The argument against the common theory of a material resurrection, on account of numerous claimants for the same substance, has of late derived a greatly increased force from the brilliant discoveries in chemistry. It is now found that only a small number of substances ever enter into the composition of animal bodies.20 The food of man consists of nitrogenized and non nitrogenized substances. The latter are the elements of respiration; the former alone compose the plastic elements of nutrition, and they are few in number and comparatively limited in extent. "All life depends on a relatively small quant.i.ty of matter. Over and over again, as the modeller fashions his clay, are plant and animal formed out of the same material." The particles that composed Adam"s frame may before the end of the world have run the circuit of ten thousand bodies of his descendants: ""Twas mine, "tis his, and has been slave to thousands." To proclaim the resurrection of the flesh as is usually done, seems a flat contradiction of clear knowledge.21 A late writer on this subject, Dr. Hitchc.o.c.k, evades the insuperable difficulty by saying, "It is not necessary that the resurrection body should contain a single particle of the body laid in the grave, if it only contain particles of the same kind, united in the same proportion, and the compound be made to a.s.sume the same form and structure as the natural body." 22 Then two men who look exactly alike may in the resurrection exchange bodies without any harm! Here the theory of punishment clashes. Does not the esteemed author see that this would not be a resurrection of the old bodies, but a creation of new ones
20 Liebig, Animal Chemistry, sect. xix.
21 The Circulation of Matter, Blackwood"s Magazine, May, 1853.
22 The Resurrection of Spring, p. 26.
just like them? And is not this a desertion of the orthodox doctrine of the Church? If he varies so far from the established formularies out of a regard for philosophy, he may as well be consistent and give up the physical doctrine wholly, because it rests solely on the tradition which he leaves and is every whit irreconcilable with philosophy. This device is as wilful an attempt to escape the scientific difficulty as that employed by Candlish to avoid the scriptural difficulty put in the way of the doctrine by the apostolic words "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of G.o.d." The eminent Scottish divine affirms that "flesh and bones" that is, these present bodies made incorruptible can inherit the kingdom of G.o.d; although "flesh and blood" that is, these present bodies subject to decay cannot.23 It is surely hard to believe that the New Testament writers had such a distinction in their minds. It is but a forlorn resource conjured up to meet a desperate exigency.
At the appearing of Christ in glory,
"When the Day of Fire shall have dawn"d, and sent Its deadly breath into the firmament," as it is supposed, the great earth cemetery will burst open and its innumerable millions swarm forth before him. Unto the tremendous act of habeas corpus, then proclaimed, every grave will yield its prisoner. Ever since the ascension of Jesus his mistaken followers have been anxiously expecting that awful advent of his person and his power in the clouds; but in vain. "All things remain as they were: where is the promise of his appearing?" As the lookers out hitherto have been disappointed, so they ever will be. Say not, Lo here! or, Lo there! for, behold, he is within you. The reason why this carnal error, Jewish conceit, retains a hold, is that men accept it without any honest scrutiny of its foundations or any earnest thought of their own about it. They pa.s.sively receive the tradition. They do not realize the immensity of the thing, nor the ludicrousness of its details. To their imaginations the awful blast of the trumpet calling the world to judgment, seems no more, as Feuerbach says, than a tone from the tin horn of a postillion, who, at the post station of the Future, orders fresh horses for the Curriculum Vita! President Hitchc.o.c.k tells us that, "when the last trumpet sounds, the whole surface of the earth will become instinct with life, from the charnels of battle fields alone more than a thousand millions of human beings starting forth and crowding upwards to the judgment seat." On the resurrection morning, at the first tip of light over acres of opening monument and heaving turf, "Each member jogs the other, And whispers, Live you, brother?"
And how will it be with us then? Will Daniel Lambert, the mammoth of men, appear weighing half a ton? Will the Siamese twins then be again joined by the living ligament of their congenital band?
Shall "infants be not raised in the smallness of body in which they died, but increase by the wondrous and most swift work of G.o.d"? 24
23 Candlish, Life in a Risen Savior: Discourse XV.
24 Augustine, De Civ. Dei, lib. xxii. cap. xiv.
Young sings, "Now charnels rattle; scatter"d limbs, and all The various bones, obsequious to the call, Self moved, advance; the neck perhaps to meet The distant head; the distant head the feet.
