Part 8 — VI. The Final States of the Righteous and of the Wicked.

1. Of the righteous.

The final state of the righteous is described as eternal life (Mat. 25:46), glory (2 Cor. 4:17), rest (Heb. 4:9), knowledge (1 Cor. 13:8-10), holiness (Rev. 21:27), service (Rev. 22:3), worship (Rev. 19:1), society (Heb. 12:23), communion with God (Rev. 21:3).

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Mat. 25:46—“And these shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous into eternal life”; 2 Cor. 4:17—“For our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory”; Heb. 4:9—“There remaineth therefore a sabbath rest for the people of God”; 1 Cor. 13:8-10—“Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall be done away; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall be done away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part: but when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away”; Rev. 21:27—“and there shall in no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh an abomination and a lie: but only they that are written in the Lamb's book of life”; 22:3—“and his servants shall serve him”; 19:1, 2—“After these things I heard as it were a great voice of a great multitude in heaven, saying, Hallelujah; Salvation, and glory, and power, belong to our God; for true and righteous are his judgments”; Heb. 12:23—“to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven”; Rev. 21:3—“And I heard a great voice out of the throne saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his peoples, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.”

Is. 35:7—“The mirage shall become a pool” = aspiration shall become reality; Hos. 2:15—“I will give her ... the valley of Achor [that is, Troubling] for a door of hope.” Victor Hugo: “If you persuade Lazarus that there is no Abraham's bosom awaiting him, he will not lie at Dives' door, to be fed with his crumbs,—he will make his way into the house and fling Dives out of the window.” It was the preaching of the Methodists that saved England from the general crash of the French Revolution. It brought the common people to look for the redress of the inequalities and injustices of this life in a future life—a world of less friction than this (S. S. Times). In the Alps one has no idea of the upper valleys until he enters them. He may long to ascend, but only actual ascending can show him their beauty. And then, “beyond the Alps lies Italy,” and the revelation of heaven will be like the outburst of the sunny landscape after going through the darkness of the St. Gothard tunnel.

Robert Hall, who for years had suffered acute bodily pain, said to Wilberforce: “My chief conception of heaven is rest.” “Mine,” replied Wilberforce, “is love—love to God and to every bright inhabitant of that glorious place.” Wilberforce enjoyed society. Heaven is not all rest. On the door is inscribed: “No admission except on business.” “His servants shall serve him” (Rev. 21:3). Butler, Things Old and New, 143—“We know not; but if life be there The outcome and the crown of this: What else can make their perfect bliss Than in their Master's work to share? Resting, but not in slumberous ease, Working, but not in wild unrest, Still ever blessing, ever blest, They see us as the Father sees.” Tennyson, Crossing the Bar: “Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me; And may there be no moaning of the bar When I put out to sea! But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home. Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark; And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark. For though from out our bourne of time and place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face, When I have crossed the bar.”

Mat. 6:20—“lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” = there are no permanent investments except in heaven. A man at death is worth only what he has sent on before him. Christ prepares a place for us (John 14:3) by gathering our friends to himself. Louise Chandler Moulton: “Some day or other I shall surely come Where true hearts wait for me; Then let me learn the language of that home, While here on earth I be; Lest my poor lips for want of words be dumb In that high company.” Bronson Alcott: “Heaven will be to me a place where I can get a little conversation.” Some of his friends thought it would be a place where he could hear himself talk. A pious Scotchman, when asked whether he ever expected to reach heaven, replied: “Why, mon, I live there noo!”

Summing up all these, we may say that it is the fulness and perfection of holy life, in communion with God and with sanctified spirits. Although there will be degrees of blessedness and honor, proportioned to the capacity and fidelity of each soul (Luke 19:17, 19; 1 Cor. 3:14, 15), each will receive as great a measure of reward as it can contain (1 Cor. 2:9), and this final state, once entered upon, will be unchanging in kind and endless in duration (Rev. 3:12; 22:15).

Luke 19:17, 19—“Well done, thou good servant: because thou wast found faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities.... Be thou also over five cities”; 1 Cor. 3:14, 15—“If any man's work shall abide which he built thereon, he shall receive a reward. If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as through fire”; 2:9—“Things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, And which entered not into the heart of man, Whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him”; Rev. 3:12—“He that overcometh, I will make [pg 1031]him a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go out thence no more”; 22:15—“Without are the dogs, and the sorcerers, and the fornicators, and the murderers, and the idolaters, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie.”

In the parable of the laborers (Mat. 20:1-16), each receives a penny. Rewards in heaven will be equal, in the sense that each saved soul will be filled with good. But rewards will vary, in the sense that the capacity of one will be greater than that of another; and this capacity will be in part the result of our improvement of God's gifts in the present life. The relative value of the penny may in this way vary from a single unit to a number indefinitely great, according to the work and spirit of the recipient. The penny is good only for what it will buy. For the eleventh hour man, who has done but little work, it will not buy so sweet rest as it buys for him who has “borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” It will not buy appetite, nor will it buy joy of conscience.

E. G. Robinson: “Heaven is not to be compared to a grasshopper on a shingle floating down stream. Heaven is a place where men are taken up, as they leave this world, and are carried forward. No sinners will be there, though there may be incompleteness of character. There is no intimation in Scripture of that sudden transformation in the hour of dissolution which is often supposed.” Ps. 84:7—“They go from strength to strength; Every one of them appeareth before God in Zion”—it is not possible that progress should cease with our entrance into heaven; rather is it true that uninterrupted progress will then begin. 1 Cor. 13:12—“now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face.” There, progress is not towards, but within, the sphere of the infinite. In this world we are like men living in a cave, and priding themselves on the rushlights with which they explore it, unwilling to believe that there is a region of sunlight where rushlights are needless.

Heaven will involve deliverance from defective physical organization and surroundings, as well as from the remains of evil in our hearts. Rest, in heaven, will be consistent with service, an activity without weariness, a service which is perfect freedom. We shall be perfect when we enter heaven, in the sense of being free from sin; but we shall grow to greater perfection thereafter, in the sense of a larger and completer being. The fruit tree shows perfection at each stage of its growth—the perfect bud, the perfect blossom, and finally the perfect fruit; yet the bud and the blossom are preparatory and prophetic; neither one is a finality. So “when that which is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away” (1 Cor. 13:10). A broadshouldered convert at the Rescue Mission said: “I'm the happiest man in the room to-night. I couldn't be any happier unless I were larger.” A little pail can be as full of water as is a big tub, but the tub will hold much more than the pail. To be “filled unto all the fulness of God” (Eph. 3:19) will mean much more in heaven than it means here, because we shall then “be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.”In the book of Revelation, John seems to have mistaken an angel for the Lord himself, and to have fallen down to worship (Rev. 22:8). The time may come in eternity when we shall be equal to what we now conceive God to be (1 Cor. 2:9).

Plato's Republic and More's Utopia are only earthly adumbrations of St. John's City of God. The representation of heaven as a city seems intended to suggest security from every foe, provision for every want, intensity of life, variety of occupation, and closeness of relation to others; or, as Hastings' Bible Dictionary, 1:446, puts it: “Safety, Security, Service.” Here, the greatest degradation and sin are found in the great cities. There, the life of the city will help holiness, as the life of the city here helps wickedness. Brotherly love in the next world implies knowing those we love, and loving those we know. We certainly shall not know less there than here. If we know our friends here, we shall know them there. And, as love to Christ here draws us nearer to each other, so there we shall love friends, not less but more, because of our greater nearness to Christ.

Zech. 8:5—“And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.” Newman Smyth, Through Science to Faith, 125—“As of the higher animals, so even more of men and women it may be true, that those who play best may succeed best and thrive best.” Horace Bushnell, in his essay, Work and Play, holds that ideal work is work performed so heartily and joyfully, and with such a surplus of energy, that it becomes play. This is the activity of heaven: John 10:10—“I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” We enter into the life of God: John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.” A nurse who had been ill for sixteen years, said: “If I were well, I would be at the small-pox hospital. I'm not going to heaven to do nothing.” Savage, Life after Death, 129, 292—“In Dante's universe, the only reason for any one's wanting to get to heaven is for the sake of getting out of the other place. There is nothing in heaven for him to do, nothing human for him to engage in.... A good deacon in his depression thought he was going to hell; but when asked what he would do there, he replied that he would try to start a prayer meeting.”

