CHAPTER XLVI.

THERE EXISTS NO REVEALED DOCTRINE ABOUT THE NATURE OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT, AS TO ITS QUALITY, DEGREE, OR DURATION, AND NO REVEALED DOCTRINE AS TO

WHO WILL BE CALLED UPON TO ENDURE IT.

A Revelation Cannot Contain Any More Light than what is Contained in the Human Rendering of its Language.-Different Interpretations from the Time of Origen and Tertullian down to the Andover School.-No Specific Biblical Details, or Exact Statement, Descriptive of the Future Life.-The Problem is to be brought, therefore, to the Tribunal of both Scripture and Reason.-The Notion of Perdition that Sprang up, probably, After the First Century.-Its Appalling Blackness and Blight Embraced, in Time, All Christian Homes and Cities.-Upright Moralists, Honest Doubters, as well as the Heathen, Doomed to Excruciating and Endless Pains.Such a Horror should have Died in a Whisper at its First Utterance.-Scripture Teaches Simply the Accountability of each Man at Last to his God.-Eternity of Pain Not Necessarily Correlative with Eternity of Joy, God's Nature being such that his Anger is More Easily Shortened than his Love.-The Latter is Infinite and Universal, the Former is Temporary and Exceptional.-Growing Amelioration of Former Dark and Vengeful Views.-No Conceivable Motive for God's Transferring the Human Race to a World Less Favorable to Morals and Happiness than This.

By Rev. DAVID SWING, Pastor of the Independent Church, Chicago, Ill.

ORIGEN, one of the greatest logicians of the early Church, stood where the new ideas which had sprung up around the form of Jesus Christ came pouring along over the boundary of the second century. Christ died in perhaps the thirty-fifth year and St. John in the ninety-ninth year of the first century. Thus nearly all of the first hundred years were consumed in the inculcation of those ideas which like a swollen stream poured over the second and rushed onward into the third. There Origen is seen attempting with his deep and critical mind to note the truths of most import thus sent suddenly into his age. By many he has been estimated as the

Church's earliest philosopher, so near in time was he to the Saviour and the apostles, and so scientific was he in his genius. A few years before this distinguished student and thinker came to his great task, the infidel Celsus, the Thomas Paine of that era, had passed by and had left behind him all those objections to Christianity which have been made familiar by the repetitions of later enemies. Origen did not therefore think and write from the standpoint of enthusiasm and credulity, but in the presence of men who had presented "the other side." His writings were compelled to be philosophic in the sense of being "reasoned thought." He was a theologian made the more careful by an acute antagonist. The Old Testament and much of the New passed under his broad and free mind, while the air of Greek and Latin liberty was still surrounding each student and his books.

Origen reached the doctrine of a final restoration to happiness of all souls that live and die upon earth. Punishment would be the lot of those who should die in their sins; but under this punishment the soul would rise and at last would return to the lost image and lost favor of its Creator.

The inference from this page in old biography when read along with many other pages taken from the lives of such subsequent students as Calvin, Luther, Wesley, and Edwards, cannot but be that revelation does not make known the manner or the duration of the punishment after death. The fact of an inspired volume being conceded, light must come at last not from the inspiration but from the interpretation of the words. If the prophecy of Daniel was miraculously placed in his consciousness, that fact, conceded, would not tell the most ardent Christian the meaning of the vision of the beasts, hoofs, horns, and thrones. Light comes to humanity not by revelation alone, but by means of the interpretation which must come afterward. If in the vision of St. John the Babylon which was foreseen as falling into a great ruin might be papal Rome or the whole Roman church, or might be a sinful world of which the special Babylon stood as a type, then revelation as a source of

a special doctrine is injured by the two possible Babylons; if there are three Babylons possible, the injury is much deeper. In these circumstances revelation can teach only this truth: that great sins will be overtaken by great punishments. If, when the book of Genesis comes with a statement that the wife of Lot looked back toward her trifling life and was made a pillar of salt, two meanings at once become easy and logical, the one that the literal event took place, the other, that Lot's wife is only a model, foolish woman and stands for any heart that would rather look back toward sin than forward toward virtue and usefulness, then revelation has been ruined as a history and becomes simply the teacher of the great doctrine that any one who shrinks from daily duty ought to become a pillar of dead rock by the wayside. If therefore the divine words regarding the condition after death of the righteous and the wicked are such as to warrant many different interpretations; if from those teachings are deduced the conclusions of Origen and Tertullian, of Dante and Hosea Ballou, of Jonathan Edwards and the new Andover School, if after eighteen hundred years the meanings of those texts increase rather than diminish, the conclusion is unavoidable that a special, definite heaven or hell is not revealed, and that revelation exhausts itself upon the simple fact of rewards and punishments beyond the grave.

