Theological Essays/Concluding Essay

Here I might stop; for the Trinity is, as I believe, the ground on which the Church stands, and on which Humanity stands; Prayer and Sacrifice are, I believe, the means whereby the Trinity is made known to us: in the Trinity I find the love for which I have been seeking; in Prayer and Sacrifice I hold that we may become partakers of it. But here I cannot stop, for the Unitarians, and multitudes who are not Unitarians, declare that all I have said is futile, for that there is another doctrine which contradicts the principle of my whole book, and yet which is as much an article of my faith as the Trinity itself. "Your Church," they say, "maintains the notion of everlasting punishment after death. Consider what is included in that notion. You cannot thrust it into a corner, as you might naturally wish to do. You cannot mention it as something by the way. If it is anything, it is fundamental. Theologians and popular preachers treat it They start from it; they put it forth as the ground of their exhortations. The world, according to them, lies under a sentence of condemnation. An as such. ​immense—an incalculable—majority of all that have been born into it, must, if their statements mean any- thing, if they are not merely idle, frivolous rhetoric, be hopelessly doomed. Their object is to point out how a few, a very few, may be saved from the sentence. All their doctrines, therefore, have this centre. Let them speak of Atonement, Justification, Regeneration;—these are only different names to denote the methods by which certain men may have the comfort of feeling that they are not sharers in the condition to which God has consigned our race."

"What is most appalling," the objector continues, "to a person who takes the words of Scripture literally, is that the passages from which the proofs of this doctrine are derived are found in the New Testament, in the discourses of Christ Himself. Dr. John Owen especially draws the attention of his readers to the fact that here, and not in the Old Testament, which is supposed to contain the severer and sterner religion of the Law, the sentences containing eternal perdition occur. There can be no doubt that his observation is true, whatever reason may be given for it. Our fathers used to think that they could explain away such passages by giving a different force to the word Eternal, when it is connected with blessedness, and when it is connected with punishment. But such philological tricks will not answer in our day. We feel the necessity of giving up the passages, of supposing that they were not spoken by Him to whom they are attributed, or that He was mistaken. But you dare not take that course."

"It is a discouraging circumstance, also," they say, "that in respect of this tenet theology has not gained by the Reformation, but has lost considerably. The ​belief in hopeless punishment belongs, no doubt, as much to Romanism as to Protestantism. But how much are its extreme horrors mitigated by the admission of a Purgatory for a great multitude of human souls! To whatever abuses that notion may have been subjected by superstition or cupidity, it is surely milder and more humane than the decree which goes forth from so many pulpits in our land: Understand, sinners, whatever be your offences, whatever your temptations, the same irremediable anguish is prepared for you all. Even in the Inferno of the Florentine poet, though all hope was to forsake those who entered it, what traces there are of recollection and affection, what hints of a moral improvement through suffering! With us, there is only one dark abyss of torment and sin for all who, in the course of threescore years and ten, have not been brought to believe things which they could not believe or have never learnt, who have not abstained from acts which they have been taught from their youth up to commit."

"Once more," they proceed, "experience, which is said to teach individuals a little—nations almost nothing—has taught theologians, it seems, to be more outrageous, more contemptuous to human sympathies and conscience, than they used to be when all men bowed the neck to their yoke. This tenet must be accepted with greater precision now than in the days gone by. The Evangelical Alliance, longing to embrace all Protestant schools and parties, makes it one of its nine articles of faith, one of those first principles which are involved in the very nature of a comprehensive Christianity. It is clear that they are not solitary in their wish to give the doctrine of everlasting punishment this character. Your orthodox English Church​men, though they may dissent from some of their opinions as too wide, will join heart and soul with them whenever they are narrow and exclusive. They may suffer doubts and modifications in some points; on this, be sure, they will demand simple, unqualified acquiescence."

These statements may be heard in all circles, from young and old, from men and women, from persons longing to believe, from those who are settled down into indifference. Those who know say that they are producing infidelity in the highest classes; hard-working clergymen in the Metropolis can bear witness that they supply the most staple arguments to those who are preaching infidelity among the lowest. How impossible it is that I can pass them by, every one must perceive. They affect not one, but each of the principles which I have been discussing. If all these assertions are true, all that I have written is false. I am bound, therefore, to examine which of them have a foundation and which have not. For no one can doubt that there is a truth in some of them which cannot be gainsaid.

I. I admit, without the slightest hesitation, that there is very much more about Eternity and eternal punishment in the Gospel than in the Law, in the words of Christ than in the books of Moses and the Prophets. Let that point be well recollected and carefully reflected upon, in connection with the opinion which all in some way or other entertain, in some language or other express, that the New Testament is more completely a revelation of the Love of God than the Old is. The two assertions must be reconciled. We cannot go on repeating them both, dwelling upon them both, drawing arguments from them both, while ​yet we feel them to be incompatible or contradictory. Let it be further conceded at once that we cannot honestly get rid of this contradiction by attaching two different meanings to the word αἰώνιος in different applications. The subject which it qualifies cannot affect the sense we put upon it. If we turn it the least awry to meet our convenience, we deal unfaithfully with the book which we profess to take as our guide.