Dreadful to view! see, through the dusky sky Fragments of bodies in confusion fly, To distant regions journeying, there to claim Deserted members and complete the frame."
The glaring melodramatic character, the startling mechanico theatrical effects, of this whole doctrine, are in perfect keeping with the raw imagination of the childhood of the human mind, but in profound opposition to the working philosophy of nature and the sublime simplicity of G.o.d.
Many persons have never distinctly defined their views upon the subject before us. In the minds even of many preachers and writers, several different and irreconcilable theories would seem to exist together in confused mixture. Now they speak as if the soul were sleeping with the body in the grave; again they appear to imply that it is detained in an intermediate state; and a moment afterwards they say it has already entered upon its final reward or doom. Jocelyn relates, in his Life of St. Patrick, that "as the saint one day was pa.s.sing the graves of two men recently buried, observing that one of the graves had a cross over it, he stopped his chariot and asked the dead man below of what religion he had been. The reply was, "A pagan." "Then why was this cross put over you?" inquired St. Patrick. The dead man answered, "He who is buried near me is a Christian; and one of your faith, coming hither, placed the cross at my head." The saint stepped out of his chariot, rectified the mistake, and went his way." Calvin, in the famous treatise designated "Psychopannychia," which he levelled against those who taught the sleep of souls until the day of judgment, maintained that the souls of the elect go immediately to heaven, the souls of the reprobate to h.e.l.l. Here they tarry in bliss and bale until the resurrection; then, coming to the earth, they a.s.sume their bodies and return to their respective places.
But if the souls live so long in heaven and h.e.l.l without their flesh, why need they ever resume it? The c.u.mbrous machinery of the scheme seems superfluous and unmeaning. As a still further specimen of the arbitrary thinking the unscientific and unphilosophical thinking carried into this department of thought by most who have cultivated it, reference may be made to Bishop Burnet"s work "De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium," which teaches that at the first resurrection the bodies of the risen will be the same as the present, but at the second resurrection, after the millennium, from the rudiments of the present body a new spiritual body will be developed.
The true idea of man"s future destiny appears to be that no resurrection of the flesh is needed, because the real man never dies, but lives continuously forever. There are two reasonable ways of conceiving what the vehicle of his life is when he leaves his present frame. It may be that within his material system lurks an exquisite spiritual organization, invisibly pervading it and const.i.tuting its vital power. This ethereal structure is disengaged at last from its gross envelope, and, unfettered, soars to the Divine realms of ether and light. This theory of an "inner body" is elaborately wrought out and sustained in Bonnet"s "Palingenesie Philosophique." Or it may be that there is in each one a primal germ, a deathless monad, which is the organic ident.i.ty of man, root of his inmost stable being, triumphant, unchanging ruler of his flowing, perishable organism. This spirit germ, born into the present life, a.s.similates and holds the present body around it, out of the materials of this world; born into the future life, it will a.s.similate and hold around it a different body, out of the materials of the future world.25 Thus there are bodies terrestrial and bodies celestial: the glory of the terrestrial is one, fitted to this scene of things; the glory of the celestial is another, fitted to the scene of things hereafter to dawn. Each spirit will be clothed from the material furnished by the world in which it resides. Not forever shall we bear about this slow load of weary clay, this corruptible ma.s.s, heir to a thousand ills. Our body shall rather be such "If lightning were the gross corporeal frame Of some angelic essence, whose bright thoughts As far surpa.s.s"d in keen rapidity The lagging action of his limbs as doth Man"s mind his clay; with like excess of speed To animated thought of lightning flies That spirit body o"er life"s deeps divine, Far past the golden isles of memory."
What man knows const.i.tutes his present world. All beyond that const.i.tutes another world. He can imagine two modes in which his desire for a life after death may be gratified, a removal into the Unknown World, or a return into the Known World. With the latter supposition the restoration of the flesh is involved.
