CHAPTER V.

POSITIVE DISBELIEFS AND POSITIVE BELIEFS CONCERNING FUTURE PUNISHMENT.

Six Points that are very common in the Traditional Orthodox Treatment of the Subject, which the Writer positively Rejects :- 1. That Punishment is to be without Gradation or Discrimination—the Code of Draco imported into Christian Theology. -2. The False Assumption that the Human Soul is Essentially Indestructible.—3. The False Criterion of Salvation or Perdition set up by the Edwardean Preachers.4. The Arguments from Utility and Expediency that are set up on all sides of this discussion.-5. The Vicious a priori Method of much Orthodox Theologizing, which is, in the worst sense of the word, Rationalistic.-6. The Unchristian Tone and Temper with which the subject is treated: The Serene and Composed; the Violent; the Jocose.

The Subject being thus cleared of Factitious Difficulties, we are prepared to receive Four Points of Scriptural Teaching:-1. The Judge of All the Earth will do Right, in the Human Sense of the Word.-2. The Scriptures, while Distinguishing absolutely between the Righteous and the Wicked, also Recognize Gradations in both Classes.-3. The Divine Judgment includes among the Saved the Righteous Heathen.-4. Some Cases under the Divine Jurisdiction are subject to a Doom which is Final, Irreversible, Eternal.-The Meaning of " Hell-fire." Various Evasions of the Austerity of the Current Orthodoxy proposed by its Advocates:-1. The “Andover Hypothesis,” or Future Probation.-2. The Representation that Punishment is Mental, not Material; and is effected by Natural Causes. -3. The Argument concerning "Eonian."-4. The "Music Hall Hypothesis," or Regeneration in Articulo Mortis.—5. The “Princeton Hypothesis," or Salvation of Fatus in Utero.—All these Attempted Theodicies are Valuable as Confessions of Discontent with the Traditionary Doctrine.

By Rev. LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON, D.D., Congregationalist.

It will be helpful to the clear setting forth of my positive belief on the subject of Punishment after Death, if I begin by indicating some of those arguments and conclusions, familiar to me in my youth, from which my mind has strongly reacted.

1. I reject the notion that the punishment of the wicked is to be without discrimination or gradation. The very principle which Plutarch quotes as absurd in the bloody code of Draco-that the

ment include

least crime deserves death, and there is no severer penalty that can be imposed upon the greatest*-has been deliberately laid down as the principle which must dictate the penal code of the divine moral government. "The legal sanctions of a perfect moral governthe highest degree of natural evil possible, in each case of disobedience." "The legal penalty must consist of the highest possible degree of misery to the disobedient subject." "The suffering of the transgressor, if it be possible, must be unmingled and eternal." I do not undertake here to controvert the finespun a priori reasoning by which such conclusions are maintained. I simply reject the conclusions as being flatly contradicted by the authority of Jesus Christ, who teaches the opposite doctrine.

2. I likewise reject the notion which for so many Christian centuries has been posited as one of the fundamentals of natural theology, and the basis of much argument both in natural theology and in revealed-the notion that the human soul, or life, is essentially indestructible, in its own nature immortal. This thesis (which I recognize as the starting-point of much of the preaching which I used to hear in my boyhood, before the subject of future punishment had ceased to be a subject of systematic pulpit argument) used to be maintained by two classes of arguments: those that prove too little, and those that prove too much. It is really astonishing to look back and see what illogical pages have been written by great logicians on this point, as if any reasoning was good enough to support a proposition which, until lately, none but a

*Plutarch, Life of Solon.

† Dr. N. W. Taylor on Moral Government, Vol. I., pp. 160, 164, 167. Italics as in the original. See also the works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. IV., sermons ix.—xv., Ed. New York. The theologians and preachers of this school, dwelling on their favorite argument that "sin is an infinite evil and requires an infinite punishment," do not always refuse to notice that "there is as great a difference among infinites as among finites... to be forever in hell is an infinite evil in respect of the duration; but yet the damned are not all equally miserable." Bellamy's Works, I., 104, note. Ed. N. Y., 1811. And yet their prevailing tone of instruction implies that the resources of omnipotence and omniscience are to be exhausted in inflicting the utmost possible suffering on every sinful soul for ever and ever.

few very low-grade atheists have thought of denying. The arguments which prove too little are those which show, or tend to show, that for some men there is to be a future life, and from which the prodigious flying leap is taken to the conclusion that all men must have an eternal future life. The arguments that prove too much are those which prove that the soul is in its essence immaterial, and therefore indissoluble into parts or elements, and therefore indestructible-arguments which are not only just as applicable to the life-principle of an oyster or a toad-stool as to the soul of man; but which are just as conclusive regarding the past eternity as regarding the eternity to come. No one has ever yet found an answer to the objection against this sort of argument, which was written down two thousand years ago by Cicero, that whatever can have a beginning can have an end.

