and fitting him for the kingdom of heaven, but forever banishing and excluding him from it.”]
In the third place, endless punishment is rational because sin is an infinite evil: infinite, not because committed by an infinite being, but against one. We reason invariably upon this principle. To torture a beast is a crime; to torture a man is a greater crime. To steal from one’s own mother is more heinous than to steal from a fellow citizen. The person who transgresses is the same in each instance; but the different worth and dignity of the objects upon whom his action terminates makes the difference in the gravity of the two offenses. David’s adultery was a finite evil in reference to Uriah, but an infinite evil in reference to God. “Against you only have I sinned” was the feeling of the sinner in this case. Had the patriarch Joseph yielded, he would have sinned against Pharaoh. But the greatness of the sin as related to the fellow creature is lost in its enormity as related to the Creator, and his only question is “how can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?”122[Note: 22 122. WS: Those who deny the position that sin is an infinite evil forget that the principle upon which it rests is one of the commonplaces of jurisprudence: the principle, namely, that crime depends upon the object against whom it is committed as well as upon the subject who commits it. The merely subjective reference of an act is not sufficient to determine whether it is a crime. The act may have been the voluntary act of a person, but unless it is also an offense against another person, it is no crime. To strike is a voluntary act; but to strike a post or a stone is not a culpable act. Furthermore, not only crime, but degrees of crime depend upon the objective reference of a personal act. Estimated only by the subjective reference, there can be not only no culpability, but no difference in culpability. Killing a dog is no worse than killing a man, if merely the subject who kills and not the object killed is considered. Both alike are voluntary acts and of one and the same person. If, therefore, the gravity of the act is to be measured solely by the nature of the person committing it and not by that of the thing against whom it is committed, killing a dog is as heinous as killing a man. Now this principle of jurisprudence is carried into theology by the theologian. The violation of the moral law is sin and guilt, only when viewed objectively in reference to God primarily and to man secondarily. Viewed merely and wholly in reference to the transgressor himself, it is not sin and guilt at all. It is sin only as committed against God or man. Again, it is only the objective reference that will yield degrees of sin. One and the same act may be simultaneously an offense against an individual, a family, a state, and God. Measured by the nature and qualities of the offender himself, it has no degrees. But measured by the nature and qualities of these moral objects against whom it is committed, it has degrees of turpitude. As the first three are only finite in worth and dignity, the culpability is only certain degrees of the finite. As the last is infinite in worth and dignity, the culpability is infinite also. Cf. Edwards, Justice of God in Works 4.228.]
The incarnation and vicarious satisfaction for sin by one of the persons of the Godhead demonstrates the infinity of the evil. It is incredible that the eternal Trinity should have submitted to such a stupendous self-sacrifice to remove a merely finite and temporal evil. The doctrine of Christ’s vicarious atonement, logically, stands or falls with that of endless punishment. Historically, it has stood or fallen with it. The incarnation of almighty God, in order to make the remission of sin possible, is one of the strongest arguments for the eternity and infinity of penal suffering. The objection that an offense committed in a finite time cannot be an infinite evil and deserve an infinite suffering implies that crime must be measured by the time that was consumed in its perpetration. But even in human punishment, no reference is had to the length of time occupied in the commission of the offense. Murder is committed in an instant, and theft sometimes requires hours. But the former is the greater crime and receives the greater punishment. In the fourth place, that endless punishment is reasonable is proved by the preference of the wicked themselves. The unsubmissive, rebellious, defiant, and impenitent spirit prefers hell to heaven. Milton correctly represents Satan as saying: “All good to me becomes bane, and in heaven much worse would be my state” and also as declaring that “it is better to reign in hell that to serve in heaven.” This agrees with the scriptural representation that Judas went “to his own place” (Acts 1:25). The lost spirits are not forced into a sphere that is unsuited to them. There is no other abode in the universe which they would prefer to that to which they are assigned, because the only other abode is heaven. The meekness, lowliness, sweet submission to God, and love of him that characterize heaven are more hateful to Lucifer and his angels than even the sufferings of hell. The wicked would be no happier in heaven than in hell. The burden and anguish of a guilty conscience, says South, is so insupportable that some “have done violence to their own lives and so fled to hell as a sanctuary and chose damnation as a release.” This is illustrated by facts in human life. The thoroughly vicious and ungodly man prefers the license and freedom to sin which he finds in the haunts of vice to the restraints and purity of Christian society. There is hunger, disease, and wretchedness in one circle; and there is plenty, health, and happiness in the other. But he prefers the former. He would rather be in the gambling house and brothel than in the Christian home:
Those that, notwithstanding all gracious means, live continually in rebellion against God; those that impenitently die in their sins; those that desire to live here forever that they might enjoy their sweet sins; those that are so hardened and naturalized in their vices that if they were revived and brought again into this world of temptations would certainly return to the pleasures of sin-is it not right that their incorrigible obstinacy should be punished forever? (Bates, On Eternal Judgment 3) The finally lost are not to be conceived of as having faint desires and aspirations for a holy and heavenly state and as feebly but really inclined to sorrow for their sin, but are kept in hell contrary to their yearning and petition. They are sometimes so described by the opponent of the doctrine or at least so thought of. There is not a single throb of godly sorrow or a single pulsation of holy desire in the lost spirit. The temper toward God in the lost is angry and defiant. “They hate both me and my father,” says the Son of God, “without a cause” (John 15:24-25). Satan and his followers “love darkness rather than light,” hell rather than heaven, “because their deeds are evil” (3:19). Sin ultimately assumes a fiendish form and degree. It is pure wickedness without regret or sorrow and with a delight in evil for evil’s sake. There are some men who reach this state of depravity even before they die: “Some men’s sins are evident beforehand, going before to judgment” (1 Timothy 5:24 Revised Version). They are seen in the callous and cruel voluptuaries portrayed by Tacitus and the heaven-defying atheists described by St. Simon. They are also depicted in Shakespeare’s Iago. The reader knows that Iago is past saving and deserves everlasting damnation. Impulsively, he cries out with Lodovico: “Where is that viper? bring the villain forth.” And then Othello’s calmer but deeper feeling becomes his own: “I look down toward his feet-but that’s a fable: If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill you.” The punishment is remitted to the retribution of God.123[Note: 23 123. WS: It ought to be noticed that the “hatred” of himself and of his Father, which Christ attributes to “the world” (John 15:18-19) and which is a distinguishing element in impenitence, does not necessarily imply sensuality and vice. Sin may be wholly intellectual: what St. Paul denominates “spiritual wickedness” (Ephesians 6:12). The most profound of Shakespearean critics calls attention to “the passionless character of Iago. It is all will in intellect” (Coleridge, Works 4.180). The “carnal mind” manifests itself in two ways. The proud spirit of the moralist is one phase of it; the self-indulgent spirit of the voluptuary is the other. The Pharisee represents the first; Dives the last. Both alike confess no sin and implore no forgiveness. In illustration of the former, consider the temper of a certain class of intellectual men toward the cross of Christ. They are perhaps austerely moral. By temperament, taste, study, and occupation, they have even an antipathy to sensuality. They “scorn delights and live laborious days.” But present for their acceptance those truths of the New Testament which involve the broken and contrite heart, and their whole inward being rises in vehement recoil. Of the effect of the doctrine of election, Calvin remarks that “when the human mind hears of it, its irritation breaks all restraint, and it discovers as serious and violent agitation as if alarmed by the sound of a martial trumpet” (3.22.1). So, too, when the authoritative demand of Jesus Christ to confess sin and beg remission through atoning blood is made to David Hume or David Strauss or John Stuart Mill, none of whom were sensualists, it wakens intense mental hostility. Now without asserting which theory in religion is true, that of the New Testament or that of the skeptic, is it not clear that if there be another life and if the teaching of the New Testament shall prove to be the absolute truth, the latter person must be classed with the “haters of God?” Will not the temper of this unsensual and intellectual man toward what is found, in the end, to be eternal verity be as thoroughly of the nature of enmity as that of the most immoral and hardened debauchee? Müller alludes to unsensual and intellectual sin in the following terms: “That which makes sin to be sin and which is the evil of evil is the selfish isolation of the man which it involves. There are cases … where a man keeps himself free from wild ungovernable passions and only seldom is guilty of overt acts which conscience recognizes as sins; yet in his inmost heart ‘the I, that gloomy despot,’ rules supreme; he stands alone in the world, shut up within himself and in a chaos of selfish endeavors, preferences, antipathies, without any true participation in the joys and sorrows of mankind, estranged from God. In such a state, the principle of sin, though shut up within, rules with no less real power than where its dominion is manifest in glaring wickedness and vice and a wild disorder of the outward life” (Sin 1.136). Müller also notices that mere intellectuality is no certain preservative against sensuality and vice: “A superficial observation of life has led to the conclusion that immorality decreases in proportion as the growth of the intellectual nature increases, and the ‘children of this generation’ pride themselves in no small degree upon the discovery that culture and not Christianity is the means of true freedom and the panacea for all the disorders of the world. But a single unbiased and penetrating glance at life will suffice to dissipate these illusions. We oftentimes find the deepest moral degradation and disorder in the very highest stages of culture, a frivolity of mind resolving all the relations of life into rottenness and utter insensibility to every impulse of holy love and a cold, calculating, self-conscious egotism, which puts from it the call to sacrifice any one of its own interests as something altogether absurd-the men with whom it comes in contact being regarded merely as ciphers, by whose help its own aggrandizement may be attained. Mental culture does not eradicate a single tendency of moral depravity; it only veils and refines them all; and so far from redeeming the man, if it be not sanctified by a higher principle, it really confirms within him the dominion of sin” (Sin 1.306-7). In corroboration of this, see the discriminating remarks of Thomas Arnold on the character of Sylla in “Roman Republic, 21” in Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.]