Starting from these premises, let us consider why it is that the New Testament has more to do with eternity than the Old. I think no Christian will differ very widely from me when I answer, “It is because the living and eternal God is more fully and perfectly revealed in the one than in the other.” In both He is discovering Himself to men; in both He is piercing through the mists which conceal Him from them. But in the one He is making Himself known chiefly in His relations to the visible economy of the world; in the other He is exhibiting His own inward nature, and is declaring Himself as He is in Him who is the brightness of His glory, the express image of His person. Whenever the word Eternal is used, then, in the New Testament, it ought first, by all rules of reason, to be considered in reference to God. Its use when it is applied to Him must determine all its other uses. There must be no shrinking from this rule, no efforts to evade the force of it; for this is what we agreed to condemn in the Unitarians and Universalists of the last age, that they changed the force of the adjective at their pleasure, so that it might not mean the same in reference to punishment as to life. How can we carry out this rule? Shall we say that Eternal means, in reference to God, “without beginning or end?” ​How then can we affix that meaning to Eternal, when we are speaking of man's bliss or misery? Is that without beginning as well as without end? "Oh no! you must leave out the beginning. That of course has nothing to do with this case." Who told you so? How dare you play thus fast and loose with God's word? How dare you fix the standard by which the signification of a word is to be judged, and reject that very standard a moment after?

But are there no better reasons why we should not affix this meaning, "without beginning and end," to the word αἰώνιος when it is applied in the New Testament to God? I quite agree that such a meaning might have seemed very natural to an ordinary Greek. The word might have been used in that sense by a classical author, or in colloquial language, without the least impropriety. But just the lesson which God had been teaching men by the revelation of Himself was, that mere negatives are utterly unfit to express His being, His substance. From the very first He had taught His chosen people to look upon Him as the righteous Being, to believe that all their righteousness was grounded on His. He had promised them a more complete knowledge of His righteousness. Every true Israelite had looked to this knowledge as his reward, as the deliverance from his enemies, as the satisfaction of his inmost longings, as the great blessing to his nation and to mankind, as well as to himself. His Righteousness, His Truth, His Love, the Jew came more and more to perceive, were the substantial and eternal things, by seeking which he was delivered from the worship of Gods of Time and Sense, as well as from the more miserable philosophical abstraction of a God who is merely a negative of time; without begin​ning and without end. Therefore, when the Son was revealed, this is the language in which the beloved disciple speaks, "The life was manifested, and we have seen it, and we declare unto you that eternal life which was with the Father, and which has been manifested unto us." This is but a specimen of his uniform language. Yes, and I will be bold to say that his language interprets all the language of the New Testament. The eternal life is the righteousness and truth and love of God which are manifested in Christ Jesus; manifested to men that they may be partakers of them, that they may have fellowship with the Father and with the Son. This is held out as the eternal blessedness of those who seek God and love Him. This it is of which our Lord must have spoken in His last prayer, if he who reports that prayer did not misinterpret His meaning.

Is it inconsistent, then, with the general object and character of the New Testament, as the manifestation of His love, that Eternity in all its aspects should come before us there as it does nowhere else, that there we should be taught what it means? Is it inconsistent with its scope and object that there, too, we should be taught what the horror and awfulness is of being without this love, of setting ourselves in opposition to it? Those who would not own Christ in His brethren, who did not visit Him when they were sick and in prison, go away, He said, into eternal or everlasting punishment. Are we affixing a new meaning to these words, or the very meaning which the context demands, the only meaning which is consistent with the force that is given to the adjective by our Lord and His apostles elsewhere, if we say that the eternal punishment is the punishment of being ​without the knowledge of God, who is love, and of Jesus Christ, who has manifested it; even as eternal life is declared to be the having the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ? If it is right, if it is a duty to say that Eternity in relation to God has nothing to do with time or duration, are we not bound to say that also in reference to life or to punishment it has nothing to do with time or duration?

