S. HELL: WHY? WHAT? HOW LONG?

HELL: WHY? WHAT? HOW LONG? by WILLIAM EDWARD BIEDERWOLF Fleming H. Revell Company Chicago New York Toronto Publishers of Evangelical Literature COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY A FREE ACROBAT BOOK PUBLIC DOMAIN

H E L L WHY—WHAT—HOW LONG “And in Hades he lifted up his eyes being in torment” (Luke 16:23).

We are to speak concerning the fate of the LOST, a question, the discussion of which it has been said and truly, has created “a whirlpool of interminable controversy, roaring in endless circles over a dark and bottomless abyss.”

If, through a slavish literalness of interpretation, together with an unwarranted license of imagination, our early-day preachers so distorted the idea of future punishment with representations utterly abhorrent to the sense of justice and love, and the conception of any Being deserving to be called “Heavenly Father,” is it not also true that the preacher of this day is saying too little concerning the same subject, which is both of great interest and vital importance to every human being? As a prominent layman has said, “Our preachers give us the easy side and seldom or never consider the difficulties in the Christian doctrine of the hereafter.” It may seem the part of wisdom to declare simply that “every man shall be rewarded according to his works”; better wisdom that, than much of ancient (and not so ancient either) descriptiveness of hell, which “curdles the blood with horror,” but man’s chief interest lies beyond the grave and he would know more of that country from whose bourne no traveler ever returns. Tennyson, in his poem, voices the longing of every human heart,

“Ah, Christ! that it were best
For one short hour to see
The souls we love, that they might tell us
What and were they be”; and in this day, when so much of faith is being undermined by systems of religious thought which purpose to save a man in spite of himself, or, perchance, to annihilate him utterly, it would seem the part of wisdom that if Christianity has anything to say about this question of supreme interest, it should be said, repeated, and emphasized. The child of faith has a right to inquire. It is the bounden duty of his spiritual adviser to answer. All has not been revealed, and concerning the “dim unknown” what is not of revelation must for earth remain obscure. To behold all behind the veil, whether in the highest heaven or the deepest hell would be to see things declared by Paul unlawful to utter, but with the revelation given of God, knowing that as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are his thoughts and his ways higher than ours, with all becoming humility, yet with holy purpose and fearless courage—must we seek to make known what we believe it lawful to understand of revelation, reason and conscience. THE SOURCE OF AUTHORITY

Another preliminary consideration concerns the respective importance of Revelation and reason. If you believe the Bible to be the Word of God, then must you admit its testimony. A writer, in a recent article, entitled, “Christ’s Credentials,” denies that the words of this text were ever uttered by Jesus, at least he says “he does not believe so.” Well, the fact of the matter is simply this: There is just as much authority for these words being put in the mouth of Jesus as there is that he ever said, “Blessed are the pure for they shall see God,” or any other of his utterances, and if we attempt to transcend the only authority that gives us the Word of God, and reject a portion of revelation because it does not voice the sentiment of OUR reason or OUR conscience, or OUR experience, we give to man a license that will play havoc with the Bible from its beginning to its end. The African king, living in the heart of the torrid zone, refused to believe except through faith in the English-man’s testimony that water ever became so hard that men could walk on it, and there is a bare possibility that in the world to come the system of rewards and punishments may involve principles of justice and mercy and love which the human mind, with its earthly limitations, has only partially comprehended. “Reason,” says Bishop Butler, “is the only faculty where we have to judge of anything, even Revelation itself,” and this is true, but if I am once convinced that God said a thing, my reason must certainly in all humility refrain from sitting in judgment upon it, simply because it may not fully accord with all that seems reasonable to me.

PUNISHMENT INEVITABLE We now begin with this thought: that Punishment is the inevitable consequence of sin.