Upon the whole, our conclusion is, that in the original plan of the world it was fixed that man should not live here forever, but that the essence of his life should escape from the flesh and depart to some other sphere of being, there either to fashion itself a new form, or to remain disembodied. If those who hold the common doctrine of a carnal resurrection should carry it out with philosophical consistency, by extending the scheme it involves to all existing planetary races as well as to their own, should they cause that process of imagination which produced this doctrine to go on to its legitimate completion, they would see in the final consummation the sundered earths approach each other, and firmaments conglobe, till at last the whole universe concentred in one orb. On the surface of that world all the risen races of being would be distributed, the inhabitants of a present solar system making a nation, the sum of gigantic nationalities const.i.tuting one prodigious, death exempted empire, its solitary sovereign G.o.d.
But this is pure poetry, and not science nor philosophy.
25 Lange on the Resurrection of the Body, Studien und Kritiken, 1836.
CHAPTER IV.
DOCTRINE OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT; OR, CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE IDEA OF A h.e.l.l.
A h.e.l.l of fire and brimstone has been, perhaps still is, the most terrible of the superst.i.tions of the world. We propose to give a historic sketch of the popular representations on this subject, trace them to their origin, and discuss the merits of the question itself. To follow the doctrine through all its variations, ill.u.s.trating the practical and controversial writings upon it, would require a large volume; but, by a judicious arrangement, all that is necessary to a fair understanding of the subject, or really interesting, may be presented within the compa.s.s of an essay. Any one who should read the literature of this subject would be astonished at the almost universal prevalence of the doctrine and at the immense diversity of appalling descriptions of it, and would ask, Whence arises all this? How have these horrors obtained such a seated hold in the world?
In the first place, it is to be replied, as soon as reason is in fair possession of the idea of a continued individual existence beyond the grave, the moral sense, discriminating the deeds, tempers, and characters of men, would teach that there must be different allotments and experiences for them after death. It is not right, say reason and conscience, for the coward, the idler, fool, knave, sot, murderer, to enter into the same realm and have the same bliss with heroes, sages, and saints; neither are they able to do it. The spontaneous thought and sentiment of humanity would declare, if the soul survives the body, pa.s.sing into the invisible world, its fortunes there must depend somewhat upon its fitness and deserts, its contained treasures and acquired habits.
Reason, judging the facts of observation according to the principles of ethics and the working of experienced spiritual laws, at once decides that there is a difference hereafter between the fate of the good heart and the bad one, the great soul and the mean one: in a word, there is, in some sense or other, a heaven and a h.e.l.l.
Again: the same belief would be necessitated by the conception, so deeply entertained by the primitive people of the earth, of overruling and inspecting G.o.ds. They supposed these G.o.ds to be in a great degree like themselves, partial, fickle, jealous, revengeful. Such beings, of course, would caress their favorites and torture their offenders. The calamities and blessings of this life were regarded as tokens, revengeful or loving, of the ruling deities, now pleased, now enraged. And when their votaries or victims had pa.s.sed into the eternal state, how natural to suppose them still favored or cursed by the pa.s.sionate wills of these irresponsible G.o.ds! Plainly enough, they who believe in G.o.ds that launch thunderbolts and upheave the sea in their rage and take vengeance for an insult by sending forth a pestilence, must also believe in a h.e.l.l where Ixion may be affixed to the wheel and Tantalus be tortured with maddening mockeries. These two conceptions of discriminating justice and of vengeful G.o.ds both lead to the theoretic construction of a h.e.l.l, and to the growth of doctrines and parables about it, though in a different sort, the former ill.u.s.trating a pervasive law which distributes men according to their deserts, the latter speaking of beings with human pa.s.sions, who inflict outward arbitrary penalties according to their pleasure.