In the fifth place, that endless punishment is rational is proved by the history of morals. In the records of human civilization and morality, it is found that that age which is most reckless of law and most vicious in practice is the age that has the loosest conception of penalty and is the most inimical to the doctrine of endless retribution. A virtuous and religious generation adopts sound ethics and reverently believes that “the judge of all the earth will do right” (Genesis 18:25); that God will not evil good and good evil nor put darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20); and that it is a deadly error to assert with the sated and worn-out sensualist: “All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous and the wicked” (Ecclesiastes 9:2). The French people, at the close of the eighteenth century, were a very demoralized and vicious generation, and there was a very general disbelief and denial of the doctrines of divine existence, immortality of the soul, freedom of the will, and future retribution. And upon a smaller scale, the same fact is continually repeating itself. Any little circle of businessmen who are known to deny future rewards and punishments are shunned by those who desire safe investments. The recent uncommon energy of opposition to endless punishment, which started about ten years ago in this country, synchronized with great defalcations and breaches of trust, uncommon corruption in mercantile and political life, and great distrust between man and man. Luxury deadens the moral sense, and luxurious populations do not have the fear of God before their eyes. Hence luxurious ages and luxurious men recalcitrate at hell and “kick against the goads.” No theological tenet is more important that eternal retribution to those modern nations which, like England, Germany, and the United States, are growing rapidly in riches, luxury, and earthly power. Without it, they will infallibly go down in that vortex of sensuality and wickedness that swallowed up Babylon and Rome. The bestial and shameless vice of the dissolute rich that has recently been uncovered in the commercial metropolis of the world is a powerful argument for the necessity and reality of “the lake which burns with fire and brimstone.” A single remark remains to be made respecting the extent and scope of hell. It is only a spot in the universe of God. Compared with heaven, hell is narrow and limited. The kingdom of Satan is insignificant in contrast with the kingdom of Christ. In the immense range of God’s dominion, good is the rule, and evil is the exception. Sin is a speck upon the infinite azure of eternity, a spot on the sun. Hell is only a corner of the universe. The Gothic etymon (Höhle, Hölle) denotes a covered-up hole. In Scripture, hell is a “pit,” a “lake”-not an ocean. It is “bottomless” but not boundless. The gnostic and dualistic theories which make God and Satan (or the demiurge) nearly equal in power and dominion find no support in revelation. The Bible teaches that there will always be some sin and some death in the universe. Some angels and men will forever be the enemies of God.124[Note: 24 124. WS: “There is this certainty,” says Hooker (Polity 5.49), “that life and death divide between them the whole body of mankind. What portion either of the two has, God himself knows; for us he has left no sufficient means to comprehend and for that cause has not given any leave to search in particular who are infallibly the heirs of the kingdom of God and who are castaways. Howbeit, concerning the state of all men with whom we live, we may till the world’s end always presume, that as far as in us there is power to discern what others are and as far as any duty of ours depends upon the notice of their condition in respect to God, the safest axioms for charity to rest itself upon are these: ‘He which believes already is the child of God; and he which believes not as yet may become the child of God.’ It becomes not us, during life, altogether to condemn any man, seeing that for anything we know there is hope of every man’s forgiveness, the possibility of whose repentance is not cut off by death. And therefore charity, which ‘hopes all things,’ prays also for all men.” To the same effect says Zanchi (Predestination, 3): “I grant that there are some particular persons mentioned in the divine word, of whose reprobation no doubt can be made; such as Esau and Judas. But now the canon of Scripture is completed, we dare not, we must not pronounce any man living to be nonelect, be he at present ever so wicked. The vilest sinner may, for aught we can tell, appertain to the election of grace and be one day wrought upon by the Spirit of God. This we know, that those who die in unbelief and are finally unsanctified cannot be saved: because God in his word tells us so and has represented these as marks of reprobation. But to say that such and such individuals, whom perhaps we now see dead in sins, shall never be converted to Christ, would be a most presumptuous assertion, as well as an inexcusable breach of the charity which hopes all things.”] But their number, compared with that of unfallen angels and redeemed men, is small. They are not described in the glowing language and metaphors by which the immensity of the holy and blessed is delineated: “The chariots of God are twenty thousand and thousands of angels” (Psalms 68:17); “the Lord came from Sinai and shined forth from Mount Paran, and he came with ten thousands of his saints” (Deuteronomy 22:2); “the Lord has prepared his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all” (Psalms 103:21); “yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory” (Matthew 6:13). The Lord Christ “must reign till he has put all enemies under his feet” (1 Corinthians 15:25). St. John “heard a voice from heaven as the voice of many waters and as the voice of a great thunder” (Revelation 14:1). The New Jerusalem “lies four square, the length is as large as the breadth; the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day; the kings of the earth do bring their honor into it” (21:16, 24-25). The number of the lost spirits is never thus emphasized and enlarged upon. The brief, stern statement is that “the fearful and unbelieving shall have their part in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone” (21:8). No metaphors and amplification are added to make the impression of an immense “multitude which no man can number.”125[Note: 25 125. WS: Calvin, explaining the elect “seven thousand” inRomans 11:4, remarks that “though this stands for an indefinite number, it was the Lord’s design to specify a great multitude. Since, then, the grace of God prevails so much in an extreme state of things, let us not lightly give over to the devil all those whose piety does not openly appear to us.” Zwingli thought that all who died in early childhood are regenerated and saved. Edwards (Against Chauncy, 14) denies that it is an article of his faith that “only a small part of the human race will finally be saved.” Hopkins (Future State, 5) asserts that “there is reason to believe that many more of mankind will be saved than lost; yea, it may be many thousands to one.” Hodge (Theology 3.879) says that “we have reason to believe that the number of the finally lost, in comparison with the whole number of the saved, will be very inconsiderable.”] (See supplement 7.6.13.)