“Reckless youth, rueful age,” says the Proverb. So the Bible: “Be not deceived, whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” “The soul that sinneth it shall die.” There is no chance about it; nothing but certainty. “Though hand join in hand the wicked shall not be unpunished” (Proverbs 11:21). As certain as pain follows the infliction of a wound, so certain it is that punishment follows sin, not as a God-threatened penalty, but as a natural consequence inseparable from sin as the producing cause. Interfere with the law of gravitation and somewhere, indeed everywhere, there will be an awful calamity. The same law of cause and effect rules in the spiritual universe. When a mother warns her child of the fire, she does not superimpose the pain as a penalty, but simply warns her little one of a necessary consequence. When God says holiness produces happiness and sin produces misery there is nothing arbitrary here but the simple statement of necessary and inevitable consequence. This is the instinct of humanity, the testimony of proverbial language, the voice of the scripture, and now it is the verdict of science “is the outcome of antecedents.” “The phenomena of mind,” he says, “are gradually being brought into the survey of science, and so far this same law holds good. It follows that conduct is amenable to law and that acts must bring consequences; good acts, good consequences; bad acts, bad consequences,” and he goes on, “If life continues after death it is evident that the next state must be the consequence of this, and the good and bad acts of our earthly life must produce effects upon the life that follows this.” I have met a few people in whose head any sort of genuine intellectual vitality was conspicuous for its absence, who declared that all the hell a man will get he will find right here on earth, but every system of religious thought, even the Universalist whose view of the future corresponds, as he declares, to the highest human conception of the character and nature God, believes in the future punishment of sin.

Plato said that “sin and punishment walk this world with their heads tied together, “ and they go into the other world with a rivet of adamant that binds them fast and inseparable. Listen,—God never tortured anybody; God never tormented anybody; God never damned anybody; and in a very certain sense it may be said, God never punished anybody. But, oh, my brother, fire burns and water drowns, and sin damns, and you might as well tie a lightning rod to your back to keep away the lightning as to go on in sin and hope it’s fearful consequence will not strike you in the world to come! As Irving has said, “A man who cannot swim might as well walk into the river and hope it will not drown as a man, seeing judgment and not mercy denounced on willing sin, hope that it will turn out to be mercy and not judgment, and so defy God’s law.” Sin is its own avenger. It works like a boomerang, striking back at the heart of its possessor, and in its dread retribution you will recognize the shaft of your own evil doing. It needs no penalty of gathered lightning from God, but when you have finished sneering at the Word of God, when you have done in this life with trampling on God’s holy Son and counting the blood of his sacrifice an unholy thing, your sin like a hideous Nemesis following after you with leaden footstep, and towering over you like the gathering storm will smite you with the lightning of its own revenge.

“Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” THE NATURE OF PUNISHMENT

We therefore conclude that hell is a logical necessity, and we pass to the discussion of its nature. Canon Farrar, in his impassioned outburst against what he calls “the popular notion of hell,” formulates an attempted, but by no means formidable argument against its eternity, in which his scathing and yet eloquent anathemas are interwoven with conceptions of physical suffering, of unimaginable horror. He speaks of “physical excruciation,” “burning prisons,” and “physical tortures,” and calls this “the popular conception of hell.” We readily admit that such may have been the popular conception long ago, but as readily affirm that such a conception is exceedingly unpopular to-day, and it may be of interest to know that from the earliest day IT HAS NEVER IN THE DOCTRINE OF COUNCIL OF ANY CHURCH BEEN AFFIRMED THAT IN HELL A MAN ENDURED PHYSICAL SUFFERING IN A MATERIAL FIRE.

