HELL
Here we touch the awful part of our
study. In Christ’s great drama of the
Judgment those on the left hand are passing out into
the darkness, and we see them no more. In that
darkness there seems no ray of hope. So far as
we can learn, it means irrevocable ruin and loss.
In spite of God’s love and pain for them on
Earth and in Hades, they seem at last to have destroyed
in themselves everything of good, and so placed themselves
beyond possibility of restoration for ever. The
judgment has clearly the ring of finality. There
seems nothing more to be said. And so, with pain
in our hearts responding to the pain of the Father,
we are forced to leave them in the darkness and mystery
in which Scripture enshrouds them.
This is, I think, all that can justifiably
be said. The reticence and reserve of Scripture
forbids any definite doctrine of Hell.
And this is all that would have needed
to be said if men had kept to that reticence and reserve
of Scripture, and to all further questionings contented
themselves with the answer that the Judge of all the
earth will do right. But they have not so contented
themselves. It is hard to blame them. For
beyond the main facts about the doom of the impenitent
there are here and there through the Bible many tantalizing
hints perplexing and difficult to reconcile with each
other, but very tempting to follow out. By emphasizing
certain of these and ignoring or dwelling more lightly
on certain others which seem to contradict them, men
have formulated definite doctrines about Hell, differing
widely from each other but each with apparently strong
Scriptural support. This is only what may happen
in any department of study. The strict rule
of evidence in any enquiry is that all the
facts must be studied and that no theory shall be accepted
as entirely trustworthy while any of the evidence
remains unaccounted for.
There are three theories which hold
the ground to-day, each of them seemingly with much
evidence in its favour, but each of them seriously
unsatisfactory as conflicting with other evidence.
(1) The theory of Everlasting Torment that
every soul which has missed of Christ shall be plunged
into a Hell of torment and sin for ever and ever,
growing worse and worse and lower and lower through
all the ages of Eternity.
(2) The theory of Universalism that
in the ages of the far future through the stern loving
discipline of God all men shall at length be saved.
(3) The theory of Conditional Immortality that
all souls who fail of Eternal Life shall be punished
not by Everlasting Torment, but by annihilation and
the loss of God and Heaven for ever.
At first sight it seems almost impossible
that such conflicting theories could be formed out
of the same Bible. But a little consideration
of the evidence and of the power of prejudice and
preconceptions in estimating evidence makes it easier
to understand.
The main trend of all Scripture teaching
is that it shall be well, gloriously well, with the
good, and that it shall be evil, unutterably evil,
with the wicked. That there is a mysterious and
awful malignity attaching to sin that to
be in sin means to be in misery and ruin in this life
or any other life and that sin persisted
in tends to utter and irretrievable ruin. No
arguments about the love and power of God to save
to the uttermost can cancel the fact of the free-will
of man or the plain statements of Scripture confirmed
beyond question by the loving Lord Himself as to the
awful fate of the finally impenitent.
But running through all this dark
background of Scripture is a curious golden thread
of prophecy that evil shall not be eternal in God’s
universe. One turns to it perplexed with wondering
hope. For however fully Conscience recognizes
the righteousness of a terrible retribution for sin,
there is in all thoughtful minds a shrinking from the
thought that Evil shall be as permanent as Good in
the universe of the All-holy God that any
evil power can exist unendingly side by side with Him
and unendingly resist Him; that Hell and Heaven, Satan
and God shall co-exist for all eternity. This
is almost unthinkable to thoughtful men. It
is a Dualism repugnant to all our ideals of God.
And this golden thread, running through the Old and
New Testaments alike, confirms this thought, in its
dim vision of a golden age somewhere away in the far
future away it would seem beyond the dark
vision of Hell when evil shall have vanished
out of the Universe for ever and “God shall
be all in all” (1 Cor. x when
there shall come “the times of the Restoration
of all things which God hath promised by the mouth
of all His holy prophets since the world began”
(Acts iii. 21).