We have thus presented the rational argument for the most severe and unwelcome of all the tenets of the Christian religion. It must have a foothold in the human reason or it could not have maintained itself against all the recoil and opposition which it elicits from the human heart. Founded in ethics, in law, and in judicial reason, as well as unquestionably taught by the author of Christianity, it is no wonder that the doctrine of eternal retribution, in spite of selfish prejudices and appeals to human sentiment, has always been a belief of Christendom. From theology and philosophy it has passed into human literature and is wrought into its finest structures. It makes the solemn substance of the Iliad and the Greek drama. It pours a somber light into the brightness and grace of the Aeneid. It is the theme of the Inferno and is presupposed by both of the other parts of the Divine Comedy. The epic of Milton derives from it its awful grandeur. And the greatest of the Shakespearean tragedies sound and stir the depths of the human soul by their delineation of guilt intrinsic and eternal. In this discussion, we have purposely brought into view only the righteousness of almighty God as related to the voluntary and responsible action of man. We have set holy justice and disobedient free will face to face and drawn the conclusions. This is all that the defender of the doctrine of retribution is strictly concerned with. If he can demonstrate that the principles of eternal rectitude are not in the least degree infringed upon, but are fully maintained when sin is endlessly punished, he has done all that his problem requires. Whatever is just is beyond all rational attack.126[Note: 26 126. WS: Said one of the deepest and most profoundly penitent of human spirits: “I have had more than a glimpse of what is meant by death and outer darkness and the worm that dies not-and that all the hell of the reprobate is no more inconsistent with the love [benevolence] of God than the blindness of one who has occasioned loathsome and guilty diseases to eat out his eyes is inconsistent with the light of the sun” (Cottle, Reminiscences of Coleridge, 282).]
But with the Christian gospel in his hands, the defender of divine justice finds it difficult to be entirely reticent and say not a word concerning divine mercy. Over against God’s infinite antagonism and righteous severity toward moral evil, there stands God’s infinite pity and desire to forgive. This is realized, not by the high-handed and unprincipled method of pardoning without legal satisfaction of any kind, but by the strange and stupendous method of putting the eternal judge in the place of the human criminal, of substituting God’s own satisfaction for that due from man. In this vicarious atonement for sin, the triune God relinquishes no claims of law and waives no rights of justice. The sinner’s divine substitute, in his hour of voluntary agony and death, drinks the cup of punitive and inexorable justice to the dregs. Any man who, in penitent faith, avails himself of this vicarious method of setting himself right with the eternal nemesis will find that it succeeds; but he who rejects it must through endless cycles grapple with the dread problem of human guilt in his own person and alone. The Christian gospel-the universal offer of pardon through the self-sacrifice of one of the divine persons-should silence every objection to the doctrine of endless punishment. For as the case now stands, there is no necessity, so far as the action of God is concerned, that a single human being should ever be the subject of future punishment. The necessity of hell is founded in the action of the creature, not of the Creator. Had there been no sin, there would have been no hell; and sin is the product of man’s free will. And after the entrance of sin and the provision of redemption from it, had there been universal repentance in this life, there would have been no hell for man in the next life. The only necessitating reason, therefore, for endless retribution that now exists is the sinner’s impenitence. Should every human individual, before he dies, sorrow for sin and humbly confess it, hades and gehenna would disappear. (See supplement 7.6.14.) For the Scriptures everywhere describe God as naturally and spontaneously merciful and declare that all the legal obstacles to the exercise of this great attribute have been removed by the death of the Son of God “for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). In the very center of the holy revelations of Sinai, Jehovah proclaimed it to be his inherent and intrinsic disposition to be “merciful and gracious, long-suffering, forgiving iniquity and transgression” (Exodus 34:6-7). Nehemiah, after the exile, repeats the doctrine of the Pentateuch: “You are a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, and of great kindness” (Nehemiah 9:17). The psalmist declares that “the Lord is ready to forgive and plenteous in mercy unto all that call upon him” (Psalms 86:5); “the Lord takes pleasure in them that fear him, in those that hope in his mercy” (147:11). From the twilight of the land of Uz, Elihu, feeling after the promised Redeemer if haply he might find him (Job 33:23), declares that “God looks upon men, and if any say, I have sinned and perverted that which was right, and it profited me not; he will deliver his soul from going down to the pit, and his life shall see the light” (33:27-28). The Bible throughout teaches that the Supreme Being is sensitive to penitence and is moved with compassion and paternal yearning whenever he perceives any sincere spiritual grief. He notices and welcomes the slightest indication of repentance: “The eye of the Lord is upon them that fear him, upon them that hope in his mercy” (Psalms 33:18); “whoso confesses and forsakes his sins shall have mercy” (Proverbs 28:13). The heavenly Father sees the prodigal when he is “yet a great way off.” He never “breaks the bruised reed” nor “quenches the smoking flax.” If there be in any human creature the broken and contrite heart, divine pity speaks the word of forgiveness and absolution. The humble confession of unworthiness operates almost magically upon the eternal. Incarnate mercy said to the heathen “woman of Canaan” who asked for only the dogs’ crumbs, “O woman, great is your faith; be it unto you even as you will” (Matthew 15:28). The omnipotent is overcome whenever he sees lowly penitential sorrow. As “the foolishness of God is wiser than man,” so the self-despairing helplessness of man is stronger than God. When Jacob says to the infinite one, “I am not worthy of the least of all your mercies,” yet wrestles with him “until the breaking of the day,” he becomes Israel and “as a prince has power with God” (Genesis 32:10; Genesis 32:24; Genesis 32:28). When Jehovah hears Ephraim “bemoaning himself” and saying, “Turn me, and I shall be turned,” he answers, “Ephraim is my dear son. I will surely have mercy upon him” (Jeremiah 31:18; Jeremiah 31:20).127[Note: 27 127. WS: Beatrice expresses the same truth to Dante:
Whene’er the sinner’s cheek Breaks forth into the precious-streaming tears Of self-accusing, in our court the wheel Of justice does run counter to the edge.
-Purgatory 31.36]
Now the only obstruction, and it is a fatal one, to the exercise of this natural and spontaneous mercy of God is the sinner’s hardness of heart. The existing necessity for hell punishment is not chargeable upon God. It is the proud and obstinate man who makes hell. It is his impenitence that feeds its perpetual fires. For so long as the transgressor does not grieve for sin and does not even acknowledge it, it cannot be pardoned. Almightiness itself cannot forgive impenitence, any more than it can make a square circle. Impenitence after sinning is a more determined and worse form of sin than sinning is in and of itself. For it is a tacit defense and justification of sin. If after transgression the person acknowledges that he has transgressed and asks forgiveness for so doing, he evinces that he does not excuse his act or defend it. On the contrary, he renounces his act, condemns it, and mourns over it. But if after transgression the person makes no acknowledgment and asks no forgiveness, he is repeating and intensifying his sin. He justifies himself in his act of rebellion against authority and thus aggravates the original fault. It is for this reason that impenitence for sin is more dreadful than sin itself. A penitent sinner can be forgiven; but an impenitent sinner cannot be. The former God pities and extends the offer of mercy to him. To the latter God holds out no hope, because he cannot. This is what gives to human existence here upon earth its dark outlook. All the gloom, discontent, and anxiety of human life grow out of this. This is what makes “all the uses of this world so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.” Men are impenitent. They give no heed to the voice of conscience, know little of remorse, nothing of genuine sorrow. They are stolid and lethargic in sin or else angrily deny the fact. They bend no knee in self-abasement before the all holy; they do not cry, “O Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, grant me your peace.” Human life is wretched and despairing, not because there is no mercy in the sweet heavens, but because there is no relenting, no softening, in the human heart. One is weary of hearing the incessant wail of the agnostic and the cynic over the “mystery” of this existence, the monotonous moan of the pessimist that life is not worth living. A sincere confession of what the consciousness of every man will tell him is the absolute truth respecting his character and conduct, when tried by a spiritual and perfect standard, would drive away this false view of earthly existence as the miasmic fog is blown by the winds. But instead of confessing sin and imploring its forgiveness, men stand complaining of its punishment or employing their ingenuity in endeavoring to prove that there is none; and then wonder that the heavens are black and thunderous over their heads. Not by this method will the sky be made clear and sunny. Whoever will cast himself upon divine compassion will find life to be worth living; but he who quarrels with divine justice will discover that he had better not have been born. (See supplement 7.6.15.)