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With regard to heaven, two questions present themselves, namely:

(a) Is heaven a place, as well as a state?

We answer that this is probable, for the reason that the presence of Christ's human body is essential to heaven, and that this body must be confined to place. Since deity and humanity are indissolubly united in Christ's single person, we cannot regard Christ's human soul as limited to place without vacating his person of its divinity. But we cannot conceive of his human body as thus omnipresent. As the new bodies of the saints are confined to place, so, it would seem, must be the body of their Lord. But, though heaven be the place where Christ manifests his glory through the human body which he assumed in the incarnation, our ruling conception of heaven must be something higher even than this, namely, that of a state of holy communion with God.

John 14:2, 3—“In my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”; Heb. 12:14—“follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord.”

Although heaven is probably a place, we are by no means to allow this conception to become the preponderant one in our minds. Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” As he goes through the gates of death, every Christian can say, as Cæsar said when he crossed the Rubicon: “Omnia mea mecum porto.” The hymn “O sing to me of heaven, when I am called to die” is not true to Christian experience. In that hour the soul sings, not of heaven, but of Jesus and his cross. As houses on river-flats, accessible in time of flood by boats, keep safe only goods in the upper story, so only the treasure laid up above escapes the destroying floods of the last day. Dorner: “The soul will possess true freedom, in that it can no more become unfree; and that through the indestructible love-energy springing from union with God.”

Milton: “What if earth be But the shadow of heaven, and things therein Each to the other like, more than on earth is thought?” Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát, stanzas 66, 67—“I sent my soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my soul returned to me, And answered ‘I myself am Heaven and Hell’ ... Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, And Hell the shadow of a soul on fire.” In other words, not the kind of place, but the kind of people in it, makes Heaven or Hell. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 341—“The earth is but a breeding-ground from which God intends to populate the whole universe. After death, the soul goes to that place which God has prepared as its home. In the resurrection they ‘neither marry nor are given in marriage’ (Mat. 22:30) = ours is the only generative planet. There is no reproduction hereafter. To incorporate himself into the race, the Father must come to the reproductive planet.”

Dean Stanley: “Till death us part! So speaks the heart When each repeats to each the words of doom; Through blessing and through curse, For better and for worse, We will be one till that dread hour shall come. Life, with its myriad grasp, Our yearning souls shall clasp, By ceaseless love and still expectant wonder, In bonds that shall endure, Indissolubly sure, Till God in death shall part our paths asunder. Till death us join! O voice yet more divine, That to the broken heart breathes hope sublime; Through lonely hours and shattered powers, We still are one despite of change or time. Death, with his healing hand, Shall once more knit the band, Which needs but that one link which none may sever; Till through the only Good, Heard, felt and understood, Our life in God shall make us one forever.”

(b) Is this earth to be the heaven of the saints?

We answer:

First,—that the earth is to be purified by fire, and perhaps prepared to be the abode of the saints,—although this last is not rendered certain by the Scriptures.

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Rom. 8:19-23—“For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body”; 2 Pet. 3:12, 13—“looking for and earnestly desiring the coming of the day of God, by reason of which the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat. But, according to his promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness”; Rev. 21:1—“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and the sea is no more.”Dorner: “Without loss of substantiality, matter will have exchanged its darkness, hardness, heaviness, inertia, and impenetrableness, for clearness, radiance, elasticity, and transparency. A new stadium will begin—God's advance to new creations, with the coöperation of perfected mankind.”

Is the earth a molten mass, with a thin solid crust? Lord Kelvin says no,—it is more rigid and solid than steel. The interior may be intensely hot, yet pressure may render it solid to the very centre. The wrinkling of the surface may be due to contraction, or “solid flow,” like the wrinkling in the skin of a baked apple that has cooled. See article on The Interior of the Earth, by G. F. Becker, in N. American Rev., April, 1893. Edward S. Holden, Director of the Lick Observatory, in The Forum, Oct. 1893:211-220, tells us that “the star Nova Aurigæ, which doubtless resembled our sun, within two days increased in brilliancy sixteen fold. Three months after its discovery it had become invisible. After four months again it reappeared and was comparatively bright. But it was no longer a star but a nebula. In other words it had developed changes of light and heat which, if repeated in the case of our own sun, would mean a quick end of the human race, and the utter annihilation of every vestige of animal and other life upon this earth.... This catastrophe occured in December, 1891, or was announced to us by light which reached us then. But this light must have left the star twenty, perhaps fifty, years earlier.”

Secondly,—that this fitting-up of the earth for man's abode, even if it were declared in Scripture, would not render it certain that the saints are to be confined to these narrow limits (John 14:2). It seems rather to be intimated that the effect of Christ's work will be to bring the redeemed into union and intercourse with other orders of intelligence, from communion with whom they are now shut out by sin (Eph. 1:20; Col. 1:20).

John 14:2—“In my Father's house are many mansions”; Eph. 1:10—“unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”; Col. 1:20—“through him to reconcile all things unto himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross; through him, I say, whether things upon the earth, or things in the heavens.”

See Dr. A. C. Kendrick, in Bap. Quarterly, Jan. 1870. Dr. Kendrick thinks we need local associations. Earth may be our home, yet from this home we may set out on excursions through the universe, after a time returning again to our earthly abodes. So Chalmers, interpreting literally 2 Pet. 3. We certainly are in a prison here, and look out through the bars, as the Prisoner of Chillon looked over the lake to the green isle and the singing birds. Why are we shut out from intercourse with other worlds and other orders of intelligence? Apparently it is the effect of sin. We are in an abnormal state of durance and probation. Earth is out of harmony with God. The great harp of the universe has one of its strings out of tune, and that one discordant string makes a jar through the whole. All things in heaven and earth shall be reconciled when this one jarring string is keyed right and set in tune by the hand of love and mercy. See Leitch, God's Glory in the Heavens, 327-330.

2. Of the wicked.

The final state of the wicked is described under the figures of eternal fire (Mat. 25:41); the pit of the abyss (Rev. 9:2, 11); outer darkness (Mat. 8:12); torment (Rev. 14:10, 11); eternal punishment (Mat. 25:46); wrath of God (Rom. 2:5); second death (Rev. 21:8); eternal destruction from the face of the Lord (2 Thess. 1:9); eternal sin (Mark 3:29).

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Mat. 25:41—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels”; Rev. 9:2, 11—“And he opened the pit of the abyss; and there went up a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace.... They have over them as king the angel of the abyss: his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in the Greek tongue he hath the name Apollyon”; Mat. 8:12—“but the sons of the kingdom shall be cast forth into the outer darkness: there shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth”; Rev. 14:10, 11—“he also shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is prepared unmixed in the cup of his anger; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: and the smoke of their torment goeth up for ever and ever”; Mat. 25:46—“And these shall go away into eternal punishment.”

Rom. 2:5—“after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up for thyself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God”; Rev. 21:8—“But for the fearful, and unbelieving, and abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death”: 2 Thess. 1:9—“who shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might”—here ἀπό, from, = not separation, but “proceeding from,” and indicates that the everlasting presence of Christ, once realized, ensures everlasting destruction; Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—a text which implies that (1) some will never cease to sin; (2) this eternal sinning will involve eternal misery; (3) this eternal misery, as the appointed vindication of the law, will be eternal punishment. As Uzziah, when smitten with leprosy, did not need to be thrust out of the temple, but “himself hasted also to go out” (2 Chron. 26:20), so Judas is said to go “to his own place” (Acts 1:25; cf. 4:23—where Peter and John, “being let go, they came to their own company”). Cf. John 8:35—“the bondservant abideth not in the house forever” = whatever be his outward connection with God, it can be only for a time; 15:2—“Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh it away”—at death; the history of Abraham showed that one might have outward connection with God that was only temporary: Ishmael was cast out; the promise belonged only to Isaac.