Naturally there is danger of people
emphasizing strongly either one of these trends of
Scripture and gathering certain proof texts according
to their own prejudices and preconceptions of what
ought to be. “The way in which some people
read their Bibles,” says Mr. Ruskin, “is
like the way in which the old monks thought that hedgehogs
ate grapes. They rolled themselves over the
grapes as they lay on the ground and whatever first
stuck to their spikes they carried off and ate.”
If the grapes are of various kinds as are the passages
of Scripture we cannot judge thus of the taste of
the vintage. To get the true taste of the grapes
we must press them in cluster. To get the true
meaning of Scripture we must study the whole trend
of Scripture. Before we can accept any doctrine
from separate passages of Scripture we must assure
ourselves that it is in harmony, not only with other
passages but also with the ruling thoughts which run
through all Scripture, God’s unutterable holiness,
God’s awful hatred of sin and stern denunciations
of doom against the impenitent, God’s love, God’s
unchangeableness, God’s reasonableness and fairness,
and the mysterious golden thread of hope which runs
through all.
Now we glance as briefly as possible
at the three theories referred to.
I
The theory of Everlasting Torment and Everlasting
Sin.
This theory keeps with Scripture in
asserting the fatal and irrevocable result of unrepented
sin but it goes beyond the reserve of Scripture
in defining that result and so defining it as to impugn
the character of God. It teaches that all who
are condemned in the Judgment are doomed to a life
of endless torment, in the company of devils forsaken
of God. Millions of millions of ages shall see
this punishment no whit nearer to its end. It
must go on for ever and ever and ever.
It takes perhaps a child’s or
a woman’s heart to realize the horror of that
thought. I remember as a child reading a Sunday-school
book that helped me to realize the meaning of this
“for ever and ever in hell.” I was
to imagine a huge forest, and a tiny insect coming
from the farthest planet and biting an atom out of
one of the leaves, and carrying it away to his home,
the journey taking one thousand years. Then I
was to imagine the ages that must elapse before that
whole leaf was carried off. Then the stupendous
time before the whole tree would be gone. Then,
as my brain reeled at the thought, I was to look forward
to the carrying away of the whole forest, and from
that to the carrying away of the whole world.
Then came the awful sentence in italics, Even
then eternity would but have begun. I suppose
God will forgive the people who wrote that book for
children if they repent, but I don’t feel much
like forgiving them. I can remember still lying
awake in the night and crying as I thought of the lost
souls in Hell as my poor little brain reeled at the
thought of the journeys of that wretched insect and
of those whom God kept alive to suffer for ever and
ever and ever.
Then as one grew older came the further
horror that these “lost” are kept alive
not only to suffer but to sin everlastingly.
They are to go on increasing in sin for ever and ever
and ever in the universe of the All-holy God.
One tests this by the ruling thoughts of Scripture.
One thinks of God’s holiness. One thinks
of the golden thread of hope. One wonders what
it means that Christ came to “destroy the works
of the devil" and to destroy the devil (bruise
the serpent’s head) and how one day “God
shall be all in all” if straight opposite for
all eternity shall be Satan’s Kingdom of misery
and sin. Surely Christ has not failed!
And yet and yet what shall we
say? And what shall we say of God’s fatherhood?
Shall we say as some do that as Judge He must do
cruel things which as Father He would shrink from?
God forbid! The Judge and the Father are one.
Men would never use such sophistry about the character
of God if it were put into plain words. “Ye
must ken,” said a godly old Scotchman, “that
the Almighty may often have to do in His offeeshial
capacity what He would scorn to do as a private individual!”
I quote this not with flippancy but with stern indignation.
That is baldly what such sophistry means.
Clearly one who insists on this doctrine
ought at least to be absolutely certain that Scripture
leaves him no escape from it. Now the conclusion
which a thorough study of the question leads to is
this; that Scripture nowhere definitely
affirms that the sufferings of the lost shall not
be everlasting, and nowhere definitely affirms
that they shall be everlasting.
Even that if it be true is some relief.