What the human race needs is to go to the divine confessional. The utterance of the prodigal should be that of every man: “Father, I have sinned.” The utterance of the psalmist should be that of every man: “O you that hear prayer, unto you shall all flesh come. Iniquities prevail against me: as for our transgressions, you shall purge them away.” “God commands all men everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30). But so long as man glosses over or conceals the cardinal fact in his history, he must live under a cloud and look with anxiety and fear into the deep darkness beyond. It is useless to contend with the stubborn fact of moral evil by the ostrich method of ignoring and denying. The sin is here, in self-consciousness, terrible and real, the lancinating sting of pain and the deadly sting of death, in this generation and in all generations. Kant, the ethical and the metaphysical, is right when he affirms that the noumenon of sin is the dark ground under the phenomenon of life. Confession, therefore, is the only way to light and mental peace. The suppression of any fundamental form of human consciousness necessarily results in unrest. Man’s words about himself must agree with his true character and condition; otherwise he becomes insincere, miserable, and false. The denial of moral evil is the secret of the murmuring and melancholy with which so much of modern letters is filled. Rousseau made a confession, but not truthful, not humble; and hence it brought him no repose. Augustine made a confession, genuine, simple, thoroughly accordant with the facts of human nature; and the outpouring of his confidences into the ear of eternal purity and mercy brought the peace that passes all understanding and the immortal life that knows no melancholy and no dissatisfaction. These historic persons are types of the two classes into which all men fall: the penitent and the impenitent. The king in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, writhing with selfish remorse but destitute of unselfish sorrow, in his soliloquy exclaims:
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it, when one cannot repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O liméd soul; that struggling to be free Art more engaged!
Bunyan’s man of Despair, in the iron cage, when assured by Christian that “the Son of the Blessed is very pitiful,” replies: “I have so hardened my heart that I cannot repent.” In these powerful delineations, these profound psychologists of sin bring to view a peril that environs free will. Pardon may be proffered by God, but penitence may become impossible through the action of man. “There are some sins,” says Augustine, “that follow of necessity, from foregoing sins that occurred without necessity.” The adoption of atheism is a sin without necessity. It is the voluntary action of man. But the hardness of heart that results from it results of necessity. No man is forced to be an infidel; but if he is one, he must be an impenitent man. A luxurious and skeptical age should remember this. That man cannot repent who drowns himself in pleasure and never seriously reflects upon his accountability to his maker. That man cannot repent who expends the energy of his mind in the endeavor to prove that all human action is irresponsible and the threatenings of revelation an idle tale. They who have “eyes full of adultery cannot cease from sin” (2 Peter 2:14). Absorption in worldliness and adoption of infidel opinions make repentance an impossibility. Sensuality and atheism harden the human heart and render it impervious to the Christian religion.
S U P P L E M E N T S
7.6.1 (see p. 885). Augustine thus states his view of endless punishment: “The church justly abominates the opinion of Origen that even they whom the Lord says are to be punished with everlasting punishment, and also the devil himself and his angels, after a time, however protracted, will be purged and released from their penalties and shall then cleave to the saints who reign with God in blessedness” (Proceedings of Pelagius 10). “Eternal punishment seems hard and unjust to human perceptions, because in the weakness of our mortal condition there is wanting that highest wisdom by which it can be perceived how great a wickedness was committed in that first transgression. The more enjoyment man found in God, the greater was his wickedness in abandoning God; and he who destroyed in himself a good that might have been eternal become deserving of eternal evil. Hence the whole mass of the human race is condemned; for he who at first gave entrance to sin has been punished with all his posterity who were in him as in a root, so that no one is exempt from this just and deserved punishment unless delivered by mercy and undeserved grace. And the human race is so apportioned that in some is displayed the efficacy of merciful grace, in the rest the efficacy of just retribution. For both could not be displayed in all; for if all had remained under the punishment of just condemnation there would have been seen in no one the mercy of redeeming grace; and on the other hand, if all had been transferred from darkness to light, the strict justice of retribution would have been manifested in none. But many more are left under punishment than are delivered from it in order that it may thus be shown what was due to all. And had it been inflicted on all, no one could justly have found fault with the justice of him who takes vengeance; whereas, in the deliverance of so many from that just award, there is cause to render the most hearty thanks to the gratuitous bounty of him who delivers” (City of God 21.12). An analysis of the doctrine contained in these extracts respecting eternal retribution, gives the following particulars: (1) Original sin is the self-determination of the human species in Adam and is punishable for the same reason that any wrong self-determination is. Sinful inclination originated in this manner is as voluntary and unforced agency as any volition prompted by it. The whole human race, consequently, responsibly ruined themselves in Adam’s fall and made themselves justly liable to eternal death. Actual transgression is not the primary, but the secondary reason for future punishment. It adds to original sin and increases the degree of the penalty, but is not the first ground for it. The principal Scripture for this is Romans 5:12-19. (2) Salvation from eternal death is undeserved, because guilt has no desert but that of penalty; it cannot therefore be claimed as due by any man, and it is bestowed without obligation on the part of God and upon whomsoever he chooses. (3) When bestowed, it manifests his attribute of mercy and that in its highest form of self-sacrifice in the vicarious sufferings and death of his Son; and when not bestowed, it manifests his justice. It will be seen from this analysis that the self-produced and responsible fall of the human race in Adam is the key to Augustine’s doctrine of endless retribution. If it be denied or disproved, universalism is the logical consequence. For if original sin and sinful inclination are necessitated and guiltless, so are the actual transgressions that issue from it. The stream has the same qualities with the fountain. (4) The number of the saved is less than that of the lost. Modern Calvinists have departed from Augustine in affirming the converse, by teaching the regeneration of all who die in infancy.
7.6.2 (see p. 887). The agnostic position which Dorner takes respecting the doctrine of endless punishment, in saying that it “remains veiled in mystery,” though formally negative and noncommittal is really as positive as direct denial and attack. Agnosticism, generally, is a crafty way of casting doubt upon truth and of rejecting it. If a person says that there may or may not be a God, but that no one knows certainly, this has the same practical effect as avowed atheism. It tends to destroy the belief in a deity and the fear of him. So also, if a person says that there may or may not be salvation after death, this has the same general influence as positive universalism. It contributes to weaken the conviction that men will be endlessly punished for the deeds done in the body. If I say to a person: “The Bible is reticent upon the subject of the future life. It does not positively teach that probation ends for all mankind at death. It may or it may not; no one knows certainly,” I relieve him in a great measure from the fear of hell. For he will regard the assertion that there possibly may be a future probation as equivalent to the assertion of the probability of such a probation. If a thing is possible, it may be actual; and when the thing possible is strongly desired and its contrary is greatly dreaded, the possibility will be construed into actuality. It will be of little use for the agnostic in eschatology to put in a caveat and attempt to warn the sinner. If he reminds him that we do not certainly know that there is salvation after death, the reply will be, that neither do we certainly know that there will not be. A theorist of this class writes as follows: “What resources may be available in other worlds, only the great arbiter can know. Hence modern theology emphasizes with solemn appeal the need of instant surrender of the heart to God. Delay is dangerous, and it may be fatal.” “And it may not be fatal,” is the agnostic sinner’s reply, which takes all the force out of this so-called solemn appeal and warning. This agnostic method of sapping the doctrine of endless retribution is not only wanting in frank and open dealing in an argument, but is chargeable with falsifying divine revelation. To say that the Bible “veils the subject of endless punishment in mystery” and that it is “reticent upon the subject of the future life,” in the face of such an eschatology as the Son of God presents in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, to say nothing of the great mass of similar teaching in other parts of the divine word, is an assumption and assurance that is contradicted by the well-nigh unanimous verdict of all readers and students of Scripture in all time.
