CHAPTER XIII. PRESENT-DAY BELIEFS ON FUTURE RETRIBUTION. Belief Held by Many for Fifteen Centuries.-Some Different Views by Eminent Relig ious Teachers.-Sermon Preached in Westminster Abbey, Nov. 11, 1877, on “ Hell -What It Is Not."-Repudiation of the Ghastly Averments of Augustinianism, Calvinism, etc.-A Gracious Shadow Cast Over the Lurid Dogma.-Defense of the Deity Against Being Infinitely Implacable and Remorselessly Cruel.-No Such Sermon Heard in the Abbey for Six Centuries.-Electric Thrill of Gratitude Flashed Through Two Continents.-Dean Stanley's Earnest Congratulations.-Honors from the English Episcopate, Universities, and Innumerable Clergymen.-No Formulary of the Church of England Contravened.-The Conscience and Reason of Mankind True to the More Benign View.-Letters of Relief and Joy from Bereaved Fathers, Mothers, Husbands, Wives, etc.—Mistaken Conception of Eternity as an Infinite Extension of Time.-Scraps of Isolated Texts and Misinterpreted Jewish Metaphors Not Decisive.-No Eternity of Punishment Deducible from the Old Testament.— Rabbis, Fathers of the Church, Schoolmen, and Others Cited.-God's Direction in developing Human Understanding of His Word and Works.-His Boundless Compassion for His Creatures Unchanged by the Accident of Death.-No Subordination Scripturally Permissible of Christ's Advocacy and Propitiation.-" Will the Lord Cast Off Forever?" BY FREDERICK W. FARRAR, D.D., Archdeacon of Westminster, Chaplain to the I HAVE several times been required by public duty to express my views on the solemn subject of the Future Destiny of Man beyond the grave. I have done so, especially, in the two volumes entitled "Eternal Hope," and "Mercy and Judgment"; nor will it be expected that I should again grapple with the whole argument in a few brief pages. In this paper I am not even asked to deal with the question in general, but only to speak of the present state of general belief respecting it. I cannot do this better than by giving an account of some personal experiences. Those who have read my books will, I hope, acquit me of being given to egotism, which is indeed entirely distasteful to me. But to allude to myself is here inevitable, because the present state of belief on the subject of "Eternal Torments" has been materially influenced by controversies in which, without any desire of mine, I have been compelled by circumstances to take a considerable part. In November, 1877, I was "in residence" as Canon at Westminster Abbey; and, owing to various deathbeds which I had recently witnessed, my whole soul had been stirred within me to its inmost depths, by contemplating the brutal and unmitigated horror of the doctrine of "Eternal Torments as it was then currently believed. By the vast majority of Anglican and Nonconformist clergymen-though the fact may now be vainly denied— the doctrine, often characterized as "orthodox," was either openly preached, formally defended, or, at the lowest, acquiesced in silently. A few there were who had tacitly let it drop out of their teaching and phraseology, though they had not deliberately abandoned it; and there were some who, among their intimate friends, ventured secretly to whisper that they could no longer believe in it without large modifications. One or two living teachers who were known to have adopted the views either of Universalism (like the Rev. Samuel Minton) or of Conditional Immortality (like the Rev. Edward White) were more or less boycotted in ecclesiastical circles as erratic if not as heretical, and they had much to suffer. Of great foreign divines there were scarcely any who, like Bishop Martensen of Seeland, combined a reputation for orthodoxy with any acceptance of "the larger hope." Of earlier English writers only a handful had ventured timidly and tentatively to express their doubts or hesitations. In living memory one Bishop-Bishop Ewing of Argyll and the Isles; one great theological thinker-Prof. F. D. Maurice; one eminent and religious layman-Mr. Thomas Erskine of Linlathen; and one or two able Non-conformists, like Dr. E. White, Dr. Allon, Rev. S. Cox, author of Salvator Mundi, and the late Rev. J. Baldwin Brown, were more or less isolated from their brethren by their opinions on this subject, and their views were stalwartly denounced by the most popular of living Baptists, Mr. Spurgeon. Prof. Maurice had been in youth my honored teacher, and was in manhood my dear and kind friend. Ever since I had read the controversy on the meaning of the word "eternal," which caused his ejection from his professorship at King's College, my own mind had been absolutely made up, and I had already come to the conclusion which, at no period of my life, have I attempted to conceal. At last, however, it became my duty to express them more unmistakably. was musing, the fire burned and at last I spake with my tongue." "While I I well remember the dim, drizzling afternoon of Nov. 11, 1877, when I walked through the rain from my house to the Abbey to preach the sermon on "Hell-what it is not," which is now printed in "Eternal Hope." I was perfectly well aware of the gravity of what I intended to do. I had to repudiate a doctrine which had been more or less universally preached by the majority of Christians for fifteen hundred years. I knew that to do so was an act which would cost me dear. I knew that during six centuries of the history of the present Abbey it was probable that no sermon had been preached which even greatly modified, much less repudiated with indignation, that popular teaching about hell which seemed to me a ghastly amalgam of all that was worst in the combined errors of Augustinianism, Romanism, and Calvinism, unrelieved by the more soft and tender elements which threw a gracious shadow over the lurid regions of the two former systems. The ordinary teaching, such as I had heard assumed-rather than either proved or dwelt upon-from my earliest childhood, seemed to me no gospel at all, but for the vast mass of mankind a doctrine of frightful and irredeemable despair. The teaching of Jonathan Edwards, of Father Furniss, of Mr. Spurgeon, seemed to me to represent God as a Moloch for all except an infinitesimal fraction of the human race. If God could deal with the miserable and tempted souls of the innumerable dead in the way represented by these teachers, it seemed to me that |