Every religion has had its hell. In the hades of Homer we are ushered into the midst of jibbering bat-like ghosts, where Sisyphus rolls his stone, Ixion is lashed to his wheel. Tityos is gnawed by the vulture, and Tantalus pants for the receding waters—quite a respectable hell as compared with some others. Mephistopheles, in Faust, mournfully remarks:

“And as for sulphur, why, you scarce can smell A trace of sulphur in this Grecian hell.” From another we quote the following: The Egyptians had many hells, a sort of progressive series of hells. The Hindoos had twenty-eight distinct hells, with horrors enough to make the strongest man faint if I should recite them. The Parsee had a hell with a peculiar punishment where the unfortunate people were required to spend their time in eating snakes and scorpions and various kinds of repulsive filth. The Hebrew conception of hell, as we get it from the Talmud, tells us that there are seven abodes in hell—and in each one of these there are 7,000 clefts—and in each cleft 7,000 limbs—and on each limb he has 7,000 barrels of gall—and you can imagine how they use this great machinery. We are told that there run through this hell seven rivers of such rank poison that if one should touch one drop of the water he would immediately burst. The Mohammedans have a conception of two enormous fiends, called ‘Searchers,” who make the deceased person soon after his death sit up in his grave and examine him, and if they find he is unworthy to enter into Paradise they hit him on the head with an immense mace.” And when we turn to the Scriptural conception of hell, we find among other expressions put into the mouth of Jesus the Savior, the following: “Depart from me ye accursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” He speaks of a “furnace of fire,” and John says the workers of iniquity shall have their place in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, and seizing upon such passages many of our wisest and certainly most devout Christian preachers have not only construed them with titanic rigidity of literal interpretation, but with an unwarranted and unlawful play of imagination have pictured a hell TOO HORRIBLE TO THINK ABOUT, MUCH LESS TO DESCRIBE. I have read with horror these descriptions, and it has made my blood curdle in my veins; livid flames where millions writhe and shriek, “Put your finger in the candle,” says John Wesley, “can you bear to have the whole body plunged into a lake of fire burning with brimstone,” and because the victims are not consumed he says “their ANGELIC tormentors (think of it!) Will have time to vary their torments a thousand ways.” Charles Finney speaks of “waves or rolling fire into which lost sinners are thrown, who lash its burning shores and gnaw their tongues for pain.” Even pious Thomas à Kempis pictures the miser with melted gold being poured down his throat, and as for Jonathan Edwards, no wonder the people fainted when he preached his sermon on “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” if they believed one jot of iota of it to be true; he pictured hell as a place WHERE EVERY SPOT IS HOTTER THAN THE OTHER , and he speaks of vast billows of fire rolling over the sinner’s head, while his eyes and mouth and hands and feet and loins and vitals are full of glowing melting fire; he puts hell in sight of heaven, and pictures the saints watching the tortures of the damned, which increases the joy of their salvation.

Happily, Beloved, such conceptions are passing away. Now and then we hear them reaffirmed, not from reasonable inference, neither from worthy or pleasing conceptions of God’s character, but out of conscientious fear of a misinterpretation of God’s Word. But here, in the presence of the God, whom I believe to be LOVE, and of the Christ who hath redeemed me from everlasting destruction; before the people to whose souls I have been sent a minister of redemption, in the name of outraged conscience and reason, and worthy reading of highest revelation, do I hurl from me this awful caricature of God’s dealing with the infinite, never- dying souls of his children, as a senseless travesty on the character of his holy will, an arrogant repudiation of his holy love, and a needless misconstruction of his holy Word.