7.6.3 (see p. 889). In Christ’s account of the day of judgment he describes himself as dividing mankind into two classes, saying to one, “Come, you blessed,” and to the other, “Depart, you cursed.” This language naturally implies that these two classes are to exist always and forever. It makes the impression of finality and has been so understood by the immense majority of readers. But if the penalty of sin is only remedial and temporary, there is ultimately only one class. All men are finally blessed of God. Upon this supposition the transactions of the judgment day are a mere unmeaning show. The day of doom, instead of being a solemn administration of divine justice having a final and irrevocable character, as our Lord represents, is only a spectacle like a scene in a play. A temporary curse is pronounced from the throne of judgment upon some men that is afterward followed by an eternal blessing upon them. This view destroys the moral sincerity and veracity of the Son of God. It is inconceivable that he who is and styles himself the truth should engage in such a false and deluding transaction before the assembled universe and that to any of mankind who he foreknows will finally be his friends and enter eternal joy, he will speak the words: “You serpents, you generation of vipers, how can you escape the damnation of hell.” It is incredible that the righteous judge of the universe will at one time say to some of mankind: “Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels,” and at a subsequent time say to this very same class, “Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”
7.6.4 (see p. 892). Respecting the use of figures in describing the misery of hell, Paley (sermon 31) states the case with great plainness and power: “I admit that it is very difficult to handle the dreadful subject of the punishment of hell properly; and one cause among others of the difficulty is that it is not for one poor sinner to denounce such appalling terrors, such tremendous consequences against another. Damnation is a word which lies not in the mouth of man, who is a worm, toward any of his fellow creatures whatsoever; yet it is absolutely necessary that the threatenings of almighty God be known and published. Therefore, we begin by observing that the accounts which the Scriptures contain of the punishment of hell are, for the most part, delivered in figurative or metaphorical terms; that is to say, in terms which represent things of which we have no notion by a comparison with things with which we have a notion. Therefore take notice what those figures and metaphors are. They are of the most dreadful kind which words can express; and be they understood how they may, ever so figuratively, it is plain that they convey and were intended to convey ideas of horrible torment. They are such as these: ‘Being cast into hell, where the worm dies not and where the fire is not quenched.’ It is ‘burning the chaff with unquenchable fire.’ It is ‘going into fire everlasting, which is prepared for the devil and his angels.’ It is ‘being cast with all the members into hell, where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched.’ These are heart-appalling expressions and were undoubtedly intended by the person who used them, who was no other than our Lord Jesus Christ himself, to describe terrible endurings, positive, actual pains of the most horrible kinds. I have said that the punishment of hell is thus represented to us in figurative speech. I now say that from the nature of things it could not have been represented to us in any other. It is of the very nature of pain that it cannot be known but by being felt. It is impossible to give to anyone an exact conception of it without his actually tasting it. Experience alone teaches its acuteness and intensity. For which reason, when it was necessary that the punishment of hell should be set forth in Scripture for our warning and set forth to terrify us from our sins, it could only be done as it has been done by comparing it with sufferings of which we can form conception and making use of terms drawn from these sufferings. When words less figurative and more direct but at the same time more general are adopted, they are not less strong otherwise than as they are more general: ‘Indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that does evil.’ These are St. Paul’s words. It is a short sentence, but enough to make the stoutest heart tremble; for though it unfold no particulars, it clearly designates positive torment.”
7.6.5 (see p. 893). Olshausen (on Matthew 12:32) thus interprets: “To explain this passage as meaning that although the sin against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven in this eon nor the next eon, it shall be afterward, plainly contradicts the intention of the speaker. For the proposition it shall not be forgiven is the direct contrary of the proposition it shall be forgiven, and the adjunct neither in this eon, neither in the eon to come is certainly intended to strengthen, not to weaken, the affirmation of nonforgiveness. Matthew does not conceive of the aiōn mellōn128[Note: 28 128. αἰὼν μέλλων = age to come] as only a fractional part of future duration which is to be followed by other fractions indefinitely, but as constituting, in connection with aiōn houtos,129[Note: 29 129. αἰὼν οὗτος = this age] the whole of duration.” Consequently, if a sin is not forgiven in either eon, it is never forgiven. This same reasoning applies to that other interpretation of this passage which makes it teach that all sins excepting that against the Holy Spirit shall be forgiven in the world to come, if they have not been forgiven in this world. To hold out the hope of forgiveness in the next world is to destroy the force and effect of the threat to punish sin which is made in this world; and it cannot be supposed that God would thus weaken and undo all his punitive legislation and menace here in time.
7.6.6 (see p. 894). Anselm (Proslogion 21) describes the rhetorical plural as the equivalent of the literal singular: “For as an age of time contains all things pertaining to time, so your eternity contains even ages of time themselves. Your eternity is called an age (aiōn)130[Note: 30 130. αἰών] on account of its indivisible immensity.”
7.6.7 (see p. 901). Another explanation of those texts which seem to teach that the dead are unconscious is given by Edwards (God’s End in Creation 2.4): “There are several Scriptures which lead us to suppose that the great thing God seeks of the moral world and the end to be aimed at by moral agents is the manifestation or making known of the divine perfections. This seems implied in that argument God’s people sometimes made use of, in deprecating a state of death and destruction; that in such a state they cannot proclaim the glorious excellency of God: ‘Shall your loving-tenderness be declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in destruction? Shall your wonders be known in the dark, and your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?’ (Psalms 88:18-18; Psalms 30:9). The argument seems to be this: Why should we perish? And how shall your end, for which you have made us, be obtained in a state of destruction in which your glory cannot be declared? ‘The grave cannot praise you, death cannot celebrate you. The living, the living, he shall praise you, as I do this day; the father to the children shall make known your truth’ (Isaiah 38:18-19).”
Cook (Bible Commentary), in his introduction to the Psalms §17 and in his interpretation of them, gives the following view of the “notices of the future state” contained in this part of Scripture: “Respecting the feelings and hopes of the psalmist touching a future state, it is clear, on the one hand, that no formal revelation of a future state of retribution had as yet been vouchsafed to the Israelites. It is indeed certain, our Lord’s authority makes it certain, that this truth was implicitly contained in God’s manifestation of himself as the God of Abraham and the fathers; and also that the patriarchs of old looked upon life here but as a pilgrimage (Hebrews 11:13). David himself (Psalms 39:12) prays, ‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, and hold not your peace at my tears: for I am a stranger with you and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.’ The stranger is one who is merely a guest for a season, the sojourner one who lives as a client under the protection of a prince or noble: neither has any right or settled footing in the land. An image which is at once humbling and suggestive of a sure hope. The earth is not the home of man (cf. Leviticus 25:23; 1 Chronicles 29:15; Psalms 119:19). Still we cannot reasonably doubt that to the generality of the people, the grave or the unknown sheol, of which the grave is the entrance, bounded the region of hope and fear [as it does to the generality of mankind today]. It has been shown in the introduction and notes to Job that the writer of that book at least felt that attempts to vindicate the righteousness of God would be futile, were the problem of the future state left unsolved; and that in the agony of the death struggle, when all other hope was finally abandoned, the conviction sprang up that God would manifest himself in some unknown way as the Redeemer. But the hope was after all vague and suggestive; little more than a preparation for a future disclosure of the truth.
“It would be easy to settle the question were we to decide it by reference to the numerous passages in which the state of the departed is represented as one of darkness, where there is no ‘remembrance of God,’ where ‘he is not praised,’ neither loved nor dreaded. On looking at these passages carefully, we may indeed find reason to conclude that they speak of the condition of those who are the objects of divine punishment and that they express the fears of one who regards himself as having incurred divine displeasure. Such, for example, is Psalms 6:5. David here speaks of those who die not saved; see verse 4. For such there is no opportunity to celebrate the mercy of God or to give him thanks. David knew that life is the season for serving God, and this knowledge sufficed for practical purposes until the life and immortality dimly anticipated by the patriarchs were brought to light by Christ. Again, 16:8-11 (quoted by St. Peter in Acts 2:31 and by St. Paul in 13:35 in proof of the resurrection) contains one of the very clearest and strongest declarations of belief in a blessed futurity which can be adduced from the Old Testament. As such it is recognized by ancient and modern interpreters, none speaking out more clearly than Ewald, who says: ‘It goes beyond other words of David, nor is anything corresponding to it found in later Hebrew writers.’ There is but one adequate explanation of such a fact, namely, that the Spirit of Christ which was in David as a prophet (1 Peter 1:11; Acts 2:30) moved and controlled his utterances, so that while they expressed fully his own yearnings, they ‘signified beforehand the glory that should follow’ in the resurrection of Christ.