We should no longer be forced to believe of God what
Conscience declares to be unworthy of Him. But
is it true? I can already see the Bible turned
over for the dark array of texts beginning with “He
that believeth not shall be damned,” “How
can ye escape the damnation of Hell?” “These
shall go away into everlasting punishment,”
etc.
Let me explain.
If we examine the Bible carefully
we shall find that, while there are a great many clear
proofs of the certainty and awfulness of Hell, the
proofs of this theory of Everlasting Torment are not
much to be depended on. Practically they can
all be gathered into three groups.
In the first the chief word is DAMN or DAMNATION.
In the second the chief word is HELL.
In the third the chief word is EVERLASTING.
It is not too much to say that if
these three sets of passages were removed from the
Bible nobody would think of believing in everlasting
torment. Now let me make the assertion straight
out There is no word in the original language
of the Bible that at all justifies the use of either
of these words in the meaning that we have attached
to it and therefore the Revised Version
of the Bible has practically swept them all away.
Section 1
Take first the words Damn, Damnation
which convey to us the idea of doom to a Hell of never-ending
torment and never-ending sin. The original word
conveyed no such idea to our Lord or the Apostles.
It conveyed no such idea to the translators of the
Authorized Version. When they translated it Damn
and Damnation they did not at all mean what we now
mean.
There are two Greek words, krino
which means simply to judge, and kata-krino
which means to judge adversely, to condemn,
and it is sometimes the first and sometimes the second
of these words which is translated “Damn.”
Why is it so translated? Surely the translators
did not think so evil of God as to believe that He
could never judge a man without condemning him and
that He could never condemn him except to everlasting
torment. Not at all. They had no thought
of this. The English word “damn”
at that time had no such awful meaning as has grown
into it in our day through the wide-spread influence
of the theory which I am criticizing. It simply
meant what the Greek word meant. I find an interesting
illustration of this in the Wycliffe Bible in the
passage about the woman taken in adultery. Jesus
saith, “Woman, hath no man damned thee?”
“No man, Lord.” “Neither do
I damn thee.” That is to say the English
word Damn at that time only meant “condemn.”
But words are dangerous things if not carefully watched,
owing to their tendency to change their meaning as
a language grows. A new, darker meaning has
grown on to the English word since. Once an innocent
word, it has now become dangerous and misleading.
Therefore, the Revisers have swept it away, and the
words damn and damnation have now vanished entirely
and for ever out of the pages of the English Bible.
Unfortunately the public do not read the Revised Version.
With this explanation I ask the reader
to turn back to his Bible. In our sense of the
word did our Lord say, “He that believeth not
shall be damned”? Most certainly not.
He said that he should be condemned for wilfully
disbelieving, but He did not say to what he should
be condemned, nor for how long. I should condemn
you for doing a selfish act, but that would hardly
mean sending you to endless torment. Did He
say that those who had done evil should rise to the
resurrection of damnation? (1 John .
No. He said, “to the resurrection of judgment.”
(See R. V.) Did St. Paul say, “He that doubteth
(about eating certain meats) is damned if he eat”?
(Rom. xi. Did he say that a church widow
should have damnation for marrying again? (1 Tim.
. Of course not; the word only means judgment
or condemnation. There is no thought at all
in it of this endless Hell as the Revised Version
has plainly shown. So we see that at any rate
all these texts about “damnation” can
no longer be used in proof of everlasting torment
and everlasting sin.
Section 2
Something similar is true about the
texts whose chief word is “Hell.”
The word “hell” occurs eighteen times in
the Authorized Version. Once it is a translation
of a Greek word Tartarus (2 Peter i cast down
to Hell to be reserved “unto the Day of Judgment.”
That certainly was not everlasting. Five times
it is a translation of the word Hades whose meaning
we already know, and which certainly did not mean
everlasting. The other twelve times it is a translation
of the word Gehenna used by our Lord, and no scholar
with the least regard for his reputation would dream
of stating that our Lord certainly meant it to convey
the idea of endlessness. It was the name of a
horrible valley outside Jerusalem where things were
cast out to be burnt, to keep the city pure.