Wrightnour: “Gehenna was the place into which all the offal of the city of Jerusalem was swept. So hell is the penitentiary of the moral universe. The profligate is not happy in the prayer meeting, but in the saloon; the swine is not at home in the parlor, but in the sty. Hell is the sinner's own place; he had rather be there than in heaven; he will not come to the house of God, the nearest thing to heaven; why should we expect him to enter heaven itself?”

Summing up all, we may say that it is the loss of all good, whether physical or spiritual, and the misery of an evil conscience banished from God and from the society of the holy, and dwelling under God's positive curse forever. Here we are to remember, as in the case of the final state of the righteous, that the decisive and controlling element is not the outward, but the inward. If hell be a place, it is only that the outward may correspond to the inward. If there be outward torments, it is only because these will be fit, though subordinate, accompaniments of the inward state of the soul.

Every living creature will have an environment suited to its character—“its own place.” “I know of the future judgment, How dreadful so e'er it be, That to sit alone with my conscience Will be judgment enough for me.” Calvin: “The wicked have the seeds of hell in their own hearts.” Chrysostom, commenting on the words “Depart, ye cursed,” says: “Their own works brought the punishment on them; the fire was not prepared for them, but for Satan; yet, since they cast themselves into it, ‘Impute it to yourselves,’ he says, ‘that you are there.’ ” Milton, Par. Lost, 4:75—Satan: “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” Byron: “There is no power in holy men, Nor charm in prayer, nor purifying form Of penitence, nor outward look, nor fast, Nor agony, nor, greater than all these, The innate torture of that deep despair Would make a hell of heaven, can exorcise From out the unbounded spirit the quick sense Of its own sins.”

Phelps, English Style, 228, speaks of “a law of the divine government, by which the body symbolizes, in its experience, the moral condition of its spiritual inhabitant. The drift of sin is to physical suffering. Moral depravity tends always to a corrupt and tortured body. Certain diseases are the product of certain crimes. The whole catalogue of human pains, from a toothache to the angina pectoris, is but a witness to a state of sin expressed by an experience of suffering. Carry this law into the experience of eternal sin. The bodies of the wicked live again as well as those of the righteous. You have therefore a spiritual body, inhabited and used, and therefore tortured, by a [pg 1035]guilty soul,—a body, perfected in its sensibilities, inclosing and expressing a soul matured in its depravity.” Augustine, Confessions, 25—“Each man's sin is the instrument of his punishment, and his iniquity is turned into his torment.” Lord Bacon: “Being, without well-being, is a curse, and the greater the being, the greater the curse.”

In our treatment of the subject of eternal punishment we must remember that false doctrine is often a reaction from the unscriptural and repulsive over-statements of Christian apologists. We freely concede: 1. that future punishment does not necessarily consist of physical torments,—it may be wholly internal and spiritual; 2. that the pain and suffering of the future are not necessarily due to positive inflictions of God,—they may result entirely from the soul's sense of loss, and from the accusations of conscience; and 3. that eternal punishment does not necessarily involve endless successions of suffering,—as God's eternity is not mere endlessness, so we may not be forever subject to the law of time.

An over-literal interpretation of the Scripture symbols has had much to do with such utterances as that of Savage, Life after Death, 101—“If the doctrine of eternal punishment was clearly and unmistakably taught in every leaf of the Bible, and on every leaf of all the Bibles of all the world, I could not believe a word of it. I should appeal from these misconceptions of even the seers and the great men to the infinite and eternal Good, who only is God, and who only on such terms could be worshiped.”

The figurative language of Scripture is a miniature representation of what cannot be fully described in words. The symbol is a symbol; yet it is less, not greater, than the thing symbolized. It is sometimes fancied that Jonathan Edwards, when, in his sermon on “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” he represented the sinner as a worm shriveling in the eternal fire, supposed that hell consists mainly of such physical torments. But this is a misinterpretation of Edwards. As he did not fancy heaven essentially to consist in streets of gold or pearly gates, but rather in holiness and communion with Christ, of which these are the symbols, so he did not regard hell as consisting in fire and brimstone, but rather in the unholiness and separation from God of a guilty and accusing conscience, of which the fire and brimstone are symbols. He used the material imagery, because he thought that this best answered to the methods of Scripture. He probably went beyond the simplicity of the Scripture statements, and did not sufficiently explain the spiritual meaning of the symbols he used; but we are persuaded that he neither understood them literally himself, nor meant them to be so understood by others.

Sin is self-isolating, unsocial, selfish. By virtue of natural laws the sinner reaps as he has sown, and sooner or later is repaid by desertion or contempt. Then the selfishness of one sinner is punished by the selfishness of another, the ambition of one by the ambition of another, the cruelty of one by the cruelty of another. The misery of the wicked hereafter will doubtless be due in part to the spirit of their companions. They dislike the good, whose presence and example is a continual reproof and reminder of the height from which they have fallen, and they shut themselves out of their company. The judgment will bring about a complete cessation of intercourse between the good and the bad. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:239—“Beings whose relations to God are diametrically opposite, and persistently so, differ so greatly from each other that other ties of relationship became as nothing in comparison.”

In order, however, to meet opposing views, and to forestall the common objections, we proceed to state the doctrine of future punishment in greater detail:

A. The future punishment of the wicked is not annihilation.

In our discussion of Physical Death, we have shown that, by virtue of its original creation in the image of God, the human soul is naturally immortal; that neither for the righteous nor the wicked is death a cessation of being; that on the contrary, the wicked enter at death upon a state of conscious suffering which the resurrection and the judgment only augment and render [pg 1036] permanent. It is plain, moreover, that if annihilation took place at death, there could be no degrees in future punishment,—a conclusion itself at variance with express statements of Scripture.

The old annihilationism is represented by Hudson, Debt and Grace, and Christ our Life; also by Dobney, Future Punishment. It maintains that κόλασις, “punishment” (in Mat. 25:46—“eternal punishment”), means etymologically an everlasting “cutting-off.” But we reply that the word had to a great degree lost its etymological significance, as is evident from the only other passage where it occurs in the New Testament, namely, 1 John 4:18—“fear hath punishment” (A. V.: “fear hath torment”). For full answer to the old statements of the annihilation-theory, see under Physical Death, pages 991-998.

That there are degrees of punishment in God's administration is evident from Luke 12:47, 48—“And that servant, who knew his Lord's will, and made not ready, nor did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes; but he that knew not, and did things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes”; Rom. 2:5, 6—“after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up for thyself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; who will render to every man according to his works”; 2 Cor. 5:10—“For we must all be made manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ; that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad”; 11:15—“whose end shall be according to their works”; 2 Tim. 4:14—“Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil: the Lord will render to him according to his works”; Rev. 2:23—“I will give unto each one of you according to your works”; 18:5, 6—“her sins have reached even unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. Render unto her even as she rendered, and double unto her the double according to her works: in the cup which she mingled, mingle unto her double.”

A French Christian replied to the argument of his deistical friend: “Probably you are right; probably you are not immortal; but I am.” This was the doctrine of conditional immortality, the doctrine that only the good survive. We grant that the measure of our faith in immortality is the measure of our fitness for its blessings; but it is not the measure of our possession of immortality. We are immortal beings, whether we believe it or not. The acorn is potentially an oak, but it may never come to its full development. There is a saltless salt, which, though it does not cease to exist, is cast out and trodden under foot of men. Denney, Studies in Theology, 256—“Conditional immortality denies that man can exist after death without being united to Christ by faith. But the immortality of man cannot be something accidental, something appended to his nature, after he believes in Christ. It must be something, at the very lowest, for which his nature is constituted, even if apart from Christ it can never realize itself as it ought.”