II. What I have said respecting the New Testament will explain some phenomena which have puzzled observers in the opinions of the early Church upon this subject. Uniformity is not to be looked for. If any one expects to find that, he will be woefully dis- appointed. He will probably discover in all the Fathers a very strange, almost overwhelming, feeling that Christ had revealed eternity, the eternal world, the eternal God, as they had never been revealed before; that a quite new blessedness had been disclosed to men; that there was a tremendous disclosure of evil correspondent to that. But as in every case the wisest teachers of these centuries were but trying to catch the meaning of our Lord and His Apostles, some seeing it on one side, some on another;—some through the refracting medium of a heathen education, some through the Jewish Scriptures, some through their own conflicts and the conflicts of their time;—so was it here. One caught at this aspect of eternity, one at that. Here was an eloquent preacher who drew pictures of miseries to come, and mixed together material images with spiritual ideas. There was a Universalist who dwelt on the possibility of men being restored, after ages of suffering, to the favour of God. There was one who dreamed of alternations of misery and blessedness. There were those who learnt in the dread​ful strife with Manicheism the real distinction of time and eternity, of life and death. There were those who, troubling themselves less with questions respecting the future state of men, dwelt on the eternity of the Father and the co-eternity of the Son, and showed how needful it was that no notions of time or duration should intrude themselves into such mysteries. The influence of these last men upon the Church was great; so far as fixing the language of her formularies in questions respecting the distinction of temporal and eternal things, it was paramount. Even their anathemas against opponents, however reckless, as they pointed to a disbelief which concerned the knowledge of God, kept up the feeling in the Church that that knowledge constitutes Eternal Life, and that the loss of it is Eternal Death. But the practical teachers naturally gave the form to the popular divinity. It is only wonderful that that divinity should have preserved so spiritual a tone as it did; that a preacher like Chrysostom, for instance, should have spoken of the second death as the death of Sin, the loss of the moral being, when he must have been continually tempted to think that the coarse reprobates of Antioch and Constantinople needed only, and could only understand, threats of material brimstone. But God did not suffer the champion whom He had educated to be the opposer of courts and empresses habitually to adopt the low policy which is so suitable to them, so shameful in the minister of Truth.

Very different was the behaviour of the bishops in the city which he ruled so righteously a century and a half after his death. Yielding to the intrigues of a successor of Eudoxia,—in comparison with whom she was an angel,—a woman who had the greatest interest, ​one would have thought, in believing that the love of God might convert even the lowest victims of lust and hatred into His servants and children,—these reverend Fathers consigned Origen to endless perdition, because he had held the opinion that his fellow-beings were not intended for it. This example how far morality was interested in such decrees,—how much of grovelling submission on the part of ecclesiastics to civil rulers was the cause of them,—might have led the Western Church, which had other reasons for not esteeming very highly the orthodoxy of Justinian and Theodora, to pause before they advanced in the same course. But barbarians were crowding into the fold of Christ, who brought with them all the dreams of a Walhalla. To govern was the function of the Latin Church; theology was to be used as an instrument of government. Distinctions, once established, were to be carefully defended and enforced. But where none existed, the Church was to prove its capacity of embracing the nations, by adapting herself, with wonderful facility, to the superstitions which she found among them, by incorporating them into her own body of doctrine, by stooping to material in- fluences and artifices, for the sake of moving those who were supposed to have little or nothing in them which could respond to a spiritual message. To a superficial, and yet an honest observer, the whole course of Papal history looks merely like a series of these politic appeals to the appetites of the lower nature, for the sake of bribing them not to instigate crimes, or of enlisting them in the service of the Church,—nothing but a series of testimonies what crimes must be the result of such bribery, what a service that must be which secures the aid of such mercenaries. The efforts ​to materialise the terrors of the future world, and to make those terrors the great motives to obedience,—with the obedience which was actually produced by them,—at once suggest themselves as the most startling and decisive points in the evidence. The vision of a purgatory from which men might be delivered by prayers or by money, coming so much more near to the conscience, suggesting so much more practical methods of proceeding than the mere distant background of hopeless torment, offers itself as the natural product of a scheme, devised to act upon the fears and hopes of man, not drawn from the word of God. But a more careful student is not satisfied with this statement of the case, though he is forced to confess that it is true. He perceives that there were words belonging to the popular language of the Latins, not derived from the Greek, which showed that the doctrine of the New Testament respecting eternal life and death had still a hold upon the conscience of the Western Church.

What is Perdition but a loss? What is eternal damnation but the loss of a good which God had revealed to His creatures, of which He had put them in possession? What a witness there lay in these words, even when thrown about by the most random rhetorician, against the notion of a mere future prize to be won by men who could purchase it by sacrifices, of a future misery which God had designed for His creatures! And the witness was not inoperative. The noblest Doctors of the Middle Ages did believe this to be the meaning of all which they dreaded for themselves and for mankind. They did believe that Love was at the root of all things, and that to lose Love was to lose all things. This was the ground of their most passionate exhortations, whatever forms ​they might take. Whatever were the crudities of their intellects, this was the undoubting testimony of their hearts. It was this inward conviction which made them tolerant of the idea of Purgatory—which allowed them to wink with a dangerous "œconomy at what they must have known were the abominations connected with it. They were afraid to limit the love which they felt had been so mighty for them and for the world. They did not dare to measure the sacrifice of Christ and His intercession by their notions. The deep conviction which they had of Evil, as opposed to the nature of God, made them shudder as they looked down into that abyss. They would rather think of material punishments which might, elsewhere as here, be God's instruments of acting upon the spirit to awaken it out of death. The great poem of the Florentine brings out this deeper theology of the Middle Ages in connection with all the forms in which it was hidden. The loss of intellectual life, of the vision of God, is with him the infinite horror of hell. Men are in eternal misery, because they are still covetous, proud, loveless. The evil priest or pope is in the worst circle of all, because he has been brought most closely into contact with spiritual and eternal things. Even here, there are all varieties of evil, approximations to penitence and good. The Purgatory is the ascent, not out of material torments, but out of moral evil, into a higher moral state. The Paradise is the consummation of that state in the vision of perfect truth and love. Those who dwell there are ever looking down upon the poor wanderers below, aware of their strifes, choosing guides for them,—it may be some poet of the old world,—who shall be helpers in their perplexity, who shall enable them to ​have a clearer vision of the order which lies beneath the confusions of the world, of the divine government to which all human governments must submit, and by which they must be judged. There may be all material accidents about the poem, derived from the age in which it was written; but that this is its theological substance I do not think any considerate reader has ever doubted.