Thirdly, when the general idea of a h.e.l.l has once obtained lodgment, it is rapidly nourished, developed, and ornamented, carried out into particulars by poets, rhetoricians, and popular teachers, whose fancies are stimulated and whose figurative views and pictures act and react both upon the sources and the products of faith. Representations based only on moral facts, emblems addressing the imagination, after a while are received in a literal sense, become physically located and clothed with the power of horror. A Hindu poet says, "The ungrateful shall remain in h.e.l.l as long as the sun hangs in heaven." An old Jewish Rabbi says that after the general judgment "G.o.d shall lead all the blessed through h.e.l.l and all the d.a.m.ned through paradise, and show to each one the place that was prepared for him in each region, so that they shall not be able to say, "We are not to be blamed or praised; for our doom was unalterably fixed beforehand." Such utterances are originally moral symbols, not dogmatic a.s.sertions; and yet in a rude age they very easily pa.s.s into the popular mind as declaring facts literally to be believed. A Talmudic writer says, "There are in h.e.l.l seven abodes, in each abode seven thousand caverns, in each cavern seven thousand clefts, in each cleft seven thousand scorpions; each scorpion has seven limbs, and on each limb are seven thousand barrels of gall. There are also in h.e.l.l seven rivers of rankest poison, so deadly that if one touches it he bursts." Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, have given minute descriptions of h.e.l.l and its agonies, descriptions which have unquestionably had a tremendous influence in cherishing and fashioning the world"s faith in that awful empire. The poems of Dante, Milton, and Pollok revel in the most vivid and terrific pictures of the infernal kingdom and its imagined horrors; and the popular doctrine of future punishment in Christendom is far more closely conformed to their revelations than to the declarations of the New Testament. The English poet"s "Paradise Lost" has undoubtedly exerted an influence on the popular faith comparable with that of the Genevan theologian"s "Inst.i.tutes of the Christian Religion." There is a horrid fiction, widely believed once by the Jewish Rabbins and by the Mohammedans, that two gigantic fiends called the Searchers, as soon as a deceased person is buried, make him sit up in the grave, examine the moral condition of his soul, and, if he is very guilty, beat in his temples with heavy iron maces. It is obvious to observe that such conceptions are purely arbitrary, the work of fancy, not based on any intrinsic fitness or probability; but they are received because unthinking ignorance and hungry superst.i.tion will greedily believe any thing they hear.
Joseph Trapp, an English clergyman, in a long poem thus sets forth the scene of d.a.m.nation: "Doom"d to live death and never to expire, In floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire The d.a.m.n"d shall groan, fire of all kinds and forms, In rain and hail, in hurricanes and storms, Liquid and solid, livid, red, and pale, A flaming mountain here, and there a flaming vale; The liquid fire makes seas, the solid, sh.o.r.es; Arch"d o"er with flames, the horrid concave roars. In bubbling eddies rolls the fiery tide, And sulphurous surges on each other ride. The hollow winding vaults, and dens, and caves, Bellow like furnaces with flaming waves.
Pillars of flame in spiral volumes rise, Like fiery snakes, and lick the infernal skies. Sulphur, the eternal fuel, unconsumed, Vomits redounding smoke, thick, unillumed."
But all other paintings of the fear and anguish of h.e.l.l are vapid and pale before the preternatural frightfulness of those given at unmerciful length and in sickening specialty in some of the Hindu and Persian sacred books.1 Here worlds of nauseating disgusts, of loathsome agonies, of intolerable terrors, pa.s.s before us. Some are hung up by their tongues, or by their eyes, and slowly devoured by fiery vermin; some scourged with whips of serpents whose poisonous fangs lacerate their flesh at every blow; some forced to swallow bowls of gore, hair, and corruption, freshly filled as fast as drained; some packed immovably in red hot iron chests and laid in raging furnaces for unutterable millions of ages. One who is familiar with the imagery of the Buddhist h.e.l.ls will think the pencils of Dante and Pollok, of Jeremy Taylor and Jonathan Edwards, were dipped in water. There is just as much ground for believing the accounts of the former to be true as there is for crediting those of the latter: the two are fundamentally the same, and the pagan had earlier possession of the field.
Furthermore, in the early ages, and among people where castes were prominent, when the learning, culture, and power were confined to one cla.s.s at the expense of others, it is unquestionable that copious and fearful descriptions of the future state were spread abroad by those who were interested in establishing such a dogma.