Broadus, Com. on Mat. 25:46 (page 514)—“He who caused to exist could keep in existence. Mark 9:49—‘Every one shall be salted with fire’—has probably this meaning. Fire is usually destructive; but this unquenchable fire will act like salt, preserving instead of destroying. So Keble, Christian Year, 5th Sunday in Lent, says of the Jews in their present condition: ‘Salted with fire, they seem to show How spirits lost in endless woe May undecaying live. Oh, sickening thought! Yet hold it fast Long as this glittering world shall last, Or sin at heart survive.’ ”

There are two forms of the annihilation theory which are more plausible, and which in recent times find a larger number of advocates, namely:

(a) That the powers of the wicked are gradually weakened, as the natural result of sin, so that they finally cease to be.—We reply, first, that moral evil does not, in this present life, seem to be incompatible with a constant growth of the intellectual powers, at least in certain directions, and we have no reason to believe the fact to be different in the world to come; secondly, that if this theory were true, the greater the sin, the speedier would be the relief from punishment.

This form of the annihilation theory is suggested by Bushnell, in his Forgiveness and Law, 146, 147, and by Martineau, Study, 2:107-8. Dorner also, in his Eschatology, seems to favor it as one of the possible methods of future punishment. He says: “To the ethical also pertains ontological significance. The 'second death' may be the dissolving of the soul itself into nothing. Estrangement from God, the source of life, ends in extinction of life. The orthodox talk about demented beings, raging in impotent fury, amounts to the same—annihilation of their human character. Evil is never the substance of the soul,—this remains metaphysically good.” It is argued that even for [pg 1037]saved sinners there is a loss. The prodigal regained his father's favor, but he could not regain his lost patrimony. We cannot get back the lost time, nor the lost growth. Much more, then, in the case of the wicked, will there be perpetual loss. Draper: “At every return to the sun, comets lose a portion of their size and brightness, stretching out until the nucleus loses control, the mass breaks up, and the greater portion navigates the sky, in the shape of disconnected meteorites.”

To this argument it is often replied that certain minds grow in their powers, at least in certain directions, in spite of their sin. Napoleon's military genius, during all his early years, grew with experience. Sloane, in his Life of Napoleon, however, seems to show that the Emperor lost his grip as he went on. Success unbalanced his judgment; he gave way to physical indulgence; his body was not equal to the strain he put upon it; at Waterloo he lost precious moments of opportunity by vacillation and inability to keep awake. There was physical, mental, and moral deterioration. But may this not be the result of the soul's connection with a body? Satan's cunning and daring seem to be on the increase from the first mention of him in Scripture to its end. See Princeton Review, 1882:673-694. Will not this very cunning and daring, however, work its own ruin, and lead Satan to his final and complete destruction? Does not sin blunt the intellect, unsettle one's sober standards of decision, lead one to prefer a trifling present triumph or pleasure to a permanent good?

Gladden, What is Left? 104, 105—“Evil is benumbing and deadening. Selfishness weakens a man's mental grasp, and narrows his range of vision. The schemer becomes less astute as he grows older; he is morally sure, before he dies, to make some stupendous blunder which even a tyro would have avoided.... The devil, who has sinned longest, must be the greatest fool in the universe, and we need not be at all afraid of him.” To the view that this weakening of powers leads to absolute extinction of being, we oppose the consideration that its award of retribution is glaringly unjust in making the greatest sinner the least sufferer; since to him relief, in the way of annihilation, comes the soonest.

(b) That there is for the wicked, certainly after death, and possibly between death and the judgment, a positive punishment proportioned to their deeds, but that this punishment issues in, or is followed by, annihilation.—We reply first, that upon this view, as upon any theory of annihilation, future punishment is a matter of grace as well as of justice—a notion for which Scripture affords no warrant; secondly, that Scripture not only gives no hint of the cessation of this punishment, but declares in the strongest terms its endlessness.

The second form of the annihilation theory seems to have been held by Justin Martyr (Trypho, Edinb. transl.)—“Some, who have appeared worthy of God, never die; but others are punished so long as God wills them to exist and be punished.” The soul exists because God wills, and no longer than he wills. “Whenever it is necessary that the soul should cease to exist, the spirit of life is removed from it, and there is no more soul, but it goes back to the place from which it was taken.”

Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:608, 609—“Justin Martyr teaches that the wicked or hopelessly impenitent will be raised at the judgment to receive an eternal punishment. He speaks of it in twelve passages: ‘We believe that all who live wickedly and do not repent will be punished in eternal fire.’ Such language is inconsistent with the annihilation theory for which Justin Martyr has been claimed. He does indeed reject the idea of the independent immortality of the soul, and hints at the possible final destruction of the wicked; but he puts that possibility countless ages beyond the final judgment, so that it loses all practical significance.”

A modern advocate of this view is White, in his Life in Christ. He favors a conditional immortality, belonging only to those who are joined to Christ by faith; but he makes a retributive punishment and pain fall upon the godless, before their annihilation. The roots of this view lie in a false conception of holiness as a form or manifestation of benevolence, and of punishment as deterrent and preventive instead of vindicative of righteousness. To the minds of its advocates, extinction of being is a comparative blessing; and they, for this reason, prefer it to the common view. See Whiton, Is Eternal Punishment Endless?

[pg 1038]

A view similar to that which we are opposing is found in Henry Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World. Evil is punished by its own increase. Drummond, however, leaves no room for future life or for future judgment in the case of the unregenerate. See reviews of Drummond, in Watts, New Apologetic, 332; and in Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 19-21, 77-124. While Drummond is an annihilationist, Murphy is a restorationist. More rational and Scriptural than either of these is the saying of Tower: “Sin is God's foe. He does not annihilate it, but he makes it the means of displaying his holiness; as the Romans did not slay their captured enemies, but made them their servants.” The terms αἰών and αἰώνιος, which we have still to consider, afford additional Scripture testimony against annihilation. See also the argument from the divine justice, pages 1046-1051; article on the Doctrine of Extinction, in New Englander, March, 1879:201-224; Hovey, Manual of Theology and Ethics, 153-168; J. S. Barlow, Endless Being; W. H. Robinson, on Conditional Immortality, in Report of Baptist Congress for 1886.

Since neither one of these two forms of the annihilation theory is Scriptural or rational, we avail ourselves of the evolutionary hypothesis as throwing light upon the problem. Death is not degeneracy ending in extinction, nor punishment ending in extinction,—it is atavism that returns, or tends to return, to the animal type. As moral development is from the brute to man, so abnormal development is from man to the brute.

Lord Byron: “All suffering doth destroy, or is destroyed.” This is true, not of man's being, but of his well being. Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 115—“Dissolution pursues a regressive course from the more voluntary and more complex to the less voluntary and more simple, that is to say, toward the automatic. One of the first signs of mental impairment is incapacity for sustained attention. Unity, stability, power, have ceased, and the end is extinction of the will.” We prefer to say, loss of the freedom of the will. On the principle of evolution, abuse of freedom may result in reversion to the brute, annihilation not of existence but of higher manhood, punishment from within rather than from without, eternal penalty in the shape of eternal loss. Mat. 24:13—“he that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved”—has for its parallel passage Luke 21:19—“In your patience ye shall win your souls,” i. e., shall by free will get possession of your own being. Losing one's soul is just the opposite, namely, losing one's free will, by disuse renouncing freedom, becoming a victim of habit, nature, circumstance, and this is the cutting off and annihilation of true manhood. “To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer” (Bernard Shaw).

In John 15:2 Christ says of all men—the natural branches of the vine—“Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he taketh it away”; Ps. 49:20—“Man that is in honor, and understandeth not, Is like the beasts that perish”; Rev. 22:15—“Without are the dogs.” In heathen fable men were turned into beasts, and even into trees. The story of Circe is a parable of human fate,—men may become apes, tigers, or swine. They may lose their higher powers of consciousness and will. By perpetual degradation they may suffer eternal punishment. All life that is worthy of the name may cease, while still existence of a low animal type is prolonged. We see precisely these results of sin in this world. We have reason to believe that the same laws of development will operate in the world to come.