But whatever right we have to detect that theology, through its external coverings, in the writings of divines or of patriots, the two were inextricably blended in the popular as well as the scholastical teaching, and the darkness was endeavouring more and more to draw down the light into itself. In the period between Dante and the Reformation there were many in Germany, in England, in France,—one noble Dominican, at least, in his own Florence,—who were labouring to disentangle the threads, and to teach Christendom that moral evil is the eternal misery from which they need to be delivered, the righteousness of God the good which they have to attain. But dilettanti popes, who believed nothing, and therefore were desirous that the world which they ruled should believe everything, who promoted letters by denying all knowledge to the people, who built churches to him who they said was the rock of the Church, by the help of missionaries who proved that it stood upon no rock but money,—these popes were consummating all the confusions that had been in the theology of the Church before; were establishing, once for all, the doctrine that the thing men have to dread is punishment and not sin, and that the greatest reward which the highest power in the Church can hold out is deliverance from punishment, not deliverance from sin. Let us understand it well; it was against this doctrine ​that Luther protested in his theses at Wittenberg. Everything in these theses, everything in his subsequent career, turns upon the assertion that a man requires and desires punishment, not indulgence, when he has done evil; that, if you cannot free him from evil you do him no service; that Tetzel had therefore not only been robbing people of their money, had not only been uttering wild and blasphemous words about his own powers and the powers of those who sent him, but that he had been promising that which it is not good for a man to have, which a man should most earnestly pray not to have, but to escape from, if it could be given him for nothing. That which we call the great proclamation of the Reformation, that a man is justified by faith alone, becomes intelligible through this principle, and is not intelligible without it. Luther declared that what man wants is freedom from sin and not freedom from punishment, that righteousness is the reward we crave for. And then he said, "This freedom which no pope can give you, this reward which you can acquire by no efforts and labours of yours, God has given you freely in Christ. Believing in Christ, the righteous One, you rise out of your own sins, you become righteous men, you are able to do righteous acts." And this doctrine, which we are told in our days is so fine and abstract that no man can listen to it or care for it, except some people of delicate and tender consciences, went through the length and breadth of Europe, spoke to the hearts of the commonest handicraftsmen and labourers, was recognised by them as the message which they were waiting to hear, because it enabled them to obtain a moral standing-ground and a moral life, which threats of future punishments and hopes of outward rewards had never won for them.

​The consequence of this doctrine where it was believed, was unquestionably to bring out the contrast between the good and evil state so distinctly and sharply, that the notion of any intermediate state between these was vehemently rejected. Hell as the state of unrighteousness, Heaven as the state of righteousness, Earth as the battlefield between the two, filled and possessed the mind. Even if purgatory had not been so connected with the system of indulgences, it could scarcely have found its place among the thoughts which were then driving all others before them. In the great Jesuit reaction of the sixteenth century it recovered its hold upon numbers who had been dispossessed of it, because the social feelings and sympathies of men, and their sense of an intimate connection between the visible and the invisible world, for which the Middle Age theology, amidst all its confusions, had borne witness, had met with a very inadequate recognition in the different schools of the Reformation. But though this was the case, it is not true. that Protestantism has pronounced more positively than Romanism did upon the future condition of men. So far as our own Church is concerned, the assertion is not only wide of the truth, but is directly in opposition to it.

In the first draft of our Articles, in the reign of Edward VI, one was introduced—the forty-second— which contained a decree upon this subject. It was expressed in the most moderate terms. It merely declared that "They also are worthy of condemnation who endeavour at this time to restore the dangerous opinion that all men, be they never so ungodly, shall at length be saved, when they have suffered pain for their sins a certain time appointed by God's justice."

After what I have said of the character of the ​Reformation, it cannot be wonderful that those who had entered most into the spirit of it should be most anxious to show that pain did not make amends for sin, and that the misery of sin does not consist in an arbitrary penalty affixed to it by God, who has sent His Son to make men righteous. On these grounds the Divines of Edward VI's reign might easily have excused themselves to their contemporaries, and even to their successors, for adopting an Article which had already been sanctioned at Augsburg. Nevertheless, it has been contended, with great reasonableness, from the expression "at this time," and from two other Articles which are found in the same draft, that this sentence was devised to meet a special emergency. The Anabaptists, among a number of other tenets, all of which had taken a sensual and a revolutionary form, had propounded some theory like that which the Reformers here denounced. Every one knows how eager Lutherans, Calvinists, and English Reformers were to disclaim sympathy with those who had done so much to make the new doctrines odious in the eyes of Europe. It was very likely, indeed, that this eagerness should be exhibited in any careful digest of their own doctrines. But the dread of the danger had subsided in the time of Queen Elizabeth. It had not, indeed, so subsided that the framers of the Articles in that reign thought it safe to omit a special denunciation of the doctrine of community of goods. But they could venture, and they seized the privilege, to strike out the forty-second Article.