The Jewish prophets took the word as a metaphor to
express the fate of wicked men. From it they
drew their images used by our Lord of “the worm
that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched”
(Mark . To be in danger of Gehenna was
to be in danger of a hereafter doom suggested by this
dread place.
Our Lord simply took up the vague
Jewish word and did not define it. What exactly
had He in His mind when He used this word? This
is a question of terrible importance. He certainly
meant something very stern and awful. He seems
to indicate also something final and irrevocable.
But there is absolutely no reason to believe that
He meant to convey the idea in our minds of a vast
prison, in which the souls of the lost are pierced
through with agony for ever and ever. You ask,
How can I know what He meant? How could I know
what Shakespeare meant by a certain word? I
should read up all the books and letters of Shakespeare’s
times in which the word occurs, and whatever it commonly
meant to the people of Shakespeare’s time I should
accept as being what Shakespeare meant. That
looks sensible, does it not? Well, a very interesting
investigation has been made by various scholars.
They have examined all the existing Jewish writings
where the word Gehenna was used from 300 B. C. to
300 A. D. Then they have examined the Jewish Talmuds
which run on to the fourth and fifth century.
A modern English scholar, Dr. Dewes, says (Plea
for a New Translation, : “Every
passage has been carefully examined which is quoted
in the works of Lightfoot, Schoetgen, Buxtorf, Castell,
Schindler, Glass, Bartoloccius, Ugalino and Nork, and
the result of the whole examination is this:
there are only two passages which even a superficial
reader could consider to be corroborative of the assertion
that the Jews understood Gehenna to be a place of everlasting
torment.”
I give a few specimens from the Talmuds.
“Gehenna is ordained of old because of sins.”
“The ungodly will be judged in Gehenna against
the day of judgment.” “The ungodly
shall be judged in Gehenna until the righteous
shall say of them, We have seen enough.”
“The judgment of the ungodly is for twelve
months.” “Gehenna is nothing but a
day in which the impious will be burned.”
“The sinners ... shall descend into Gehenna;
at the end of twelve months the body shall be consumed
and the soul burned up and the wind shall scatter
it under the feet of the just.”
The reader sees, of course, that the
vague Jewish opinions have no authority for us except
to help us to get at the meaning of our Lord when
speaking to Jews about Gehenna. We may assume
that He used their familiar word in the sense in which
they would naturally understand it. They certainly
would understand Him to proclaim some terrible doom,
probably also an irrevocable doom. But can any
one affirm that they must have understood Him to mean
endless torment, in the face of this evidence and
its powerful confirmation by the greatest of all modern
Jewish students of the Talmud, Emanuel Deutsch.
“There is no everlasting damnation in the Talmud”
(Remains, , and again, “There is
not a word in the Talmud which supports the damnable
dogma of endless torment” (Conversation with
Mr. Cox, Salvator Mundi, .
The American Revised Version has very
wisely removed the word Hell altogether on account
of the misleading associations connected with it.
It substitutes the word Gehenna, leaving the reader
to ascertain its meaning. The English Revisers
have retained the word Hell and put the word Gehenna
beside it in the margin. I think this was a pity,
as it will be hard for the ordinary reader to dissociate
the word Hell from the theory which has unwarrantably
grown on to it. But at any rate I think we may
safely say that no reader who understands the position
will ever again use the texts in which our Lord speaks
of Hell to prove the absolute certainty of the theory
of Endless Torment and Endless Sin. So vanishes
another group of the proof texts for this theory.
Section 3
Now take the group of texts with the
word “everlasting.” It is surely
significant that the Revisers have completely removed
this word also in every case and substituted for it
the word “eternal,” a less definite word
and which in scholarly usage means rather the opposite
of temporal that which is above the sphere
of time and space that which belongs to
the other world. At any rate the fact that they
have removed it in every case shows that the word
“everlasting” did not seem to them a correct
translation.