The haughtiness and selfishness of the hierarchic spirit, the exclusiveness, cruelty, and cunning tyranny of many of the ancient priesthoods, are well known. Despising, hating, and fearing the people, whom they held in abject spiritual bondage, they sought to devise, diffuse, and organize such opinions as would concentrate power in their own hands and rivet their authority. Accordingly, in the lower immensity they painted and shadowed forth the lurid and dusky image of h.e.l.l, gathering around it all that was most abominated and awful. Then they set up certain fanciful conditions, without the strict observance of which no one could avoid d.a.m.nation. The animus of a priesthood in the structure of this doctrine is shown by the glaring fact that in the old religions the woes of h.e.l.l were denounced not so much upon bad men who committed crimes out of a wicked heart, as upon careless men who neglected priestly guidance and violated the ritual. The omission of a prayer or an ablution, the neglect of baptism or confession, a slight thrown upon a priest, a mental conception differing from the decree of the "Church," would condemn a man far more surely and deeply into the Egyptian, Hindu, Persian, Pharisaic, Papal, or Calvinistic h.e.l.l than any amount of moral culpability according to the standard of natural ethics.
1 See Pope"s translation of the Viraf Nameh. Also the Dabistan, vol. i. pp. 295-304, of the translation by Shea and Troyer; and Coleman"s Mythology of the Hindus, chapter on the h.e.l.ls.
The popular h.e.l.ls have ever been built on hierarchic selfishness, dogmatic pride, and personal cruelty, and have been walled around with arbitrary and traditional rituals. Through the breaches made in these rituals by neglect, souls have been plunged in. The Pa.r.s.ee priest describes a woman in h.e.l.l "beaten with stone clubs by two demons twelve miles in size, and compelled to continue eating a basin of putridity, because once some of her hair, as she combed it, fell into the sacred fire." The Brahmanic priest tells of a man who, for "neglecting to meditate on the mystic monosyllable Om before praying, was thrown down in h.e.l.l on an iron floor and cleaved with an axe, then stirred in a caldron of molten lead till covered all over with the sweated foam of torture like a grain of rice in an oven, and then fastened, with head downwards and feet upwards, to a chariot of fire and urged onwards with a red hot goad." The Papal priest declares that the schismatic, though the kindest and justest man, at death drops hopelessly into h.e.l.l, while the devotee, though scandalously corrupt in heart and life, who confesses and receives extreme unction, treads the primrose path to paradise. The Episcopalian priest dooms the dissenter to everlasting woe in spite of every virtue, because he has not known sacramental baptism in the apostolic line. The Arminian priest turns the rationalist over to the penal fires of eternity, because he is in mental error as to the explanation of the Trinity and the Atonement. In every age it has been the priestly spirit, acting on ritual considerations, that has deepened the foundations, enlarged the borders, and apportioned the victims, of h.e.l.l. The perversions and excesses of the doctrine have grown out of cruel ambition and cunning on one side, and been received by docile ignorance and superst.i.tion on the other, and been mutually fed by traditions and fables between. The excessive vanity and theocratic pride of the Jews led them to exclude all the Gentiles, whom they stigmatized as "uncirc.u.mcised dogs," from the Jewish salvation. The same spirit, aggravated if possible, pa.s.sed lineally into Christendom, causing the Orthodox Church to exclude all the heathen, all heretics, and the unbaptized, from the Christian salvation.
A fifth explanation of the wholesale severity and multiplied details of horror, which came to be incorporated with the doctrine of h.e.l.l, is to be found in the gloomy theories of certain philosophers whose relentless speculations were tinged and moulded by their own recluse misanthropy and the prevailing superst.i.tions of their time. Out of the old asceticism of the East the false spiritualism which regarded matter as the source of evil and this life as a penance arose the dogma of metempsychosis. The consequence of this theory, rigidly carried out, created a descending congeries of h.e.l.ls, reaching from centre to nadir, in correspondence to an ascending congeries of heavens, reaching from centre to zenith. Out of the myth of the Fall sprang the dogma of total depravity, dooming our whole race to h.e.l.l forever, except those saved by the subsequent artifice of the atonement. Theories conjured up and elaborated by fanciful and bloodless metaphysicians, in an age when the milk of public human kindness was thinned, soured, poisoned, by narrow and tyrannical prejudices, might easily legitimate and establish any conclusions, however unreasonable and monstrous. The history of philosophy is the broad demonstration of this. The Church philosophers, (with exceptions, of course,) receiving the traditions of the common faith, partaking in the superst.i.tions of their age, banished from the bosoms of men by their monastic position, and inflamed with hierarchic pride, with but a faint connection or intercourse between conscience and intellect or between heart and fancy, strove to spin out theories which would explain and justify the orthodox dogmas.