This statement is not mine. It is the justification which is offered for the compilers of our Articles by those who would have wished them to dogmatise most peremptorily on the subject. Taking their explanation, the evidence that the members of the Church of Eng​land have perfect freedom on this subject, is irresistible. It is scarcely possible to invent a case in one's mind which would be equally strong. Mere silence might be accounted for. But here is omission, careful, considerate omission, in a document for future times, of that which had been too hastily admitted, to meet an emergency of that time. The omission was made by persons who probably were strong in the belief that the punishment of wicked men is endless, but who did not dare to enforce that opinion upon others; above all, who did not dare to say that the words Eternal and Everlasting, which they knew had such a profound and sacred meaning in reference to God Himself, and to the revelation of His Son, could be shrivelled and contracted into this signification.

III. I have answered two of the objections at some length. I have considered how it is that the New Testament speaks more of eternal life and of eternal punishment than the Old; how the usage of the words in the New Testament explains that fact, and is explained by it; how, instead of interfering with the assertion of St. Paul, that it is the will of God that all men should be saved, and of St. John, that God is love; without these words the others would be inexplicable. Next, the charge that there has been a tendency throughout the history of the Church to determine the limits of God's love to men, and to speak of all but a few as hopelessly lost, but that this tendency has been much more marked and strong in Protestants than in Romanists, so that we are much more bound by the opinion than they were,—I have met by a sketch of the history of opinion upon this subject, which, however slight, I believe is accurate, and will bear examination. And I have come to the conclusion that the ​deepest and most essential part of the theology previous to the Reformation bore witness to the fact that eternal life is the knowledge of God, who is Love, and eternal death the loss of that knowledge; that it was the superficial theology,—that which belonged to the Papal system as such,—which interfered with this belief; that it was the great effort of the Reformation to sweep away that superficial theology, in order that Righteousness and Evil, Love and Hatred, might stand out as the two eternal opposites; the one as the eternal life which God presents to men, the other as the eternal death which they choose for themselves, and which consists in being at war with His Love. I have now to consider the third statement, that, whatever may have been the case at the time of the Reformation, theologians have in our age become entirely positive and dogmatic upon this subject; that upon it they can brook no doubt or diversity of opinion; that, in fact, they hold that a man is as much bound to say, "I believe in the endless punishment of the greater portion of mankind as "I believe in God the Father, in God the Son, and in God the Holy Ghost."

I wish that I felt as able to controvert these propositions as the others. But I am bound to admit that the evidence for them is very strong. Perhaps I may be permitted to trace some of the causes which have led to this state of feeling. They will account, I think, for the existence of it, at least under certain modifications, in very good men. They will explain what are likely to be the issues of it if it is not counteracted. They may help to show English Churchmen, and especially English Clergymen, what their standing-ground is, and what their obligations are, if they are really stewards of the everlasting Gospel.

​1. Every one must be aware how much the philosophical teaching under which we have grown up unconsciously modifies our thoughts and opinions on a multitude of subjects which we suppose to be beyond its range. Luther's first battles, as his letters show us, were with Aristotle: he found how much the habits of thought learnt from him, and consecrated in the schools, interfered with the understanding of St. Paul. He wanted his pupils to look directly at the sense of Scripture; they came with certain preconceived notions which they imputed to the sacred writers; any one who construed them without reference to these notions was supposed to depart from their natural, simple meaning. It was not that Aristotle might not be an exceedingly useful teacher for certain purposes; but what Bacon discovered to be true of him in the investigation of Nature, Luther discovered to be true in the investigation of Scripture. His logical determinations and arrangements, even his accurate observations, hindered the student, who was not to bring wisdom but to seek it.

What Aristotle was to the German in the sixteenth century, John Locke is to an Englishman in the nineteenth. His dogmas have become part of our habitual faith; they are accepted, without study, as a tradition. In this respect he resembles his predecessor. Proscribed at first by divines for the Essay on the Understanding more than for his politics or his interpretations of Scripture, just as Aristotle was proscribed by popes in the twelfth century,—divines now assume that Essay to be the rule and measure of thought and language, even as in the thirteenth century the Stagirite Metaphysics became the rule and measure of thought and language to all orthodox schoolmen. But there ​is this difference: Aristotle belongs merely to the schools; Locke connects the schools with the world. He found a number of mystifications which doctors were canonising. He courageously applied himself to the removal of them. The conscience of ordinary men recognised him as their champion. He spoke to the love of the simple and practical, in which lies the strength of the English character. He asked men who were using phrases which they had inherited, and to which they attached no meaning, to give an account of them, and if they could not, to surrender them. It was evident that he had an immense advantage over his opponents, because he understood himself, and because he had determined to be faithful to his own convictions. He succeeded in persuading those who believed very little, not to pretend to believe more than they did. Who can doubt that this was a good and great service to mankind? But it involved this consequence. If men should chance hereafter to discover that some of the principles held by their ancestors had a substance and meaning in them, however little that substance and meaning might be represented in the dialect of the day, there would be considerable difficulty in recovering the possession. It would be supposed that the good sense of a great man had settled the question for ever, and those who knew little how it had been settled, or what there was to settle, would be just as zealous in discountenancing and ridiculing any further investigation, as if they were bowing to a dictator, not accepting help from one who had protested against dictation.