McConnell, Evolution of Immortality, 85-95, 99, 124, 180—“Immortality, or survival after death, depends upon man's freeing himself from the law which sweeps away the many, and becoming an individual (indivisible) that is fit to survive. The individual must become stronger than the species. By using will aright, he lays hold of the infinite Life, and becomes one who, like Christ, has ‘life in himself’ (John 5:26). Gravitation and chemical affinity had their way in the universe until they were arrested and turned about in the interest of life. Overproduction, death, and the survival of the fittest, had their ruthless sway until they were reversed in the interest of affection. The supremacy of the race at the expense of the individual we may expect to continue until something in the individual comes to be of more importance than that law, and no longer.... Goodness can arrest and turn back for nations the primal law of growth, vigor, and decline. Is it too much to believe that it may do the same for an individual man?... Life is a thing to be achieved. At every step there are a thousand candidates who fail, for one that attains.... Until moral sensibility becomes self-conscious, all question of personal immortality becomes irrelevant, because there is, accurately speaking, no personality to be immortal. Up to that point the individual living creature, whether in human form or not, falls short of that essential personality for which eternal life can [pg 1039]have any meaning.” But how about children who never come to moral consciousness? McConnell appeals to heredity. The child of one who has himself achieved immortality may also prove to be immortal. But is there no chance for the children of sinners? The doctrine of McConnell leans toward the true solution, but it is vitiated by the belief that individuality is a transient gift which only goodness can make permanent. We hold on the other hand that this gift of God is “without repentance” (Rom. 11:29), and that no human being can lose life, except in the sense of losing all that makes life desirable.

B. Punishment after death excludes new probation and ultimate restoration of the wicked.

Some have maintained the ultimate restoration of all human beings, by appeal to such passages as the following: Mat. 19:28; Acts 3:21; Eph. 1:9, 10.

Mat. 19:28—“in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory”; Acts 3:21—Jesus, “whom the heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things”; 1 Cor. 15:26—“The last enemy that shall be abolished is death”; Eph. 1:9, 10—“according to his good pleasure which he purposed in him unto a dispensation of the fulness of the times, to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth”; Phil. 2:10, 11—“that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”; 2 Pet. 3:9, 13—“not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance ... But, according to his promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”

Robert Browning: “That God, by God's own ways occult, May—doth, I will believe—bring back All wanderers to a single track.” B. W. Lockhart: “I must believe that evil is essentially transient and mortal, or alter my predicates of God. And I must believe in the ultimate extinction of that personality whom the power of God cannot sometime win to goodness. The only alternative is the termination of a wicked life either through redemption or through extinction.” Mulford, Republic of God, claims that the soul's state cannot be fixed by any event, such as death, outside of itself. If it could, the soul would exist, not under a moral government, but under fate, and God himself would be only another name for fate. The soul carries its fate, under God, in its power of choice; and who dares to say that this power to choose the good ceases at death?

For advocacy of a second probation for those who have not consciously rejected Christ in this life, see Newman Smyth's edition of Dorner's Eschatology. For the theory of restoration, see Farrar, Eternal Hope; Birks, Victory of Divine Goodness; Jukes, Restitution of All Things; Delitzsch, Bib. Psychologie, 469-476; Robert Browning, Apparent Failure; Tennyson, In Memoriam, § liv. Per contra, see Hovey, Bib. Eschatology, 95-144. See also, Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 406-440.

(a) These passages, as obscure, are to be interpreted in the light of those plainer ones which we have already cited. Thus interpreted, they foretell only the absolute triumph of the divine kingdom, and the subjection of all evil to God.

The true interpretation of the passages above mentioned is indicated in Meyer's note on Eph. 1:9, 10—this namely, that “the allusion is not to the restoration of fallen individuals, but to the restoration of universal harmony, implying that the wicked are to be excluded from the kingdom of God.” That there is no allusion to a probation after this life, is clear from Luke 16:19-31—the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Here penalty is inflicted for the sins done “in thy lifetime” (v. 25); this penalty is unchangeable—“there is a great gulf fixed” (v. 26); the rich man asks favors for his brethren who still live on the earth, but none for himself (v. 27, 28). John 5:25-29—“The hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in himself, even so gave he to the Son also to have life in himself: and he gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is a son of man. Marvel not at this: for the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, until the resurrection of judgment”—here it is declared that, while for those who have done good there is a resurrection of life, there is for those who have done ill only a resurrection of judgment. John 8:21, 24—“shall die in your sin: whither I go, ye cannot come ... except ye believe that I am he, ye shall die in your sins”—sayings which indicate finality in the decisions of this life.

Orr, Christian View of God and the World, 243—“Scripture invariably represents the judgment as proceeding on the data of this life, and it concentrates every ray of appeal into the present.” John 9:4—“We must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh [pg 1040]when no man can work”—intimates that there is no opportunity to secure salvation after death. The Christian hymn writer has caught the meaning of Scripture, when he says of those who have passed through the gate of death: “Fixed in an eternal state, They have done with all below; We a little longer wait; But how little, none can know.”

(b) A second probation is not needed to vindicate the justice or the love of God, since Christ, the immanent God, is already in this world present with every human soul, quickening the conscience, giving to each man his opportunity, and making every decision between right and wrong a true probation. In choosing evil against their better judgment even the heathen unconsciously reject Christ. Infants and idiots, as they have not consciously sinned, are, as we may believe, saved at death by having Christ revealed to them and by the regenerating influence of his Spirit.

Rom. 1:18-28—there is probation under the light of nature as well as under the gospel, and under the law of nature as well as under the gospel men may be given up “unto a reprobate mind”; 2:6-16—Gentiles shall be judged, not by the gospel, but by the law of nature, and shall “perish without the law ... in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men.” 2 Cor. 5:10—“For we must all be made manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ; [not that each may have a new opportunity to secure salvation, but] that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad”; Heb. 6:8—“whose end is to be burned”—not to be quickened again; 9:27—“And inasmuch as it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh[not a second probation, but] judgment.” Luckock, Intermediate State, 22—“In Heb. 9:27, the word ‘judgment’ has no article. The judgment alluded to is not the final or general judgment, but only that by which the place of the soul is determined in the Intermediate State.”

Denney, Studies in Theology, 243—“In Mat. 25, our Lord gives a pictorial representation of the judgment of the heathen. All nations—all the Gentiles—are gathered before the King; and their destiny is determined, not by their conscious acceptance or rejection of the historical Savior, but by their unconscious acceptance or rejection of him in the persons of those who needed services of love.... This does not square with the idea of a future probation. It rather tells us plainly that men may do things of final and decisive import in this life, even if Christ is unknown to them.... The real argument against future probation is that it depreciates the present life, and denies the infinite significance that, under all conditions, essentially and inevitably belongs to the actions of a self-conscious moral being. A type of will may be in process of formation, even in a heathen man, on which eternal issues depend.... Second probation lowers the moral tone of the spirit. The present life acquires a relative unimportance. I dare not say that if I forfeit the opportunity the present life gives me I shall ever have another, and therefore I dare not say so to another man.”

For an able review of the Scripture testimony against a second probation, see G. F. Wright, Relation of Death to Probation, iv. Emerson, the most recent advocate of restorationism, in his Doctrine of Probation Examined, 42, is able to evade these latter passages only by assuming that they are to be spiritually interpreted, and that there is to be no literal outward day of judgment—an error which we have previously discussed and refuted,—see pages 1024, 1025.

(c) The advocates of universal restoration are commonly the most strenuous defenders of the inalienable freedom of the human will to make choices contrary to its past character and to all the motives which are or can be brought to bear upon it. As a matter of fact, we find in this world that men choose sin in spite of infinite motives to the contrary. Upon the theory of human freedom just mentioned, no motives which God can use will certainly accomplish the salvation of all moral creatures. The soul which resists Christ here may resist him forever.