There is only space for a brief explanation.
The original word is the adjective aionos
(aionios) (Eng. aeonian), coming from the noun aion
(aion) (Eng. aeon), an age, an epoch, a long period
of time. This noun cannot mean eternity for it
is repeatedly used by St. Paul in the plural “aeons”
and “aeons of aeons.” As we speak
of great periods of time, “the Ice Age,”
“the Stone Age,” etc., so the Bible
speaks of “this age” (aeon), “the
coming age” (aeon), and “the end of the
age,” etc. These aeons or ages are
thought of in Scripture as vast periods past, present
and future in which the Divine purpose is working itself
out, e. g., God’s purpose is the purpose
of the ages (aeons) (Eph. ii. Christ’s
name is above every name not only in this age (aeon)
but in that which is to come (Eph. . “That
in the ages (aeons) to come He might shew,”
etc.
From this noun, then, conies the adjective
aionios (aionios) aeonian which
may be defined “age long” or “belonging
to the ages,” etc. Any Greek scholar
will assert unhesitatingly that of itself it does not
mean endless or everlasting. Sometimes, as when
applied to God, it may be thus translated but only
because the meaning is inherent in the noun to which
it is applied. The word aionios of itself
would not positively prove the endlessness of God.
This adjective when applied to any thing or any state
of being cannot of itself be used to prove its endlessness.
It is worth notice too that in the
Septuagint Greek Bible, the version usually quoted
in the Gospels and Epistles, this word aionios
is frequently applied to things that have ended, e.
g., the gift of the land of Canaan, the priesthood
of Aaron, the kingdom of David, the temple at Jerusalem,
the daily offerings, etc. When the noun
always means a finite period and the adjective is
applied both to that which is ended and to that which
is endless it would surely be poor scholarship if
the Revisers allowed the word “everlasting”
to remain as its translation, or if students of theology
should argue from it the endlessness of anything.
To which we may add that there are Greek adjectives
and phrases which do definitely mean “endless”
and which are never used in the Bible of men’s
fate in the Hereafter.
Be it observed that all this does
not prove that the punishment of the future ages may
not be everlasting. It only proves that Scripture
nowhere asserts unmistakably that it must be so.
It simply asserts that it is aeonian.
The thoughtful advocates of Everlasting
Torment are of course aware of all this. But
they honestly feel that in spite of the indefiniteness
of the adjective, our Lord has fixed His meaning beyond
question in the one passage that has become so famous
as the great proof text in this controversy, “These
shall go away into aeonian punishment, but the
righteous into aeonian life” (Matt. xx. Very reasonably they say, “If the
word asserts everlastingness in the one case it must
also in the other.” The answer is that
the word of itself cannot assert everlastingness
in either case. If this word were our only proof
of everlasting life then everlasting life would be
a doubtful matter. But the everlastingness of
that life like the everlastingness of God is evident
all over the Bible quite apart from this. The
words here simply tell that the one shall go into
the aeonian life and the other into aeonian punishment,
i. e., that the one shall go into the life
of the future age and the other into the punishment
of the future age without exactly specifying the duration
of either.
I quite feel that the close connection
of the words suggests at least the probability that
one is as lasting as the other. Yet even that
consideration is weakened by asking if people are willing
to apply it to St. Paul’s statement, “As
in Adam all die even so in Christ shall all
be made alive” (the context suggests eternal
life). I would point out, too, that a somewhat
similar verse is in the Septuagint Bible of our Lord’s
day in Hab. ii, where the (aeonian) everlasting
mountains were scattered before God, whose ways are
(aeonian) everlasting. Yet it does not prove
that the one is as endless as the other. And
in Rom. xv-26 the mystery hid in the (aeonian)
times “before the world began” is now
manifested according to the command of the (aeonian)
eternal God. But the age “before the world
began” is ended.
At any rate I must leave the matter
here. I have no space for fuller statement.