When any one ventures to say to an English audience that Eternity is not a mere negation of time, that it denotes something real, substantial, before all ​time, he is told at once that he is departing from the simple intelligible meaning of words; that he is introducing novelties; that he is talking abstractions. This language is perfectly honest in the mouths of those who use it. But they do not know where they learnt it. They did not get it from peasants or women or children. They did not get it from the Bible. They got it from Locke. And if I find that I cannot interpret the language and thoughts of peasants and women and children, and that I cannot interpret the plainest passages of the Bible or the whole context of it, while I look through the Locke spectacles,—I must cast them aside. I am sure Locke would wish me to do so, for I believe he was a thoroughly honest man, and one who desired nothing less in the world than that he should become an oppressor to the spirits which he supposed he was setting free.

Here, then, is one cause of our present state of feeling respecting the question which I am now considering; here is a proof how much that state of feeling must affect a multitude of subjects, besides that of everlasting punishment. "When the Scriptures speak of Eternity they must mean endlessness; they can mean nothing else. To be sure they do mean something else, when they speak of God's eternity; but we have only to put in also, 'without beginning' to that, and all is right." The divines who use such language are supported by those who most object to the conclusion which they deduce from it. The old Unitarian cannot give up Locke. The orthodox Dissenters have always supposed that he must be right, because Churchmen disliked him for his notions of government and toleration. Practical men suspect that some German mysticism must be near, when his decrees are ​disputed. And those who have no dread of this mysticism, and who know that the explorers of other nations have passed beyond the Hercules pillars within which our navigators confine themselves, and have even affirmed the existence of islands and continents where Locke supposed there was nothing but ocean, yet ask "what that has to do with old Hebrews like Paul or John? Of course they knew nothing about these islands and continents. The coarsest, most material view of things, is most suitable to them." Nearly all people, therefore, in this country, who speak on such matters, are agreed that the words of the Gospel, if they were taken strictly and fairly, must have the hardest (I do not say the most awful, for I believe the sense I contend for is much more awful) meaning which has ever been given them. Only the tens and hundreds of thousands who cannot speak dissent from that decision.

2. However hard and exclusive the Romish Church may have been,—though the great complaint we make of her is, that she excommunicates those who are members of the body of Christ as much as she is,—it is impossible not to see that she takes up a position which looks, at least, much more comprehensive than that of the Protestant bodies. She assumes the Church to represent mankind. The day before Good Friday the Pope blesses the universe. The sacrifice which she presents day by day is declared to be that sacrifice which was made for the sins of the whole world. We believe that the strongest witness we have to bear is, that the sacrifice was made once for all; that our acts do not complete it, but are only possible because it is complete; that they are grounded upon our right to present that continually to the Father, with ​which He has declared Himself well pleased. We ought, therefore, to assert the redemption of mankind more distinctly than they do. But it is clear that in practice we do not seem to the world to do so, nor seem to ourselves to do so. The distinctiveness, the individuality, of Protestantism is its strength, as I have maintained before in these Essays. But close to that strength is its greatest weakness, that which we all feel, which all in some sort confess, which is the root of our sectarianism, which is continually kept alive by it, and yet which is destroying the very bodies that it has created. What is the consequence to theology? The religious men, the saved men, are looked upon as the exceptions to a rule; the world is fallen, outcast, ruined; a few Christians about the signs and tokens of whose Christianity each sect differs, have been rescued from the ruin. I have had to speak in almost every page of this book respecting the habit of mind to which this opinion appertains; and to show how it is at war with all the articles of the Christian faith. I only wish to point out here how it bears upon the subject of everlasting salvation and damnation. Damnation does not mean what its etymology would lead us to suppose that it means, what it certainly did mean to the Church in former days, amidst all its perplexities and confusions. It is not the loss of a mighty gift which has been bestowed upon the race. Men are not regarded as rejecting the counsel of God against themselves. God is represented as the destroyer. Nay, divines go the length of asserting—even of taking it for granted,—that our Lord Himself taught this lesson to His disciples when He said, And I say unto you, my friends, Be not afraid of them which kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do; but I will ​forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which, after he hath killed, hath power to cast into hell, yea, I say unto you, Fear him. Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; ye are of more value than many sparrows. We are come to such a pass as actually to suppose that Christ tells those whom He calls His friends not to be afraid of the poor and feeble enemies who can only kill the body, but of that greater enemy who can destroy their very selves, and that this enemy is—not the devil, not the spirit who is going about seeking whom he may devour, not him who was a murderer from the beginning,—but that God who cares for the sparrows! They are to be afraid lest He who numbers the hairs of their head should be plotting their ruin! Does not this interpretation, which has become so familiar that one hears it without even a hint that there is another, show us on the edge of what an abyss we are standing, how likely we are to confound the Father of lights with the Spirit of darkness?