I am not at all arguing, at this point, against the proposition that every human being that ever has lived or ever shall live, will continue to live for ever and ever. This is in the power of God, and I am not now denying that it may be in the will of God. All that I am now seeking is to clear the subject, which has difficulties enough of its own, from the factitious difficulties that have been superinduced upon it by this utterly worthless line of arguments, that for so many ages have been let pass unchallenged.

3. The school of preaching and theologizing under which my youth was passed was that which was formed under the influences. of "The Great Awakening" of the last century, in the hands of the New England theologians. It has never lost the marks of its origin, not only in the religious revivals that have attended upon it, but in the Revivalism which has sometimes dominated it, as if the kingdom of heaven consisted in having revivals, and the only way into it was through "a revival experience." Those whose memory does not go back to the time when that epoch-making book, Bushnell's Christian Nurture, came into the world of American theology amid a thunder-storm of denunciations and anathemas, can have little idea of the dominance, not to say the domineering, of that

one-sided and narrow-minded conception of Christianity, over American Christendom. My mind very early reacted from the criterion of salvation or perdition which seemed to be set up by the most characteristic preachers of this school, and which, grossly stated, pointed out the escape from an eternity of anguish as being by way of the "anxious bench" or the "inquiry meeting," through a certain sequence of emotions and convictions.* The inference as to the condition of the populations of the world, past and present, Christian as well as heathen, was sufficiently sweeping and awful. But it did not hinder the revivalist from reasserting his scheme of "experimental religion" as the one alternative of infinite and eternal woe.

4. My mind has also reacted against the argument from utility or expediency as applied to this subject. There are many subjects on which theology has had a detrimental effect on preaching; on this subject, the supposed exigences of preaching, especially of so-called "revival-preaching," have had a bad effect on theology; they have been allowed largely to govern the studies of exegetes and the reasonings of dogmatizers. The same people who have been "very jealous for the Lord" in denouncing their fellow-servants for taking counsel with human wisdom, and accommodating their message to the needs of human nature, have constantly urged it as one of the main motives (we may not say, arguments) for holding firmly to the traditionary doctrine, and for tolerating no re-examination of it under penalty of an ecclesiastical boycotting,—that it is a doctrine which does immense execution in revivals, and that to raise any doubts about it is to "cut the nerve of missions." On all sides of this polyhedral discussion there has been quite too much pushing of this consideration of utility. It has its legitimate use as one of the tests of truth; but that use is a very subordinate one, and

"Thus are all you that never passed under a great change of heart by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all that were never born again and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin to a state of new and before altogether unexperienced light and life-you are thus in the hands of an angry God." Jonathan Edwards's Sermon on "Sinners in the Hands of an angry God."

requires to be applied with great caution against mistake. The proposal to insist on certain theological statements in order to stimulate the compassion of the Church, and promote donations, and irritate the nerve of missions," has been aptly compared to the policy of raising alarms of fire in order to keep the fire-engine companies in active discipline.

5. In like manner, from hearing them reiterated to the point of fatigue, in my boyhood, by the disciples of Dr. Nathaniel Taylor, I have come to dislike as well as profoundly to distrust those wiredrawn, attenuated a priori arguments concerning what God must do, by which to coerce our interpretation of every declaration or hint that he has given us of what he will do. These arguments are founded in speculations on the nature of government, a subject which (according to Comte's classification of human sciences) is in the region furthest removed from the possibility of exact knowledge; * and to the uncertainties inherent in this subject are superadded the absolutely boundless possibilities of error involved in the attempt to construct the divine government upon the analogies of this human pattern. The whole method is vicious. The objection to it is that it is, in the worst sense of a good word, rationalistic.

6. Finally, my mind has been revolted by the tone and temper with which this doctrine is commonly set forth, whether in theological treatises or in preaching. I find it impossible to share the admiration so often expressed for the calm composure with which Jonathan Edwards quietly delivered his soul of that frightful sermon on "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," while listeners

* Philosophie Positive, tom. i., p. 96. See also pp. 101, 102.

The line of argument by which Dr. Taylor comes to the tremendous conclusions concerning future punishment which I have already quoted is indicated in the analytical Table of Contents prefixed to his Lectures on Moral Government: 1. What is a perfect moral government? or, moral government in the abstract. 2. The moral government of God as known by the light of nature. 3. The moral government of God as revealed in the Scriptures.

It is a bold" spider" (to use the favorite word of Edwards) that ventures so far out into infinite space supported by the thread that he spins out out of his own bowels.