“But even in those psalms which contain such declarations as make the impression of a final triumph of death and the cessation of consciousness, we are struck by the expression of feelings which are wholly incompatible with the certainty of annihilation: in none are there more lively, joyous expressions of trust and hope; see especially the last half of Ps. 146 and 13:3 contrasted with 13:5. Nor are these expressions to be explained as referring to the anticipation of a temporary deliverance from death or to the postponement of a general and inevitable doom. The psalmists speak of thanks to be offered to the Lord God forever (30:12; 61:8; 145:1, 21), of an eternal portion in heaven (16:11; 17:15), and of the end of the upright as peace (37:37). In the very depth of humiliation and hopelessness, so far as this life is concerned, God is called upon as Helper, Deliverer, and Redeemer; as ‘the Lord my salvation’ (38:22; 88:1). The general judgment is regarded as a day when the wicked shall not stand in the congregation of the righteous (1:5), as the morning of the eternal day when the upright shall have dominion over the wicked (49:14), when the righteous shall see the light, while the man who is ‘in honor and understands not is like the beasts that perish’ (49:20). Taking such statements in their combination and mutual bearings as explaining, developing, and illustrating each other, it is strange that any should fail to recognize throughout the Psalms a state of feelings and convictions which speak of a deep, though it may be half-conscious faith in the perpetuity of the soul, the light, the glory (16:9), the spiritual principle of God’s rational creatures. The soul will see ‘light in God’s light’ (36:9); ‘God will be its portion forever’ (73:26). Touching the great bulk of the Davidic psalms, indeed of the whole Psalter, there are throughout indications, more or less distinct, sometimes faint, sometimes singularly bright and strong, of an undercurrent of feeling in harmony with those undying and irrepressible aspirations which God has implanted in souls bearing his impress and capable of union with him; a union which excludes the possibility of annihilation.”
Upon this general subject, Baxter (Dying Thoughts, introduction) remarks as follows: “I have often marveled to find David in the Psalms, and other saints before Christ’s coming, to have expressed so great a sense of the things of this present life and to have said so little of another; to have made so great a matter of prosperity, dominions, and victories on the one hand and of enemies, success, and persecution on the other. But I consider that it was not for mere personal, carnal interest, but for the church of God and for his honor, word, and worship. And they knew that if things go well with us on earth, they will be sure to go well in heaven. If the militant church prosper in holiness, there is no doubt but it will triumph in glory. God will be sure to do his part in receiving souls if they be here prepared for his receipt. And Satan does much of his damning work by men; so that if we escape their temptations we escape much of our danger. If idolaters prospered, Israel was tempted to idolatry. The Greek church is almost swallowed up by Turkish prosperity and dominion. Most follow the powerful and prosperous side. And therefore for God’s cause and for heavenly, everlasting interest, our own state, but much more the church’s, must be greatly regarded here on earth. Indeed, if earth be desired only for earth and prosperity loved but for the present welfare of the flesh, it is the certain mark of damning carnality and an earthly mind. But to desire peace and prosperity and power to be in the hands of wise and faithful men, for the sake of souls and the increase of the church and the honor of God, that his name may be hallowed, his kingdom come, his will be done on earth as it is in heaven, this is to be the chief of our prayers to God.”
7.6.8 (see p. 908). Augustine’s view of pagan virtue is thus expressed: “You allude in your letter to the fact that Xenocrates converted Polemo from a dissipated to a sober life, though the latter was not only habitually intemperate, but was actually intoxicated at the time. Now although this was, as you truthfully apprehend, not a case of conversion to God, but of emancipation from a particular form of self-indulgence, I would not ascribe even this amount of improvement wrought in him to the power of man, but to the power of God. For even in the body all excellent things, such as beauty, vigor, health, and the like, are the work of God, to whom nature owes its creation and preservation; how much more certain, then, must it be that none but God can impart excellent quality to the soul. If, therefore, Polemo, when he exchanged a life of dissipation for a life of sobriety, had so understood whence the gift came, that renouncing the superstitions of the heathen he had rendered worship to the divine giver, he would then have become not only temperate, but truly wise and savingly religious; which would have secured to him not merely the practice of virtue in this life, but also immortal blessedness in the life to come” (Letter 144.2). “If we say that all without exception who were found in hell were delivered therefrom by Christ when he descended thither, who would not rejoice if this could be proved? Especially would men rejoice for the sake of some who are known to us by their literary labors-poets, philosophers, and orators-who have held up to contempt the false gods of the nations and have even occasionally confessed the one true God, although along with the rest they observed superstitious rites, and also for the sake of many more of whom we have no literary remains, but respecting whom we have learned from the writings of these others that their lives were to a certain extent praiseworthy, so that with the exception of idolatry and serving the creature rather than the Creator, they may be held up as models of frugality, self-sacrifice, chastity, sobriety, braving death in their country’s defense, and keeping faith not only with their fellow citizens but also their enemies. All these things, indeed, when they are not performed in true humility to the glory of God, but in pride and for the sake of human praise and glory, become morally worthless and unprofitable; nevertheless, as indications of a certain temper of mind, they please us so much that we would desire that those in whom they exist should either by special favor or along with all mankind without exception be freed from the pains of hell, were it not that the verdict of human sensibility is different from that of the perfect holiness and justice of God” (Letter 164.4 to Evodius).
7.6.9 (see p. 911). Müller (Sin 2.281) thus describes the sinful selfishness of childhood: “We meet with this natural egoism in childhood generally, not indeed always in the form of violent passion and self-will, but sometimes under the garb of prevailing passivity and natural softness of disposition and tractableness of character; even in these cases none but a very superficial observer can fail to trace the selfish principle, though modified in its manifestations by natural temperament. An unbiased observation of childhood, when once the moral consciousness is awakened, will satisfy anyone that in the most tenderhearted and affectionate child there is a tendency to indulge hostile feelings against anything that hinders it in the attainment of its own wishes and desires and that it is wont thoughtlessly to give way to this impulse provided it be not held in check by other influences, by blood relationship, or judicious tutelage. Even in the best-dispositioned children we may discover, in greater or less degree, an element of hatred usually aroused by wounded self-love and an element of falsehood which in disputes with its playmates or in answer to its parents or teachers willfully sacrifices truth for the sake of self. Experience indeed shows that this self-seeking on the child’s part chiefly appears in the gratification of particular affections and in sensuous pleasures, so that these seem to be the excitants tempting it to wrongdoing and the outward material of its sins; but can this circumstance justify our reducing the principle of selfishness to the excessive strength of particular affections? By no means; on the contrary, the predominance of particular affections and sensuous desires to which experience thus witnesses arises from a radical disturbance in that other sphere of life which is actuated by the perverted will. Experience, moreover, unequivocally testifies that as human development advances selfishness shows itself equally in the spiritual nature and sometimes with such strength as to ignore and suppress the calls of the sensuous nature and of particular affections. The theory of sensuousness or of particular affections is quite insufficient to explain these phenomena.”
7.6.10 (see p. 911). Owen (Arminianism, chap. 7) teaches the salvation of some infants outside of the covenant and the church: “In this inquiry respecting the desert of original sin, the question is not ‘what shall be the certain lot of those that depart this life under the guilt of this sin only?’ but ‘what does this hereditary and native corruption deserve in all those in whom it is?’ For as St. Paul says, ‘We judge not them that are without,’ especially infants (1 Corinthians 5:13). But for the demerit of this corruption before the justice of God, our Savior expressly affirms that unless a man be born again ‘he cannot enter the kingdom of heaven’; and let them that can, distinguish between a not going to heaven and a going to hell: a third receptacle for souls in Scripture we find not. St. Paul also tells us that ‘by nature we are children of wrath’; even originally and actually we are guilty of and obnoxious unto that wrath which is accompanied with fiery indignation that shall consume the adversaries. Again, we are assured that no unclean thing shall enter into heaven (Revelation 21:1-27); with which hell-deserving uncleanness children are polluted, and, therefore, unless it be purged by the blood of Christ, they have no interest in everlasting happiness. By this means sin is come upon all to condemnation, and yet we do not peremptorily censure to hell all infants departing this world without the laver of regeneration [i.e., baptism], the ordinary means of waiving the punishment due to this pollution. This is the question de facto which we before rejected: yea, and two ways there are whereby God saves such infants, snatching them like brands from the fire: First, by interesting them into the covenant, if their immediate or remote parents have been believers; he is a God of them and of their seed, extending his mercy unto a thousand generations of them that fear him. Second, by his grace of election which is most free and not tied to any conditions; by which I make no doubt that God takes many infants unto himself in Christ, whose parents never knew or had been despisers of the gospel. And this is the doctrine of our [English] church, agreeable to the Scripture affirming the desert of original sin to be God’s wrath and damnation.”