While this temper of mind continues, it is absolutely inevitable that we should not merely look upon the immense majority of our fellow-creatures as doomed to perdition, but that we should regard the Gospel as itself pronouncing their doom. The message which, according to this view of the case, Christ brings from Heaven to earth is, "Your Father has created multitudes whom He means to perish for ever and ever. By my agony and bloody sweat, by my cross and passion, I have induced Him in the case of an inconceivably small minority to forego that design." Dare we state that proposition to ourselves,—dare we get up into a pulpit and preach it? But if we dare not, ​seeing it is a matter of life and death, and there must be no trifling or equivocation about it, let us distinctly tell ourselves what we do mean; and if we find that a blasphemous thought has mingled with our belief hitherto, let us confess that thought to God, and ask Him to deliver us from it.

3. I cannot wonder that Divines,—even those who would shrink with horror from such a view of God's character and His Gospel as this,—should crave for some more distinct apprehensions, nay, even statements respecting eternal punishment, than might perhaps be needful in former days. It is quite clear that the words which go forth from our pulpits on the subject, have no effect at all upon cultivated men of any class, except the effect of making them regard our other utterances with indifference and disbelief. They do not think that we put faith in our own denunciations. They ask, how it is possible for us to go about and enjoy life if we do; how, if we do, we can look out upon the world that is around us and the world. that has been, without cursing the day on which we were born? They say that we pronounce a general sentence, and then explain it away in each particular case; they say that we believe that God condemns the world generally, but that, under cover of certain phrases which may mean anything or nothing, we can prove that, on the whole, He rather intends it good than ill. They say that we call upon them to praise Him and give Him thanks, and that what we mean is, that they are to testify emotions towards Him which they do not feel, and which His character, as we represent it, cannot inspire, in order to avert His wrath from them. Cultivated men, I say, repeat these things to one another. If we do not commonly hear them, it is because they ​count it rude ever to tell us what they think. Poor men say these same things in their own assemblies with more breadth and honesty, not wishing us to be ignorant of their opinions respecting us. And though these considerations, so far as they concern ourselves, may not move us, how can we help being moved by their effect on those who utter them? If we believe that the words Eternal Damnation or Death have a very terrible significance, such as the Bible tells us they have, is it nothing that they should be losing all their significance for our countrymen? Is it nothing that they should seem to them mere idle nursery-words that frighten children, but with which men have nothing to do? Is it nothing that a vague dream of bliss hereafter, into which righteousness and goodness do not enter, which has no relation to God, should float before the minds of numbers; but that it should have just as little power to awaken them to any higher or better life, as the dread of the future has to keep them from any evil?

The members of the Evangelical Alliance perceive, more or less clearly, that this is the state of things which has increased, and is increasing, among us. They hear of a vague Universalism being preached from some pulpits in America and on the Continent. They think that notion must encourage sinners to suppose that a certain amount of punishment will be enough to clear off their scores, and to procure them ultimate bliss. "You are relaxing the strictness of your statements," they say, "just when they need to be more stringent, because all moral obligations are becoming laxer, because people are evidently casting off their fear, without obtaining anything better in the place of it." Therefore they conclude that such freedom must ​be checked. It cannot answer, they think, now, however it may have answered heretofore, to leave any loop-hole for doubt about the endless punishment of the wicked.

I have stated the arguments which I think may have inclined worthy and excellent men to arrive at this conclusion; though I believe a more fatal one,—one more certain to undermine the truth which is in their hearts, and which they are seeking to defend,—cannot be imagined. We do, it seems to me, need to have a more distinct and awful idea of eternal death and eternal punishment than we have. I use both words, Death and Punishment, that I may not appear to shrink from the sense which is contained in either. Punishment, I believe, seems to most men less dreadful than death, because they cannot separate it from a punisher, because they believe, however faintly, that He who is punishing them is a Father. The thought of His ceasing to punish them, of His letting them alone, of His leaving them to themselves, is the real, the unutterable horror. A man may be living without God in the world; he may be trembling at His name, some- times wishing that He did not exist; and yet, if you told him that he was going where there would be no God, no one to watch over him, no one to care for him, the news would be almost intolerable. We do shrink from this; all men, whatever they may fancy, are more appalled at the thoughts of being friendless, homeless, fatherless, than at any outward terrors you can threaten them with. I know well how the conscience confuses this anticipation with that of meeting God, with being brought face to face with Him. The mixture of feelings adds infinitely to the horror of them. There is a sense of wrath abiding on the spirit which has refused ​the yoke of love. This is one part of the misery. There is a sense of loneliness and atheism. This is another. And surely this, this is the bottomless pit which men see before them, and to which they feel that they are hurrying, when they have led selfish lives, and are growing harder and colder and darker every hour. Can we not tell them that it is even so; that this is the abyss of death, that second death, of which all material images offer only the faintest picture? Will not that show them more clearly what life is,—the risen life, the eternal life, that which was with the Father, and has been manifested to us? Will it not enable us to say, "This life is that for which God has created man, for which he has redeemed man in His Son, which He is sending His Spirit to work out in man?" Will it not enable us to say, "This eternal death is that from which God sent His Son to deliver men, from which He has delivered them? If they fall into it, it is because they choose it, because they embrace it, because they resist a power which is always at work to save them from it." By delivering such a message as this to men, should we not be doing more to make them aware how the revelation of God's righteousness for the redemption of sinners is at the same time the revelation of the wrath of God against all unrighteousness and ungodliness? Would not such a message show that a Gospel of eternal love must bring out more clearly than any mere law can that state which is the resistance to it and the contradiction of it? But would not such a message at the same time present itself to the conscience of men, not as an outrage on their experience, but as the faithful interpreter of it, not as disproving everything that they have dreamed of the willingness of God to save them, ​but as proving that He is willing and able to save them to the very uttermost?