Working with metaphysical tools of abstract reason, not with the practical faculties of life, dealing with the fanciful materials of priestly tradition, not with the solid facts of ethical observation, they would naturally be troubled with but few qualms and make but few reservations, however overwhelming the results of horror at which they might arrive. Habituated for years to hair drawn a.n.a.lyses and superst.i.tious broodings upon the subject, overshadowed by the supernatural hierarchy in which they lived, surrounded by a thick night of ignorance, persecution, and slaughter, it was no wonder they could believe the system they preached, although in reality it was only a traditional abstraction metaphysically wrought up and vivified by themselves.
Being thus wrought out and animated by them, who were the sole depositaries of learning and the undisputed lords of thought, the ma.s.s of the people, lying abjectly in the fetters of authority, could not help accepting it. Ample ill.u.s.trations of these a.s.sertions will occur to all who are familiar with the theological schemes and the dialectic subtleties of the early Church Fathers and of the later Church Scholastics.
Finally, by the combined power, first, of natural conscience affirming a future distinction between the good and the bad; secondly, of imperfect conceptions of G.o.d as a pa.s.sionate avenger; thirdly, of the licentious fancies of poets drawing awful imaginative pictures of future woe; fourthly, of the cruel spirit and the ambitious plans of selfish priesthoods; and fifthly, of the harsh and relentless theories of conforming metaphysicians, the doctrine of h.e.l.l, as a located place of manifold terrific physical tortures drawing in vast majorities of the human race, became established in the ruling creeds and enthroned as an orthodox dogma. In some heathen nations the descriptions of the poets, in others the accounts of the priestly books, were held to be inspired revelations. To call them in question was blasphemous.
In Christendom the scriptural representations of the subject, which were general moral adaptations, incidentally made, of representations already existing, obtained a literal interpretation, had the stamp of infallibility put on them and immense perverted additions joined to them. Thus everywhere the dogma became a.s.sociated with the established authority. To deny it was heresy.
Heretics were excommunicated, loaded with pains and penalties, and, for many centuries, often put to death with excruciating tortures. From that moment the doctrine was taken out of the province of natural reason, out of the realm of ethical truth. The absurdities, wrongs, and barbarities deducible from it were a part and parcel of it, and not to be considered as any objection to it. No free thought and honest criticism were allowed. Because taught by authority, it must be submissively taken for granted. Henceforth we are not to wonder at the revolting inhumanity of spirit and horribleness of gloating hatred shown in connection with the doctrine; for it was not the independent thought and proper moral spirit of individuals, but the petrified dogma and irresponsible corporate spirit of that towering hierarchy, the Church.
The Church set forth certain conditional offers of salvation. When those offers were spurned or neglected, the Church felt personally insulted and aggrieved. Her servants hurled on the hated heretics and heathen the denunciations of bigotry and the threats of rage.