Matthew Henry (on 2 Samuel 12:15-25) remarks respecting infant salvation: “Nathan had told David that the child should certainly die, yet while it is within the reach of prayer he earnestly intercedes with God for it, chiefly, we may suppose, that its soul might be safe and happy in another world and that his own sin might not come against the child and that it might not fare the worse for that in the future state. The child died when it was seven days old and therefore not circumcised, which David might perhaps interpret as a further token of God’s displeasure, that it died before it was brought under the seal of the covenant. Yet he does not therefore doubt of its being happy, for the benefits of the covenant do not depend upon the seals. Godly parents have great reason to hope concerning their children that die in infancy, that it is well with their souls in the other world; for the promise is ‘to us and our seed,’ which shall be performed to those who do not put a bar in their own door, as infants do not.”
7.6.11 (see p. 914). Graves (Pentateuch 2.3) remarks upon “the striking difference that exists between the Mosaic penal code and that of most modern states. No injury affecting property was punished by death. Restitution was required, or an additional fine imposed suited to the nature of the offense; or at the utmost, if the offender was too poor to make restitution or pay the regulated fine, he might be sold as a slave, still, however, within the pale of the Jewish nation. But this slavery could not exceed seven years, as the Sabbatical Year would terminate it. It must be acknowledged that the Jewish law adjusted its punishments more suitably to the real degree of moral depravity of the different species of crime than modern codes which permit some of the most atrocious instances of moral turpitude to pass with trivial punishments or none at all, while they punish even slight invasions of property with ignominious death. If in England the crimes of adultery, obstinate disobedience to parents, and perjury when intended to destroy the innocent man’s life cannot now be capitally punished, because penal laws so extremely rigorous would not be executed and therefore would be ineffectual, while we daily see our scaffolds loaded with criminals prosecuted and condemned for violations of property, will the conclusion be favorable to modern manners? Can we avoid suspecting that our hearts are more anxious for money than for virtue; and that such lenity proves we slight the crimes to which we are thus indulgent, notwithstanding the religion we profess, rather than that we act from pure mercy to the criminal?” In the levitical economy, no sacrifice was appointed for the crime of murder: “You shall take no satisfaction (kōper)131[Note: 31 131. ëÌÉôÆø] for the life of a murderer which is guilty of death; but he shall surely be put to death” (Numbers 35:31).
7.6.12 (see p. 922). The spontaneous impulse to invoke the holy and just retribution of God upon diabolical wickedness, when it is persisted in and not repented of, finds expression in the imprecatory psalms, only purified by impersonal judicial feeling from the personal and selfish emotion which exasperates the natural man. Those who would exclude the imprecatory psalms from both the liturgical and the didactic services of the church utterly misconceive their nature. They suppose them to be the expression of the revengeful anger of the individual on account of some injury done to himself by sin, instead of being the judicial displeasure of the conscience at sin as the violation of divine law and the dishonor of God: “Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate you? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies” (Psalms 139:21-22). In this instance, David hates the hater of God, not the hater of himself. The person spoken of is not David’s enemy, but God’s enemy; by reason of his own love and reverence for God he so identifies himself with God that he “counts” God’s enemy as his own enemy, and his invocation of divine retribution thereby obtains the dispassionateness and righteousness of God’s own action (119:52-53). The following extract from Tholuck (On the Psalms, introduction 4.3) places the subject in a clear and true light: “The attitude of the psalmists toward their enemies has always formed an objection to their morality. Instead of the mild voice of placability and compassion, we hear, it is said, the tumult of revenge and prayers for the condemnation of their foes. Augustine felt this difficulty and endeavored to remove it by saying that the reference is not to the wishes of the psalmists, but only to predictions of God’s retributions suspended over confirmed sinners: ‘Indeed, the form of wishing appears in these words, but the foreknowledge of declaring is understood’132[Note: 32 132. In verbis quidem figura optantis apparet, sed intelligitur praescientia nuntiantis.] (sermon 22). The opinion is considerably current that love to enemies is enjoined as a duty only in the New Testament. But the erroneousness of this is evident from Exodus 23:4-5; Leviticus 19:18; Job 31:29; Proverbs 24:17-18; Proverbs 24:29; Proverbs 25:21-22. In order to form a right estimate of the imprecatory psalms, we must consider the end contemplated by punishment. One view is that with God, and also with the truly righteous man, punishment springs from benevolence and love and contemplates the improvement of man. But what is to be done if you have to do with an impenitent and incorrigible sinner? By his impenitence he is persisting in sin, justifying his sin, and reaffirming it. No one, certainly, would maintain that this concentration of sin into hardness and insensibility is a reason why it should not suffer the intrinsic desert of sin. That there is no prospect and probability of improvement in this case is no reason why the criminal should be dismissed without any infliction. Improvement as the end does not exhaust the purpose of penalty. Philosophy agrees with Christianity that the first and principal purpose of punishment is retribution; that is, that the happiness of the individual criminal be wholly sacrificed to the higher demands of justice as expressed in the law of God and the state. Hence to demand, not from selfish and personal motives but from a sense of the holiness of God and his law, that the hardened sinner be punished in order to vindicate the authority of both is as little to be regarded as evidencing moral imperfection as to desire that those who are susceptible of improvement should be reformed by means of painful correctives. If, therefore, it can be shown that the imprecations and prayers for divine retribution do not flow from the vindictive disposition, the personal irritability, and passion of the psalmist, but from the conscientious and unselfish motives relating to God and law just now alluded to, the objection to the imprecatory psalms is removed. These supplications would then correspond to the desire of a good monarch or a just judge to discover the guilty that justice might be administered. David the king gives expression to this desire in many instances: ‘I will walk within my house with a perfect heart. I will set no wicked thing before my eyes; I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me. A forward heart shall depart from me; I will not know a wicked person. Whoso privily slanders his neighbor, him will I cut off; him that has a high look and a proud heart will not I suffer. He that works deceit shall not dwell within my house; he that tells lies shall not tarry in my sight. I will early destroy all the wicked of the land; that I may cut off all wicked doers from the city of the Lord’ (Psalms 101:1-8). It is not injury and dishonor to himself personally to which he refers in this language, but dishonor to God. He disavows personal and selfish revenge: ‘If I have rewarded evil unto him that was at peace with me (yea, I have delivered him that without cause is my enemy), let the enemy pursue my soul and take it; yea, let him tread down my life upon the earth’ (7:5-6). Having sinned, he invokes punitive infliction upon himself: ‘Let the righteous [God] smite me, it shall be a kindness; and let him reprove me, it shall be an excellent oil’ (141:5).
“The psalmists frequently mention reasons like the following for their prayers for the punishment of sinners: that the holiness of God and his righteous government of the world should be acknowledged; that the faith of the pious should be strengthened; that the haughtiness of the ungodly should be brought within bounds; that they should know that God is the righteous judge of the world; and that the fulfillment of his promises to maintain right and justice should not fail. See Psalms 5:11-12; Psalms 9:20-20; Psalms 12:9; Psalms 22:23-31; Psalms 28:4-5; Psalms 35:24; Psalms 40:17; Psalms 59:14; Psalms 109:27; Psalms 142:8. The invocation of divine judgments upon the heathen, such as 79:6: ‘Pour out your wrath upon the heathen that have not known you; and upon the kingdoms that have not called upon your name,’ is the expression of a desire that the true religion may prevail in the earth. The victory of the heathen over Israel threatened the destruction of it. Moreover, it should be observed that aversion toward a nation as a whole, on account of its enmity to Jehovah, does not exclude sympathy and kindness toward the individuals of it viewed merely as human beings. An instance of this kind occurs in 2 Kings 6:22. From this point of view, even Lessing once advocated the so-called vindictive psalms.