If any man feels that a world of increasing sin and
awful torment growing no nearer to its end after millions
and millions of ages does not disturb his conscience
or the thoughts of God which he has learned from the
whole trend of Scripture this text will probably weigh
strongly with him in spite of all that I have said.
But to him who is tortured by such a thought of God
and yet feels that Scripture binds him to it, it must
surely be some relief to feel that even in this great
bulwark text of Everlasting Torment our Lord only asserts
that these shall go away into the aeonian punishment
or chastisement whatever that may mean.
Reluctantly, impelled by a sense of
duty, I have dealt with this theory more fully than
with the others. Should any godly people fear
that I am lightening an awful deterrent to sin let
me say what long experience has taught me of the danger
of this common theory.
It is making sad loving hearts whom
God has not made sad and making earnest Christians,
who feel forced to believe it, perplexed about the
love and justice of God and the prophecies of the final
victory of good.
It is forcing into the background
the true and awfully solemn teaching about Hell which
ought to be prominent in all our pulpits. When
men cannot see any possible reconciliation between
the doctrine of God’s love and their doctrine
of Hell they are very apt to find an easy way out.
“We cannot reconcile them,” said a young
layman to me one day, “therefore we drop out
one of them Hell.” Do not be
shocked at it. Many besides my young layman are
unconsciously doing it. Nowadays more than ever
we, clergy, are teaching much about the love of God.
But nowadays more than ever we are holding our tongues
about Hell. We know the horrible idea which
Hell commonly conveys. Therefore we keep it in
the background trusting that our hearers will leave
it there during the sermon on God’s love.
But they do not, and so we are very unconvincing
about both doctrines.
Again, this common theory of Hell
is so unreasonable that it has lost its power as a
deterrent. No teaching from which Conscience
revolts can long hold its power over men. The
rough common sense, the rough moral sense of careless
men makes them reject it and treat it as a subject
of jest. When men can stupidly laugh together
over jests about hell-fire, when the devil is presented
as a clown in the pantomime it indicates something
very wrong in the teaching. No doctrine has any
real hold on the crowd when they can lightly jest about
it. And because of their unbelief in this false
notion of Hell they are ceasing to believe in any
Hell at all ceasing to believe in that awful
real Hell which is taught in the Bible and of which
God is giving some men foretastes even in this life.
And this false notion of Hell tends
to shake men’s belief in the reality of Heaven.
For if the redeemed could enjoy their bliss in Heaven,
knowing that myriads are existing for ever and ever
in endless suffering and still worse in endless sin,
one feels that they have grown so selfish and opposite
to Christ that they have no business in any heaven.
We dare not leave out the love of
God and we dare not leave out the doctrine of Hell.
Both are certainly true. Therefore they must
be capable of reconciliation. The reconciliation
must not come in ignoring Hell or believing in a kindly,
good-natured God who does not judge severely about
moral character and who only cares that His child
should stop crying and be happy. We are having
too much of this sentimentalism nowadays. It
is a miserable misconception of that awful holiness
which is “of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.”
It would never explain the need of Christ dying on
the cross to put away sin.
Whatever reconciliation we find here
or hereafter it must have at bottom God’s unutterable
hatred of sin but also God’s unutterable love
and pain over every sinful soul which He has made.
This theory of Endless Torment and Endless Sin certainly
does not appear to satisfy this test, and it has in
addition to face the stern revolt of Reason and Conscience.
II
The theory of Universalism, i.
e., that all men shall at length be saved.
This opinion is based on the more
hopeful side of Scripture that we have referred to,
but it ignores or explains away what contradicts it
in the darker and sterner side. If one could
forget that, it would be the most inspiring of all
the guesses that have been made. As presented
by its best exponents, such men as Allen and Jukes
and Cox, it is wonderfully attractive and at first
sight seems to satisfy many of the conditions of the
problem. It takes account of a just and awful
retribution for every sin, and takes account also of
the mysterious hope in the Hereafter which runs through
the Bible. It believes that the power of God
has infinite resources and that the love of God has
unwearying persistence and that no soul can ultimately
resist such resources and such love. Even Hell
itself it deems God’s final effort when all
other means have failed.