Rugged old Tertullian, in whose torrid veins the fire of his African deserts seems infused, revels with infernal glee over the contemplation of the sure d.a.m.nation of the heathen. "At that greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment," he says, "how shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red hot fires with their deluded pupils; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish than ever before from applause."2 Hundreds of the most accredited Christian writers have shown the same fiendish spirit. Drexel the Jesuit, preaching of Dives, exclaims, "Instead of a lofty bed of down on which he was wont to repose himself, he now lies frying in the flames; his sparkling wine and delicious dainties are taken from him; he is burnt up with thirst, and has nothing for his food but smoke and sulphur." Jeremy Taylor3 says, in that discourse on the "Pains of h.e.l.l" where he has lavished all the stores of his matchless learning and all the wealth of his gorgeous imagination in multiplying and adorning the paraphernalia of torture with infinite accompaniments of unendurable pangs and insufferable abominations, "We are amazed at the inhumanity of Phalaris, who roasted men in his brazen bull: this was joy in respect of that fire of h.e.l.l which penetrates the very entrails without consuming them;" "husbands shall see their wives, parents shall see their children, tormented before their eyes;" "the bodies of the d.a.m.ned shall be crowded together in h.e.l.l like grapes in a wine press, which press one another till they burst;" "every distinct sense and organ shall be a.s.sailed with its own appropriate and most exquisite sufferings." Christopher Love belying his name says of the d.a.m.ned, "Their cursings are their hymns, howlings their tunes, and blasphemies their ditties." Calvin writes, "Forever hara.s.sed with a dreadful tempest, they shall feel themselves torn asunder by an angry G.o.d, and transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings, terrified by the thunderbolts of G.o.d, and broken by the weight of his hand, so that to sink into any gulfs would be more tolerable than to stand for a moment in these terrors." A living divine, Dr.
Gardiner Spring, declares, "When the omnipotent and angry G.o.d, who has access to all the avenues of distress in the corporeal frame and all the inlets to agony in the intellectual const.i.tution, undertakes to punish, he will convince the universe that he does not gird himself for the work of retribution in vain;" "it will be a glorious deed when He who hung on Calvary shall cast those who have trodden his blood under their feet, into the furnace of fire, where there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth."
Thousands of pa.s.sages like these, and even worse, might easily be collected from Christian authors, dating their utterance from the days of St. Irenaus, Bishop of Lyons, who flamed against the heretics, to the days of Nehemiah Adams, Congregational preacher of Boston, who says, "It is to be feared the forty two children that mocked Elisha are now in h.e.l.l." 4 There is an unmerciful animus in them, a vindictiveness of thought and feeling, far oh, how far! removed from the meek and loving
2 De Spectaculis, cap. x.x.x., Gibbon"s trans.
3 Contemplations of the State of Man, ch. 6 8.
4 Friends of Christ, p. 149.
soul of Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem, and loved the "unevangelical" young lawyer who was "not far from the kingdom of heaven," and yearned towards the penitent Peter, and from the tenderness of his immaculate purity said to the adulteress, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." There are some sectarians in whom the arbitrary narrowness, fierceness, and rigidity of their received creeds have so demoralized and hardened conscience and sensibility in their native healthy directions, and artificially inflamed them in diseased channels, that we verily believe, if the decision of the eternal destiny of the human race were placed in their hands, they would with scarcely a twinge of pain perhaps some of them even with a horrid satisfaction and triumph doom all except their own dogmatic coterie to h.e.l.l. They are bound to do so. They profess to know infallibly that G.o.d will do so: if, therefore, the case being in their arbitration, they would decide differently, they thereby impeach the action of G.o.d, confess his decrees irreconcilable with reason and justice, and set up their own goodness as superior to his. Burnet has preserved the plea of b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, which was in these words: "As the souls of heretics are hereafter to be eternally burning in h.e.l.l, there can be nothing more proper than for me to imitate the Divine vengeance by burning them on earth." Thanks be to the infinite Father that our fate is in his hands, and not in the hands of men who are bigots,
"Those pseudo Privy Councillors of G.o.d, Who write down judgments with a pen hard nibb"d: Ushers of Beelzebub"s black rod, Commending sinners, not to ice thick ribb"d, But endless flames to scorch them up like flax, Yet sure of heaven themselves, as if they"d cribb"d The impression of St. Peter"s keys in wax!"