Emerson, in the book just referred to, says: “The truth that sin is in its permanent essence a free choice, however for a time it may be held in mechanical combination with the notion of moral opportunity arbitrarily closed, can never mingle with it, and must in the logical outcome permanently cast it off. Scripture presumes and teaches [pg 1041]the constant capability of souls to obey as well as to be disobedient.” Emerson is correct. If the doctrine of the unlimited ability of the human will be a true one, then restoration in the future world is possible. Clement and Origen founded on this theory of will their denial of future punishment. If will be essentially the power of contrary choice, and if will may act independently of all character and motive, there can be no objective certainty that the lost will remain sinful. In short, there can be no finality, even to God's allotments, nor is any last judgment possible. Upon this view, regeneration and conversion are as possible at any time in the future as they are to-day.

But those who hold to this defective philosophy of the will should remember that unlimited freedom is unlimited freedom to sin, as well as unlimited freedom to turn to God. If restoration is possible, endless persistence in evil is possible also; and this last the Scripture predicts. Whittier: “What if thine eye refuse to see, Thine ear of heaven's free welcome fail, And thou a willing captive be, Thyself thine own dark jail?”Swedenborg says that the man who obstinately refuses the inheritance of the sons of God is allowed the pleasures of the beast, and enjoys in his own low way the hell to which he has confined himself. Every occupant of hell prefers it to heaven. Dante, Hell, iv—“All here together come from every clime, And to o'erpass the river are not loth, For so heaven's justice goads them on, that fear Is turned into desire. Hence never passed good spirit.” The lost are Heautoutimoroumenoi, or self-tormentors, to adopt the title of Terence's play. See Whedon, in Meth. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1884; Robbins, in Bib. Sac., 1881:460-507.

Denney, Studies in Theology, 255—“The very conception of human freedom involves the possibility of its permanent misuse, or of what our Lord himself calls ‘eternal sin’ (Mark 3:29).” Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:699—“Origen's restorationism grew naturally out of his view of human liberty”—the liberty of indifference—“endless alternations of falls and recoveries, of hells and heavens; so that practically he taught nothing but a hell.”J. C. Adams, The Leisure of God: “It is lame logic to maintain the inviolable freedom of the will, and at the same time insist that God can, through his ample power, through protracted punishment, bring the soul into a disposition which it does not wish to feel. There is no compulsory holiness possible. In our Civil War there was some talk of ‘compelling men to volunteer,’ but the idea was soon seen to involve a self-contradiction.”

(d) Upon the more correct view of the will which we have advocated, the case is more hopeless still. Upon this view, the sinful soul, in its very sinning, gives to itself a sinful bent of intellect, affection, and will; in other words, makes for itself a character, which, though it does not render necessary, yet does render certain, apart from divine grace, the continuance of sinful action. In itself it finds a self-formed motive to evil strong enough to prevail over all inducements to holiness which God sees it wise to bring to bear. It is in the next world, indeed, subjected to suffering. But suffering has in itself no reforming power. Unless accompanied by special renewing influences of the Holy Spirit, it only hardens and embitters the soul. We have no Scripture evidence that such influences of the Spirit are exerted, after death, upon the still impenitent; but abundant evidence, on the contrary, that the moral condition in which death finds men is their condition forever.

See Bushnell's “One Trial Better than Many,” in Sermons on Living Subjects; also see his Forgiveness and Law, 146, 147. Bushnell argues that God would give us fifty trials, if that would do us good. But there is no possibility of such result. The first decision adverse to God renders it more difficult to make a right decision upon the next opportunity. Character tends to fixity, and each new opportunity may only harden the heart and increase its guilt and condemnation. We should have no better chance of salvation if our lives were lengthened to the term of the sinners before the flood. Mere suffering does not convert the soul; see Martineau, Study, 2:100. A life of pain did not make Blanco White a believer; see Mozley, Hist. and Theol. Essays, vol. 2, essay 1.

[pg 1042]

Edward A. Lawrence, Does Everlasting Punishment Last Forever?—“If the deeds of the law do not justify here, how can the penalties of the law hereafter? The pain from a broken limb does nothing to mend the break, and the suffering from disease does nothing to cure it. Penalty pays no debts,—it only shows the outstanding and unsettled accounts.” If the will does not act without motive, then it is certain that without motives men will never repent. To an impenitent and rebellious sinner the motive must come, not from within, but from without. Such motives God presents by his Spirit in this life; but when this life ends and God's Spirit is withdrawn, no motives to repentance will be presented. The soul's dislike for God will issue only in complaint and resistance. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4—“Try what repentance can? what can it not? Yet what can it, when one cannot repent?” Marlowe, Faustus: “Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place; for where we are is hell, And where hell is, there we must ever be.”

The pressure of the atmosphere without is counteracted by the resistance of the atmosphere within the body. So God's life within is the only thing that can enable us to bear God's afflictive dispensations without. Without God's Spirit to inspire repentance the wicked man in this world never feels sorrow for his deeds, except as he realizes their evil consequences. Physical anguish and punishment inspire hatred, not of sin, but of the effects of sin. The remorse of Judas induced confession, but not true repentance. So in the next world punishment will secure recognition of God and of his justice, on the part of the transgressor, but it will not regenerate or save. The penalties of the future life will be no more effectual to reform the sinner than were the invitations of Christ and the strivings of the Holy Spirit in the present life. The transientness of good resolves which are forced out of us by suffering is illustrated by the old couplet: “The devil was sick,—the devil a monk would be; The devil got well,—the devil a monk was he.”

Charles G. Sewall: “Paul Lester Ford, the novelist, was murdered by his brother Malcolm, because the father of the two brothers had disinherited the one who committed the crime. Has God the right to disinherit any one of his children? We answer that God disinherits no one. Each man decides for himself whether he will accept the inheritance. It is a matter of character. A father cannot give his son an education. The son may play truant and throw away his opportunity. The prodigal son disinherited himself. Heaven is not a place,—it is a way of living, a condition of being. If you have a musical ear, I will admit you to a lovely concert. If you have not a musical ear, I may give you a reserved seat and you will hear no melody. Some men fail of salvation because they have no taste for it and will not have it.”

The laws of God's universe are closing in upon the impenitent sinner, as the iron walls of the mediæval prison closed in night by night upon the victim,—each morning there was one window less, and the dungeon came to be a coffin. In Jean Ingelow's poem “Divided,” two friends, parted by a little rivulet across which they could clasp hands, walk on in the direction in which the stream is flowing, till the rivulet becomes a brook, and the brook a river, and the river an arm of the sea across which no voice can be heard and there is no passing. By constant neglect to use our opportunity, we lose the power to cross from sin to righteousness, until between the soul and God “there is a great gulf fixed” (Luke 16:26).

John G. Whittier wrote within a twelvemonth of his death: “I do believe that we take with us into the next world the same freedom of will we have here, and that there, as here, he that turns to the Lord will find mercy; that God never ceases to follow his creatures with love, and is always ready to hear the prayer of the penitent. But I also believe that now is the accepted time, and that he who dallies with sin may find the chains of evil habit too strong to break in this world or the other.” And the following is the Quaker poet's verse: “Though God be good and free be heaven, Not force divine can love compel; And though the song of sins forgiven Might sound through lowest hell, The sweet persuasion of his voice Respects the sanctity of will. He giveth day; thou hast thy choice To walk in darkness still.”

Longfellow, Masque of Pandora: “Never by lapse of time The soul defaced by crime Into its former self returns again; For every guilty deed Holds in itself the seed Of retribution and undying pain. Never shall be the loss Restored, till Helios Hath purified them with his heavenly fires; Then what was lost is won, And the new life begun, Kindled with nobler passions and desires.” Seth, Freedom as Ethical Postulate, 42—“Faust's selling his soul to Mephistopheles, and signing the contract with his life's blood, is no single transaction, done deliberately, on one occasion; rather, that is [pg 1043]the lurid meaning of a life which consists of innumerable individual acts,—the life of evil means that.” See John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 2:88; Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 315.