I purpose to stay by the assertion that God never damned anybody, and that future punishment is the consequence of an efficient cause and by what law of reason, by what principle of science, can you make sin become the efficient producing cause of flames of material fire? If we believe in the resurrection of the body, what chemical affinity could fire have with a spiritual being? What effect could an red-hot coal have on a spirit? There is not more use for coal in hell than there is for gold and precious stones in heaven. Both are, by the very nature of spiritual being, IMMATERIAL, and consequently it becomes not only necessary to construe figuratively such expressions as lakes of fire and gates of pearl, as burning flames of hell and golden streets of heaven, but to follow a literal interpretation for each and every expression in the Bible would land us in the embarrassment of ill-disguised ridiculousness. It is time for such unworthy and horrible misinterpretations to be sent to the limbo of exploded fallacies to become the property of bats and owls. And some inquiring soul asks, “What, then, are the sufferings of hell?” and the question finds answer in asking another, “Of what nature must they be to be the result, the sequence, the natural consequence of sin?” Remember the record says DIVES, “His body was buried,” so was the body of Lazarus, though it is not recorded; the rich man always gets the funeral; and yet the record puts Dives in hell; not his body, but DIVES, the living, deathless, conscious personality; the responsible Ego, unclothed and apart from the dishonored body, the intuition and perception, strong and clear, an immortal something that fire cannot burn, but which is tormented by the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched, which, by the nature of sin, and of being, is the scorpion-sting of memory and the biting remorse of a guilty conscience. I do not mean to say that God cannot inflict an added arbitrary penalty, more awful than the horrible inventions of Dante’s Inferno, but that it is contrary to law and to the divine nature to do so. Old Theology speaks of “poena damni,” the penalty of loss, and “poena sensus, “the penalty of feeling. The classification is good with the conception of the latter half changed. The PENALTY OF LOSS is the frightful craving for sensual indulgence remove from every possibility of gratification, the conscious separation from earth’s loved ones, who have been wiser than you; the dear old mother, the God-fearing wife, the precious child of your life, but worse than all this to be shut out from the glorious presence of God. What this means no one but a hell-imprisoned sinner can appreciate. Indeed some one has written, Better fire-willed hell with Him, than golden-gated Paradise without.” To a spirit made for God this is the very essence of destruction. Banished from the light of his glorious face into the long night of shame and contempt, where the monotony of darkness is broken only by the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth; of groans and shrieks, of blasphemies against God and reproachings against each other. This you may term God’s punishment if you choose, but as society, for its own protection, imprisons the criminal, so God, for the protection of heaven’s society, must deny entrance to the wicked. What would you—a lover of sin and a hater of holiness, do in heaven? You would be miserable even there; every pure look would bring a blush of shame to your face: a hard, mean—railing—loveless, spirit; base—selfish—sensual;—your very presence would bring hell with it and heaven would lose its loveliness and become another hell. There is no place in heaven for hell and God MUST shut it out. But society inflicts pain upon it’s criminals. Not so with God. The “penalty of feeling” is the natural reward of evil doing. The worm that dieth not is memory’s awful voice. “Let memory alone survive and it will strike 10,000 scorpion stings into the soul of the lost.”

There are no magic waters of Lethe in hell where one may bathe and forget. Son! Remember!! Said Abraham, and the memory began its hideous work; he remembers that his “good things” are forever past; “sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things,” and remorse begins to worm its way into his soul; but this is not all; he remembers every evil thing he ever did; his gluttonous greed, his miserly selfishness; Lazarus at his gate neglected; his godless influence the Son of God scorned, and his offer of mercy despised. The drunkard recalls the wretched home, the agonizing wife and starving child, the gambler the ruined victims of his vice, the murderer the ghastly face and oozing blood, the seducer the innocent spoil of his ungodly passion, the blasphemer, the dishonored use of God’s holy name; the Christ-rejecter the fresh red of the bloody sacrifice, and all this memory, liked a fanged hound of hell, will strike its remorseless sting so deep in the soul that hissing flames would be a boon could they but bring forgetfulness: and then conscience adds its fuel to the flame. It plays a fearful part here; what must its accusing voice do in hell! Have you never heard of men who start at the sudden ring of the door bell, turn pale when suddenly accosted, tremble at the stir of every leaf; whose faces blanch under any steady gaze.

Professor Webster, awaiting execution for the murder of Dr. Parkman, complained to the jailer that the prisoners on the other side of the cell were continually accusing him of his crime. There were no prisoners on the other side of his cell!