It may be thought that this doctrine and its awful concomitants, though once promulgated, are now nearly obsolete. It is true that, in thinking minds and generous hearts, they are getting to be repudiated. But by no means is it so in the recognised formularies of the established Churches and in the teachings of the popular clergy. All through the Gentile world, wherever there is a prevailing religion, the threats and horrors of a fearful doctrine of h.e.l.l are still brandished over the trembling or careless mult.i.tudes. In Christendom, the authoritative announcement of the Roman and Greek Churches, and the public creeds confessed by every communicant of all the denominations, save two or three which are comparatively insignificant in numbers, show that the doctrine is yet held without mitigation. The Bishop of Toronto, only a year or two ago, published the authoritative declaration that "every child of humanity, except the Virgin Mary, is from the first moment of conception a child of wrath, hated by the blessed Trinity, belonging to Satan, and doomed to h.e.l.l!" Indeed, the doctrine, in its whole naked and frightful extent, is necessarily, in strict logic, an integral part of the great system of the popular Christianity, that is, Christianity as falsely interpreted, paganized, and scholasticized. For if by the sin of Adam the entire race were totally depraved and condemned to a hopeless h.e.l.l, and only those can be saved who personally appropriate by a realizing faith the benefits of the subsequent artifice carried out in the atoning blood of the incarnate G.o.d, certainly the extremist advocate of the doctrine concerning h.e.l.l has not exceeded the truth, and cannot exceed it. All the necessities of logic rebuke the tame hearted theologians, and great Augustine"s, great Calvin"s, ghost walks unapproached among them, crying out that they are slow and inefficient in describing the enormous sweep of the inherited penalty! Many persons who have not taken pains to examine the subject suppose that the horrifying descriptions given by Christian authors of the state and sufferings of the lost were not intended to be literally received, but were meant as figures of speech, highly wrought metaphors calculated to alarm and impress with physical emblems corresponding only to moral and spiritual realities. The progress of thought and refinement has made it natural that recourse should often be had to such an explanation; but unquestionably it is a mistake. The annals of theology, both dogmatic and homiletic, from the time of the earliest Fathers till now, abound in detailed accounts of the future punishment of the wicked, whereof the context, the train of thought, and all the intrinsic characteristics of style and coherence, do not leave a shadow of doubt that they were written as faithful, though inadequate, accounts of facts.
The Church, the immense bulk of Christendom, has in theory always regarded h.e.l.l and its dire concomitants as material facts, and not as merely spiritual experiences.
Tertullian says, "The d.a.m.ned burn eternally without consuming, as the volcanoes, which are vents from the stored subterranean fire of h.e.l.l, burn forever without wasting." 5 Cyprian declares that "the wretched bodies of the condemned shall simmer and blaze in those living fires." Augustine argues at great length and with ingenious varieties of reasoning to show how the material bodies of the d.a.m.ned may withstand annihilation in everlasting fire.6 Similar a.s.sertions, which cannot be figuratively explained, are made by Irenaus, Jerome, Athanasius, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Gerson, Bernard, and indeed by almost all the Christian writers.
Origen, who was a Platonist, and a heretic on many points, was severely condemned for saying that the fire of h.e.l.l was inward and of the conscience, rather than outward and of the body. For the strict materiality of the fire of h.e.l.l we might adduce volumes of authorities from nearly every province of the Church. Dr. Barrow a.s.serts that "our bodies will be afflicted continually by a sulphurous flame, piercing the inmost sinews." John Whitaker thinks "the bodies of the d.a.m.ned will be all salted with fire, so tempered and prepared as to burn the more fiercely and yet never consume." Jeremy Taylor teaches that "this temporal fire is but a painted fire in respect of that penetrating and real fire in h.e.l.l." Jonathan Edwards soberly and believingly writes thus: "The world will probably be converted into a great lake or liquid globe of fire, a vast ocean of fire, in which the wicked shall be overwhelmed, which will always be in tempest, in which they shall be tost to and fro, having no rest day or night, vast waves or billows of fire continually rolling over their heads, of which they shall forever be full of a quick sense within and without: their heads, their eyes, their tongues, their hands, their feet, their loins, and their vitals shall forever be full of a glowing, melting fire, fierce enough to melt the very rocks and elements; and also they shall eternally be full of the most quick and lively sense
5 Apol. cap. 47-48.
6 De Civ. Dei, lib. xxi. cap. 2 4.