The reader who thinks there can be
no possible excuse for such a theory should glance
at a few of the passages quoted in its favour:
“God who wills that all men
should be saved” (1 Tim. i, and “who
wills that all men should come to repentance”
(2 Peter ii. And this will or determination
of God is “immutable” (Heb. v. Again, “Now is the judgment of this
world, now shall the Prince of this world be cast
out, AND I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men
unto Myself” (John xi, 32). “All
flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke
ii. “His grace bringing salvation
to all men” (Titus i. “We
trust in the living God who is the Saviour of all
men, especially of those who believe” (1
Tim. i. “He is the propitiation
not for our sins only, but also for the sins
of the whole world” (1 John i.
“He was manifested that He might destroy
the works of the devil” (1 John ii [and
destroy the devil (bruise the serpent’s
head) Gen. ii]. “He shall overcome
the strong man armed (the devil) and take away his
armour and divide his spoils” (Luke x,
22). “He was manifested to put away
sin by the sacrifice of Himself” (Heb. i.
“God hath not cast away His people whom He
foreknew ... and so all Israel shall be saved”
(Rom. xi-33). “The times of the Restoration
of all things which God hath promised by the mouth
of all His holy prophets since the world began”
(Acts ii. “As in Adam all
die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
But every man in his own order: Christ the first-fruits;
afterwards they that are Christ’s at His coming.
Then cometh the end ... when all things have been
subjected unto Him ... then shall the Son
also be subjected unto Him that put all things under
Him that God may be all in all” (1 Cor.
x-29).
One can see how the constant study
of such passages should lead men to an enthusiastic
hope and lead them to study less carefully the stream
of darker teaching that seemed to conflict with these.
Whatever may be said against the advocates of Universalism
we at least owe to them a clearer emphasizing of the
mysterious hopefulness of Scripture as to the final
triumph of good.
But with deep reluctance one is bound
to assert that the advocates of Universal Salvation
to a great degree ignore or explain away unsatisfactorily
much of the sterner side of the Bible. For amid
all its hopefulness there is a steadily persistent
note in Scripture, stern, awful, sorrowful, which
seems impossible to reconcile with Universalism.
There are clear and repeated assertions that some
men at any rate will not be saved. It is St.
Paul, the author of so many of those hopeful Scriptures
quoted, who tells us “even weeping” of
men “whose end is destruction” (Phil.
ii, and of those whose fate shall be “eternal
destruction from the presence of God” (2 Thess.
. It is the loving Christ Himself who said
of one of His apostles, “It were good for that
man if he had not been born” (St. Matt. xxv.
We are warned back too by the tendency
of character to grow permanent. And when we are
told that God “willeth all men to be saved,”
and that God can do everything, we are forced to ask,
Can God do contradictory things? Can God make
a door to be open and shut at the same time?
Can God make a thing to be and not to be at the same
time? Can God make a man’s will free to
choose good or evil and yet secure that he shall certainly
choose good at the last? One longs to believe
that Universalism should be true, but to believe it
we must ignore much of the evidence of Scripture.
III
The theory of Conditional Immortality,
i. e., that all souls who fail of Eternal Life
shall be punished not by Endless Torment, but by Annihilation
and the loss of God and Heaven for ever and ever.
This is another conjecture framed
to escape the difficulties of the former two.
It would be consistent both with retribution for evil
and also with the final victory of good. That
in the mysterious nature of things when the malignity
of sin becomes incurable, a soul rotted through with
sin might ultimately die out of existence; this opinion
is at least allowable as a conjecture to escape from
the theory of Endless Torment and Sin. It would
in a real sense be an everlasting punishment, being
an everlasting loss of Heaven and God. But it
too is founded only on part of the evidence, on such
texts as “The gift of God is eternal life,”
“He that hath the Son hath life,” implying
that immortality is a conditional thing granted only
to those who are saved, and such texts as “eternal
destruction from the presence of God,”
and the idea of utter annihilation in such passages
as “burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
There is much in favor of it but there is much in
Scripture which makes it difficult to accept it.