“Out damned spot!” cried Lady Macbeth, looking at her lily-white hand at night. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?” There was no blood on her hand. It was the blood of Duncan on her soul. Is it not Plutarch in his “Delayed Vengeance of Deity” who speaks of a young man fiercely wringing the necks of some young birds? Ask him why. “It was their own fault,” he says, “why did they keep twittering at me Parricide, Parricide!” An eight-year-old boy saw his widowed mother cruelly oppressed by a wicked landlord. He became a noted painter and painted a life likeness of the dark scene and placed it where the man would see it, who, as his eyes fell upon it, turned pale and trembled in every joint, offering large sums of money to purchase it that he might put it forever out of his sight. And so upon the canvas of every soul an unseen artist paints a life likeness, reflecting correctly all the evil passions of our spiritual history. In hell they will be revealed. On earth, by repetition of crime, a man’s conscience becomes hardened and seared so that the guiltiest sinner suffers least the pain of its compunctions, but in hell, when all such alleviating influences are removed, when a man can sin only in thought and desire, what frightful agonies of conscience will he suffer! What burning remorse will feed upon his never- dying soul! What tongues of accusing flame will feed his memory with sins long buried in the past! Let the unholy man, the seducer, the lying hypocrite, enter hell and torment will be “as certain as the fixed stars.” the craving lusts denied, torn from the loved ones, and banished from the presence of God, with memory quickened and life-damning mistakes recalled, while conscience like a tormenting devil strikes terror to the guilty soul, and if this be not hell there can be none. Give the damned to such a doom his choice, and rather than this, like Desdemona’s destroyer, he would cry, “Whip me, ye devils! Blow me about in the winds! Roast me in sulphur! Wash me in the steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!” Such, oh man, is hell—God save you from it!

Just a few words concerning the question of hell’s eternity. I have in my library a book on “Eternal Hope.” Twice have I read it, searched carefully its historical and linguistic premises. The author is aged and learned and this may seem unbecoming, but I am surprised at, what seems at least to me, its extreme lack of worthy argument and its supreme superficiality, coming from the pen of such a man as Canon Farrar. I find the Greek expression translated Eternal, although applied to some things that are not endless always means in classic Greek, in its Hebrew equivalent and in the New Testament, ENDLESSNESS AS FAR AS C IRCUM STA NCES W ILL PERM IT.

If hell is not endless, heaven is not—in spite of this eminent author’s disdain. The book is an invective, impassioned and partisan.

Abraham said, “Besides all this between us and you there is a great gulf fixed so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us that would come from thence.” Isaiah knew the truth when he said, “They that go down to the pit cannot hope for thy truth.” Beyond the grave what hope can there be? ‘This driven back by the oracle, “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that 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.” But apart from this tell me, in the name of sound wisdom, how can it be otherwise? If a man will not love God now, how can he love him then? ‘Tis said, “The fear of hell peoples heaven”; ‘tis false! Without love no man can see God. Hell may terrify man, it cannot convert him. “Virtue founded on fear is only vice in a fit of dejection.” By every voice of revelation, by every principle of reason, there can be no hope beyond the grave. Love and not fear is the “open sesame” to the pearly gates in the great beyond. A father and son were angry; thirteen years have passed; the mother after trying in vain to effect a reconciliation, is dying with a broken heart. The son has come home and entered the room of his precious dying mother. She cannot speak, but motions, and as father and son approach on either side she takes their hands and joins them over her heart. A last look of love and she has gone. The father knows he has lost a faithful wife, the son a darling mother, and falling in each other’s arms, there, over the body of a lost loved one, they are reconciled.

Oh, my brother, oh, my sister, God is not angry with you, but if you go down to hell it will be over the dead body of a crucified Christ, who died to reconcile you to God, and if you go down it will not be to come up, and with what intelligence God has given me, and with all the love of my heart I beg of you to enter through the open gate of mercy ere night that gate may close and seal thy doom, for if you live a Christless life and die a Christless death, and are buried in a Christless grave, you will go out into a Christless Eternity, and realize there what you refused to learn here. “The harvest past, the summer is ended,” and hell awful and eternal has begun.