(e) The declaration as to Judas, in Mat. 26:24, could not be true upon the hypothesis of a final restoration. If at any time, even after the lapse of ages, Judas be redeemed, his subsequent infinite duration of blessedness must outweigh all the finite suffering through which he has passed. The Scripture statement that “good were it for that man if he had not been born” must be regarded as a refutation of the theory of universal restoration.

Mat. 26:24—“The Son of man goeth, even as it is written of him: but woe unto that man through whom the Son of man is betrayed! good were it for that man if he had not been born.” G. F. Wright, Relation of Death to Probation: “As Christ of old healed only those who came or were brought to him, so now he waits for the coöperation of human agency. God has limited himself to an orderly method in human salvation. The consuming missionary zeal of the apostles and the early church shows that they believed the decisions of this life to be final decisions. The early church not only thought the heathen world would perish without the gospel, but they found a conscience in the heathen answering to this belief. The solicitude drawn out by this responsibility for our fellows may be one means of securing the moral stability of the future. What is bound on earth is bound in heaven; else why not pray for the wicked dead?” It is certainly a remarkable fact, if this theory be true, that we have in Scripture not a single instance of prayer for the dead.

The apocryphal 2 Maccabees 12:39 sq. gives an instance of Jewish prayer for the dead. Certain who were slain had concealed under their coats things consecrated to idols. Judas and his host therefore prayed that this sin might be forgiven to the slain, and they contributed 2,000 drachmas of silver to send a sin offering for them to Jerusalem. So modern Jews pray for the dead; see Luckock, After Death, 54-66—an argument for such prayer. John Wesley, Works, 9:55, maintains the legality of prayer for the dead. Still it is true that we have no instance of such prayer in canonical Scriptures. Ps. 132:1—“Jehovah, remember for David All his affliction”—is not a prayer for the dead, but signifies: “Remember for David”, so as to fulfil thy promise to him, “all his anxious cares”—with regard to the building of the temple; the psalm having been composed, in all probability, for the temple dedication. Paul prays that God will “grant mercy to the house of Onesiphorus” (2 Tim. 1:16), from which it has been unwarrantably inferred that Onesiphorus was dead at the time of the apostle's writing; but Paul's further prayer in verse 18—“the Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day”—seems rather to point to the death of Onesiphorus as yet in the future.

Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:715 note—“Many of the arguments constructed against the doctrine of endless punishment proceed upon the supposition that original sin, or man's evil inclination, is the work of God: that because man is born in sin (Ps. 51:5), he was created in sin. All the strength and plausibility of John Foster's celebrated letter lies in the assumption that the moral corruption and impotence of the sinner, whereby it is impossible to save himself from eternal death, is not self-originated and self-determined, but infused by his Maker. ‘If,’ says he, ‘the very nature of man, as created by the Sovereign Power, be in such desperate disorder that there is no possibility of conversion or salvation except in instances where that Power interposes with a special and redeeming efficacy, how can we conceive that the main portion of the race, thus morally impotent (that is, really and absolutely impotent), will be eternally punished for the inevitable result of this moral impotence?’ If this assumption of concreated depravity and impotence is correct, Foster's objection to eternal retribution is conclusive and fatal.... Endless punishment supposes the freedom of the human will, and is impossible without it. Self-determination runs parallel with hell.”

The theory of a second probation, as recently advocated, is not only a logical result of that defective view of the will already mentioned, but it is also in part a consequence of denying the old orthodox and Pauline doctrine of the organic unity of the race in Adam's first transgression. New School Theology has been inclined to deride the notion of a fair probation of humanity in our first father, and of a common sin and guilt of mankind in him. It cannot find what it regards as a fair probation for each individual since that first sin; and the conclusion is easy that there must be such a fair probation for each individual in the world to come. But we may advise those who take this view [pg 1044]to return to the old theology. Grant a fair probation for the whole race already passed, and the condition of mankind is no longer that of mere unfortunates unjustly circumstanced, but rather that of beings guilty and condemned, to whom present opportunity, and even present existence, is a matter of pure grace,—much more the general provision of a salvation, and the offer of it to any human soul. This world is already a place of second probation; and since the second probation is due wholly to God's mercy, no probation after death is needed to vindicate either the justice or the goodness of God. See Kellogg, in Presb. Rev., April, 1885:226-256; Cremer, Beyond the Grave, preface by A. A. Hodge, xxxvi sq.; E. D. Morris, Is There Salvation After Death? A. H. Strong, on The New Theology, in Bap. Quar. Rev., Jan. 1888,—reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 164-179.

C. Scripture declares this future punishment of the wicked to be eternal.

It does this by its use of the terms αἰών, αἰώνιος.—Some, however, maintain that these terms do not necessarily imply eternal duration. We reply:

(a) It must be conceded that these words do not etymologically necessitate the idea of eternity; and that, as expressing the idea of “age-long,” they are sometimes used in a limited or rhetorical sense.

2 Tim. 1:9—“his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before times eternal”—but the past duration of the world is limited; Heb. 9:26—“now once at the end of the ages hath he been manifested”—here the αἰῶνες have an end; Tit. 1:2—“eternal life ... promised before times eternal”; but here there may be a reference to the eternal covenant of the Father with the Son; Jer. 31:3—“I have loved thee with an everlasting love” = a love which antedated time; Rom. 16:25, 26—“the mystery which hath been kept in silence through times eternal ... according to the commandment of the eternal God”—here “eternal” is used in the same verse in two senses. It is argued that in Mat. 25:46—“these shall go away into eternal punishment”—the word “eternal” may be used in the narrower sense.

Arthur Chambers, Our Life after Death, 222-236—“In Mat. 13:39—‘the harvest is the end of theαἰών,’ and in 2 Tim. 4:10—‘Demas forsook me, having loved this present αἰών’—the word αἰών clearly implies limitation of time. Why not take the word αἰών in this sense in Mark 3:29—‘hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin’? We must not translate αἰών by ‘world,’ and so express limitation, while we translate αἰώνιος by ‘eternal,’ and so express endlessness which excludes limitation; cf. Gen. 13:15—‘all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed forever’; Num. 25:13—‘it shall be unto him [Phinehas], and to his seed after him, the covenant of an everlasting priesthood’; Josh. 24:2—‘your fathers dwelt of old time [from eternity] beyond the River’; Deut. 23:3—‘An Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter ... into the assembly of Jehovah for ever’; Ps. 24:7, 8—‘be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors.’ ”

(b) They do, however, express the longest possible duration of which the subject to which they are attributed is capable; so that, if the soul is immortal, its punishment must be without end.

Gen. 49:26—“the everlasting hills”; 17:8, 13—“I will give unto thee ... all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession ... my covenant [of circumcision] shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant”; Ex. 21:6—“he [the slave] shall serve him [his master] for ever”; 2 Chron. 6:2—“But I have built thee an house of habitation, and a place for thee to dwell in for ever”—of the temple at Jerusalem; Jude 6, 7—“angels ... he hath kept in everlasting bonds under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrah ... are set forth as an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire”—here in Jude 6, bonds which endure only to the judgment day are called ἀϊδίοις (the same word which is used in Rom. 1:20—“his everlasting power and divinity”), and fire which lasts only till Sodom and Gomorrah are consumed is called αἰωνίον. Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:687—“To hold land forever is to hold it as long as grass grows and water runs, i. e., as long as this world or æon endures.”

In all the passages cited above, the condition denoted by αἰώνιος lasts as long as the object endures of which it is predicated. But we have seen (pages 982-998) that physical death is not the end of man's existence, and that the soul, made in the image of God, is immortal. A punishment, therefore, that lasts as long as the soul, must be an everlasting punishment. Another interpretation of the passages in Jude is, however, entirely possible. It is maintained by many that the “everlasting bonds” of the fallen angels do not cease at the judgment, and that Sodom and Gomorrah suffer “the punishment [pg 1045]of eternal fire” in the sense that their condemnation at the judgment will be a continuation of that begun in the time of Lot (see Mat. 10:15—“It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city”).