And it contradicts straight out the wide-spread Christian
belief in the essential immortality of the soul (though
that belief also needs to be examined). At any
rate it cannot claim authority as a theory of future
punishment.
IV
These are the only conjectures offered
us to solve the difficulties connected with Final
Retribution. We find them all unsatisfactory.
We have reached no definite doctrine of Hell.
With the evidence at our disposal it seems impossible
to do so. The failure of all attempts at reconciling
the seeming contradictions of Scripture must suggest
to us that the solution of this problem is beyond
the range of our present powers. At any rate
it is beyond the range of our present knowledge.
Surely it is wise and reverent to think that this points
to some dealing of God beyond our human ken
which will one day reconcile all the difficulties.
Our little guesses do not exhaust God’s possibilities.
Some day we shall find the answer in that land where
we shall know even as we are known. And when
we find it we know it will be consistent with our
highest thoughts of God. I like to think that
it is those who have grown closest to Christ in sympathy
for sorrow and pain and who unlike us, know all the
facts of the case, who are represented as joining
in that glad shout hereafter, “Hallelujah! salvation
and glory and power belong to our God, FOR TRUE AND
RIGHTEOUS ARE HIS JUDGMENTS.” Leave the
manifestation of this to God. A wise old man
once said, “God has a good deal of time to do
things between this and the other side of eternity.”
This then is the conclusion of the
whole matter. A return to the reserve and reticence
of Scripture. But with this result of our study,
that we feel no longer forced to believe of God that
which Conscience declares to be unworthy of Him.
We are set free to believe that the Judge of all
the earth will do right that Hell as well
as Heaven is within the confines of His dominion that
evil shall not last for ever; that in spite of all
its conflicting evidence the trend of Scripture moves
towards the golden age, the final victory of good.
Thus we leave it.
In our final vision of humanity in
Christ’s great drama of the Judgment, those
on the left are passing into the outer darkness and
as they pass the curtain falls behind them and we
see them no more. We know not what is passing
in that outer darkness where there is “weeping
and gnashing of teeth.” We have no grounds
to believe that any soul there is being born again
through sorrow and shame, that any spoiled and deformed
life is being remoulded in that awful crucible of God.
But as we watch the awful shadows
of that outer darkness, there comes beyond it on the
far horizon the quivering of a coming dawn. For
that age of God’s Gehenna is to have its end,
and far away the day will dawn for which the whole
creation groaneth and travaileth together; when evil
shall have vanished out of the universe for ever; when
death and Hell, the evil and the Evil One shall be
cast into the lake of fire; when “at the name
of Jesus every knee shall bow of things in Heaven and
earth, and under the earth” (in the world of
the dead). “And every tongue shall confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the
Father.” “Then cometh the end,”
says St. Paul, “when Christ shall deliver up
the Kingdom to God, even the Father, when all His enemies
shall be subjected unto Him. And when all His
enemies have been subjected unto Him, then shall the
Son also Himself be subjected unto Him that put all
things under Him, that God may be all in all.”
That is what shall be. One day,
somewhere in the far mysterious future the “purpose
of the ages” shall be accomplished. Evil
shall have vanished out of the universe for ever and
God shall be all in all. One day again it shall
be as at the creation when “God looked on everything
that He had made and behold it was very good.”
How? We know not and we need not know.
We need not be able to assert dogmatically how He
will accomplish His purpose. We need not be able
to assert that all men shall be saved or that all
who are not will be annihilated. But we must
be able with trustful hearts to assert God’s
love and God’s power and the final abolishing
of evil, even though we can only do it with the poet’s
vagueness:
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, “Is there any
hope?”
To which an answer pealed from that high
land,
But in a tongue no man could understand,
And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.