“In the New Testament the same expression of desire for righteous retribution upon the incorrigibly wicked appears. In terms not less severe than those in the Psalms, Christ announces judgment to the ‘cursed’ (Matthew 25:41) and sentences the hypocritical and selfish Pharisees to ‘the damnation of hell’ (23:33). Peter in the name of God smote Ananias and Sapphira with instantaneous death for their blasphemy of the Holy Spirit; and his words to both of them contain not the slightest trace of personal and selfish anger. He said to Simon the sorcerer, in holy indignation, ‘Your money perish with you,’ yet added, ‘Repent therefore of this your wickedness.’ Did not Paul strike Elymas the sorcerer with blindness and call him a ‘child of the devil’? Did he not solemnly ‘deliver unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh’ the wicked Corinthian who had married his stepmother and say, ‘Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil; the Lord reward him according to his works’? Such is the general nature of the imprecations in the Psalms, even if we should concede that in a few instances, like Psalms 137:8-9, there may have been some blending of the unhallowed flame of personal passion with the holy fire.” In his comment upon Psalms 5:10, Tholuck thus explains: “ ‘Make them [consciously] guilty’ means ‘may divine justice cause them to feel their guilt by the failure of their enterprises and make them perceive that they did not only oppose man but God.’ The Lord said (Deuteronomy 32:35), ‘To me belongs vengeance and recompense.’ That declaration caused David to refrain from taking vengeance into his own hands and to refer it to God, as he said to Saul, ‘The Lord judge between me and you, and the Lord avenge me of you; but my hand shall not be upon you’ (1 Samuel 24:12). In this psalm, he supplicates vengeance at the hands of God, not for his personal gratification but mainly because the cause of oppressed innocence is always that of God and because divine glory is sullied when wickedness triumphs. Proud men have not the remotest idea that God sets so great a value upon poor mortals that he should consider his eternal majesty injured when they are injured. They no more think that their blows will strike heaven than they do when they tread the dust or mud underfoot. But divine wisdom now and then furnishes the most palpable evidence how precious are to him those ‘little ones,’ as Christ calls them. With this correspond the words of the prophet, ‘He that touches you touches the apple of his eye’ (Zechariah 2:8). As still another ground for the supplicated manifestation of God’s punitive justice, the psalmist adduces the eternal praise and gratitude of the entire company of the godly which should be paid to him for this manifestation: ‘I remembered your judgments of old, O Lord, and have comforted myself’ (Psalms 119:52). For God is not like an unfeeling idol, unheedful of the sacrifices of praise which man his creature offers to him, but he is like a father who rejoices in the honor and love which his children bear to him. David, here and elsewhere, so completely regards all the pious as one component whole, where if ‘one member be honored all the members rejoice with it’ (1 Corinthians 12:26), that he considers his own deliverance as their common interest; for are not benefits conferred on individuals pledges to the rest?”
It must always be remembered that when the psalmist invokes the retribution of God upon the enemies of God, he supposes their impenitence and persistence in enmity. And what other feeling than the desire that obstinate and persevering hostility to God and his government should be punished is proper? David never calls down the judicial vengeance of heaven upon the humble and penitent man who confesses his sin and endeavors to forsake it. This shows that his feeling is not revengeful and selfish; for when mere revenge exists, no discrimination is made between penitence and impenitence. The cry for mercy is disregarded by the malignant and exasperated man, and he wreaks his anger upon the object of it, without regard to the state of mind which may be in the one who has injured him. When David says, “My eye also shall see my desire upon my enemies, and my ears also shall hear my desire of the wicked that shall rise up against me” (Psalms 92:11), he assumes that there is no relenting on their part and no intention to change their course of conduct. And that “my enemies” means God’s enemies is proved by the preceding context: “For, lo, your enemies, O Lord, for, lo, your enemies shall perish; all the workers of iniquity shall be scattered” (92:9).
Butler (On Human Nature, sermon 6) evinces the ethical nature of dispassionate resentment against hardened and obstinate wickedness: “The indignation raised by cruelty and injustice, and the desire to have it punished which persons even when not affected by it feel, is by no means malice. No; it is resentment against vice and wickedness, it is one of the common bonds by which society is held together, a fellow feeling which each individual has in behalf of the whole species as well as of himself; and it does not appear that this, generally speaking, is at all too excessive among mankind. It is not natural but moral evil, it is not suffering but injury, which raises that anger or resentment of which we are speaking. The natural object of it is not one who appears to the suffering person to have been only the innocent occasion of his pain or loss, but one who has been in a moral sense injurious to himself or others.”
7.6.13 (see p. 929). The existence of a comparatively small kingdom of evil within the vast holy and blessed universe of God is plainly taught in the Apocalypse. (1) It is denominated “the bottomless pit”: “The fifth angel sounded, and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth; and unto them was given power as the scorpions of earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should hurt only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And their torment was as the torment of a scorpion when he strikes a man” (Revelation 9:1-5). (2) Satan or the devil is the prince and head of this kingdom: “They had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue has his name Apollyon” (9:11); “and the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent the devil, and Satan, which deceive the whole world; he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him” (12:9). (3) The members of the kingdom of evil are characterized by willing, willful, and intense hatred of God and holiness and by an impenitent and blaspheming spirit: “They worshiped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? And the beast opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name and his tabernacle and them that dwell in heaven. And they blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and repented not of their deeds” (13:4, 6; 16:11). (4) The misery of the kingdom of evil is awful and endless: “The smoke of their torment ascends up forever and ever; and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image and whosoever receives the mark of his name. The beast and the false prophet shall be tormented day and night forever and ever” (14:11; 20:10).
7.6.14 (see p. 930). Bohemian Confession 4 enunciates the often-forgotten truth that the torments of hell, like sin itself, originate in the finite will, not in the infinite; in man, not in God: “For as God is not the cause of sin, even so he is not the cause of punishment.”133[Note: 33 133. Ut enim Deus non est causa peccati, ita non est (causa) poenae.] The author of sin is the real author of hell. Says Augustine (On the Trinity 4.12): “The judge inflicts punishment on the guilty; yet it is not the justice of the judge, but the desert of the crime, which is the cause of punishment.”
7.6.15 (see p. 932). The boundlessness of divine mercy, of which Dante speaks, supposes penitence for sin, and penitence necessarily begins with the acknowledgment of justice, because mercy exists and is known only as the antithesis of justice. If there were no justice in God, there could be no mercy in him; for mercy is releasing from justice. Here is the fatal defect in spurious penitence. The sinner does not begin at the beginning, by bending the knee before the Holy One. Justice must first be recognized in order to any experience of mercy. Whoever denies the justice of God and recalcitrates at it will be eternally kept in contact and conflict with it and never know anything of divine compassion. He will find it an iron wall through which he cannot break. God, for him, will be a perfectly just and righteously punitive being and nothing more. But whoever humbly recognizes justice by confessing sin and guilt will find that the Supreme Being is infinitely and tenderly pitiful and will forgive and eradicate the deepest sin. For the mercy has been manifested at the cost to the eternal Trinity of a self-sacrifice to satisfy justice of which neither man nor angel has any conception and which was necessitated by the inexorable nature of law and retribution. To deny, therefore, or combat this inexorableness makes the manifestation of pity and mercy on the part of God an utter impossibility.
Accordingly, in all the biblical descriptions of the lost, the absence of sorrow for sin as related to justice and the hatred of justice itself are invariable elements. Satan and his angels, together with condemned men, are utterly and malignantly impenitent: “The fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat and blasphemed the name of God who has power over these plagues; and they repented not to give him glory. And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain and blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores and repented not of their deeds” (Revelation 16:8-11). Lost men “despise the goodness and forbearance and long-suffering of God that lead to repentance” and “in proportion to (kata)134[Note: 34 134. κατά] their hardness and impenitent heart treasure up wrath against the day of wrath” (Romans 2:4-5).