A revelation cannot contain any more light than what is contained in the human rendering of its language. When the old oracle told the ambitious king that should he make war upon a certain rival he would overthrow a great kingdom, the willing warrior hastened to conclude that the nation to be overthrown was that of his rival. Had he raised the inquiry whether he would destroy his rival's empire or his own, he would soon have concluded that the oracle had revealed nothing, one import being neutralized by the fact of another. Thus when the Church comes away from her more divine oracles and finds in her hands two or three sets of responses, she must confess the total absence of revelation so far as these differences extend, and the presence of revelation at that point where

differences may be lost in harmony. The number of willing warriors has been so great in all the theological past that there was little waiting for any calm study of the Sibylline verses placed in the hand. The heart read one sentence and then drew the sword.

The Bible has never made any attempt to utter ambiguous voices. Enigmas formed the wise policy of the ancient oracles; but the hidden things of the Bible all lie honorably concealed under those figures which belong to all literature, under those imports which were local and relative, and under all those changes of meaning which come from sacred writers who are separated widely by both locality and time. Trouble may well be expected when a Mr. Froude, of England, becomes the interpreter of Job, or a Mr. Grote stands as interpreter of Plato, but this trouble comes not from any effort of Job and Plato to send enigmas down to the nineteenth century, but from changes in words, in texts, in minds, and in the possible thoughts which have come into being in the three thousand years.

Few are the details which can be determined from the Old and New Testaments. Whatever theory of inspiration the student may hold, the inferences are compelled to be general. The text which permits the Romanist to say, "This is my body," "This is my blood," permits the Protestant to say, "This stands for my body, and blood," thus making a specific dogma impossible as to a real or a figurative presence. The teaching therefore exhausts itself upon the general lesson that the Church should celebrate forever a feast in memory of its Mediator.

Many years ago when Dr. Hodge, of Princeton, and Dr. Park, of Andover, fought their theological duel over the doctrine of innate depravity, the Princeton champion based his claim upon the literal interpretation of texts, to all which Dr. Park gave a figurative meaning. Inasmuch as inspiration had not specified which import was to be attached to the language about original sin, the disputants made no progress, and could have made none, had they continued the argument for a half century. They withdrew from the con

flict; and what the Church now deduces from the Scripture is the general doctrine that even childhood itself is prone to violate the moral law. Thus under any possible definition of inspiration it fails to be specific.

The Holy Scriptures, so general as to origin of man, as to the modus of world-making, as to the origin of sin, as to the subject of baptism and the mode of baptism, as to the nature of the communion, as to the atonement by blood, as to the reign of Christ upon earth for a thousand years, as to inherent immortality or conditional immortality, as to a personal Satan, as to the oneness of Christ and the Creator, do not suddenly depart from their method and make an exact statement regarding the punishment after death. To the student in this field of thought back comes all that Biblical fondness for generality which reveals itself at so many points of exegetical inquiry. What he encounters when he studies the atonement meets him when he studies the fate of the sinful. Taught in the Old Testament to think that a literal bloodshedding is essential to salvation, and that without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins, he finds that when a Hebrew was too poor to offer blood a wheaten cake would answer; he finds that the "Lord delighteth not in sacrifices" but only in a contrite heart; and then he passes into the New Testament to find that Christ did not die as a sacrifice upon an altar and not by the "shedding of blood," but by the bloodless death on the cross. Sitting down to study the eternal world the student passes from this obscure cloud around the atonement to enter a similar cloud-a cloud that envelops the souls which have crossed the boundary of this world.

Reason therefore must accept of the responsible office of truthseeker and truth-finder for mankind. It must collate texts, must gather data from outside store houses and from its own independent resources, and, if possible, find some expression into which can be fitted alike the words which are held as inspired and the words which stand commended by what may be called the light of man's