Suppose, instead of taking this method of asserting the truth of all God's words, the most blessed and the most tremendous, we reject the wisdom of our forefathers, and enact an article declaring that all are heretics and deniers of the truth who do not hold that Eternal means endless, and that there cannot be a deliverance from eternal punishment. What is the consequence? Simply this, I believe the whole Gospel of God is set aside. The state of eternal life and eternal death is not one we can refer only to the future, or that we can in anywise identify with the future. Every man who knows what it is to have been in a state of sin, knows what it is to have been in a state of death. He cannot connect that death with time; he must say that Christ has brought him out of the bonds of eternal death. Throw that idea into the future, and you deprive it of all its reality, of all its power. I know what it means all too well while you let me connect it with my present and personal being, with the pangs of conscience which I suffer now. It becomes a mere vague dream and shadow to me, when you project it into a distant world. And if you take from me the belief that God is always righteous, always maintaining a fight with evil, always seeking to bring His creatures out of it, you take everything from me, all hope now, all hope in the world to come. Atonement, Redemption, Satisfaction, Regeneration, become mere words to which. there is no counterpart in reality.

I ask no one to pronounce, for I dare not pronounce myself, what are the possibilities of resistance in a human will to the loving will of God. There are ​times when they seem to me—thinking of myself more than of others—almost infinite. But I know that there is something which must be infinite. I am obliged to believe in an abyss of love which is deeper than the abyss of death: I dare not lose faith in that love. I sink into death, eternal death, if I do. I must feel that this love is compassing the universe. More about it I cannot know. But God knows. I leave myself and all to Him.

It is of this faith that some are seeking to rob us. Have we made up our minds to surrender it? Have we resolved that the belief in Endless Punishment shall be not a tenet which any one is at liberty to hold,—as any one is at liberty to hold the notion that the elements are changed in the Lord's Supper, provided he does not force the notion upon me, and will come with me to eat of a feast which is beyond all notions,—but the tenet of the Church to which every other is subordinate; just as Transubstantiation has become in the Romish Church since it has been declared essential to all who partake of the Eucharist? Let us consider, not chiefly what we are accepting, but what we are rejecting, before we tamely submit to this new imposition.

There is one other consideration which I would impress very earnestly upon my brethren—especially upon the Clergy, before I conclude. The doctrine of endless punishment is avowedly put forward as necessary for the reprobates of the world, the publicans and harlots, though perhaps religious men might dispense with it. Now, I find in our Lord's discourses, that when He used such words as these, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how shall ye escape the damnation of hell?" He was speaking to religious men, to ​doctors of the law; but that when He went among publicans and sinners, it was to preach the Gospel of the kingdom of God.

Does not this difference show that our minds are very strangely at variance with His mind? Ought not the discovery to make us think and to make us tremble? I am certain that we who are in continual contact with eternal things do require to remind ourselves what danger we are in of losing these things. Spiritual pride is the essential nature of the Devil. To be in that is to be in the deepest hell. Oh! how little are all outward sensual abominations in comparison of this! And surely to those who are sunk in those abominations, no message will avail but that which He who knew what was in man delivered. Freedom to the captives, opening of sight to them that are blind, a power near them which is mightier than the power of the Devil, a Father and a Son and a Spirit who are willing and able to bring them out of darkness and the shadow of death,—this was the news which turned the circumcised and the uncircumcised, the children of God's covenant, those who were afar off, the corrupt men and women of the most corrupt period in history, into saints and martyrs. We deliberately proclaim that this method will not avail for us! What is this but saying that we have not faith in that which the Apostle declares to be the power of God unto salvation; that we have substituted for it an earthly and Tartarean machinery of our own! May God preserve us from such apostasy! May He teach us again by mighty evidence that when we preach the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, we invade the realm of Death and Eternal Night, and open the kingdom of Heaven!