(c) If, when used to describe the future punishment of the wicked, they do not declare the endlessness of that punishment, there are no words in the Greek language which could express that meaning.

C. F. Wright, Relation of Death to Probation: “The Bible writers speak of eternity in terms of time, and make the impression more vivid by reduplicating the longest time-words they had [e. g., εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων = ‘unto the ages of the ages’]. Plato contrasts χρόνος and αἰών, as we do time and eternity, and Aristotle says that eternity [αἰών] belongs to God.... The Scriptures have taught the doctrine of eternal punishment as clearly as their general style allows.” The destiny of lost men is bound up with the destiny of evil angels in Mat. 25:41—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels.” If the latter are hopelessly lost, then the former are hopelessly lost also.

(d) In the great majority of Scripture passages where they occur, they have unmistakably the signification “everlasting.” They are used to express the eternal duration of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Rom. 16:26; 1 Tim. 1:17; Heb. 9:14; Rev. 1:18); the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit with all true believers (John 14:17); and the endlessness of the future happiness of the saints (Mat. 19:29; John 6:54, 58; 2 Cor. 9:9).

Rom. 16:26—“the commandment of the eternal God”; 1 Tim. 1:17—“Now unto the King eternal, incorruptible, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever”; Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit”; Rev. 1:17, 18—“I am the first and the last, and the Living one; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore”; John 14:16, 17—“And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth”; Mat. 19:29—“every one that hath left houses, or brethren, or sisters ... for my name's sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and shall inherit eternal life”; John 6:54, 58—“He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life.... he that eateth this bread shall live for ever”; 2 Cor. 9:9—“His righteousness abideth for ever”; cf. Dan. 7:18—“But the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever.”

Everlasting punishment is sometimes said to be the punishment which takes place in, and belongs to, an αἰών, with no reference to duration. But President Woolsey declares, on the other hand, that “αἰώνιος cannot denote ‘pertaining to an αἰών, or world period.’ ”The punishment of the wicked cannot cease, any more than Christ can cease to live, or the Holy Spirit to abide with believers; for all these are described in the same terms; “αἰώνιος is used in the N. T. 66 times,—51 times of the happiness of the righteous, 2 times of the duration of God and his glory, 6 times where there is no doubt as to its meaning ‘eternal,’ 7 times of the punishment of the wicked; αἰών is used 95 times,—55 times of unlimited duration, 31 times of duration that has limits, 9 times to denote the duration of future punishment.” See Joseph Angus, in Expositor, Oct. 1887:274-286.

(e) The fact that the same word is used in Mat. 25:46 to describe both the sufferings of the wicked and the happiness of the righteous shows that the misery of the lost is eternal, in the same sense as the life of God or the blessedness of the saved.

Mat. 25:46—“And these shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous into eternal life.” On this passage see Meyer: “The absolute idea of eternity, in respect to the punishments of hell, is not to be set aside, either by an appeal to the popular use of αἰώνιος, or by an appeal to the figurative term ‘fire’; to the incompatibility of the idea of the eternal with that of moral evil and its punishment, or to the warning design of the representation; but it stands fast exegetically, by means of the contrasted ζωὴν αἰώνιον, which signifies the endless Messianic life.”

(f) Other descriptions of the condemnation and suffering of the lost, excluding, as they do, all hope of repentance or forgiveness, render it certain [pg 1046] that αἰών and αἰώνιος, in the passages referred to, describe a punishment that is without end.

Mat. 12:31, 32—“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven.... it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come”; 25:10—“and the door was shut”; Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”; 9:43, 48—“to go into hell, into the unquenchable fire ... where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched”—not the dying worm but the undying worm; not the fire that is quenched, but the fire that is unquenchable; Luke 3:17—“the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire”; 16:26—“between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that they that would pass from hence to you may not be able, and that none may cross over from thence to us”; John 3:36—“he that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.”

Review of Farrar's Eternal Hope, in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1878:782—“The original meaning of the English word ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ was precisely that of the Greek words for which they stand. Their present meaning is widely different, but from what did it arise? It arose from the connotation imposed upon these words by the impression the Scriptures made on the popular mind. The present meaning of these words is involved in the Scripture, and cannot be removed by any mechanical process. Change the words, and in a few years ‘judge’ will have in the Bible the same force that ‘damn’ has at present. In fact, the words were not mistranslated, but the connotation of which Dr. Farrar complains has come upon them since, and that through the Scriptures. This proves what the general impression of Scripture upon the mind is, and shows how far Dr. Farrar has gone astray.”

(g) While, therefore, we grant that we do not know the nature of eternity, or its relation to time, we maintain that the Scripture representations of future punishment forbid both the hypothesis of annihilation, and the hypothesis that suffering will end in restoration. Whatever eternity may be, Scripture renders it certain that after death there is no forgiveness.

We regard the argument against endless punishment drawn from αἰών and αἰώνιος as a purely verbal one which does not touch the heart of the question at issue. We append several utterances of its advocates. The Christian Union: “Eternal punishment is punishment in eternity, not throughout eternity; as temporal punishment is punishment in time, not throughout time.” Westcott: “Eternal life is not an endless duration of being in time, but being of which time is not a measure. We have indeed no powers to grasp the idea except through forms and images of sense. These must be used, but we must not transfer them to realities of another order.”

Farrar holds that ἀΐδιος, “everlasting”, which occurs but twice in the N. T. (Rom. 1:20 and Jude 6), is not a synonym of αἰώνιος, “eternal”, but the direct antithesis of it; the former being the unrealizable conception of endless time, and the latter referring to a state from which our imperfect human conception of time is absolutely excluded. Whiton, Gloria Patri, 145, claims that the perpetual immanence of God in conscience makes recovery possible after death; yet he speaks of the possibility that in the incorrigible sinner conscience may become extinct. To all these views we may reply with Schaff, Ch. History, 2:66—“After the general judgment we have nothing revealed but the boundless prospect of æonian life and æonian death.... Everlasting punishment of the wicked always was and always will be the orthodox theory.”

For the view that αἰών and αἰώνιος are used in a limited sense, see De Quincey, Theological Essays, 1:126-146; Maurice, Essays, 436; Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:485-488; Farrar, Eternal Hope, 200; Smyth, Orthodox Theology of To-day, 118-123; Chambers, Life after Death; Whiton, Is Eternal Punishment Endless? For the common orthodox view, see Fisher and Tyler, in New Englander, March, 1878; Gould, in Bib. Sac., 1880:212-248; Princeton Review, 1873:620; Shedd, Doctrine of Endless Punishment, 12-117; Broadus, Com. on Mat. 25:45.

D. This everlasting punishment of the wicked is not inconsistent with God's justice, but is rather a revelation of that justice.

(a) We have seen in our discussion of Penalty (pages 652-656) that its object is neither reformatory nor deterrent, but simply vindicatory; in [pg 1047] other words, that it primarily aims, not at the good of the offender, nor at the welfare of society, but at the vindication of law. We have also seen (pages 269, 291) that justice is not a form of benevolence, but is the expression and manifestation of God's holiness. Punishment, therefore, as the inevitable and constant reaction of that holiness against its moral opposite, cannot come to an end until guilt and sin come to an end.

The fundamental error of Universalism is its denial that penalty is vindicatory, and that justice is distinct from benevolence. See article on Universalism, in Johnson's Cyclopædia: “The punishment of the wicked, however severe or terrible it may be, is but a means to a beneficent end; not revengeful, but remedial; not for its own sake, but for the good of those who suffer its infliction.” With this agrees Rev. H. W. Beecher: “I believe that punishment exists, both here and hereafter; but it will not continue after it ceases to do good. With a God who could give pain for pain's sake, this world would go out like a candle.” But we reply that the doctrine of eternal punishment is not a doctrine of “pain for pain's sake,” but of pain for holiness' sake. Punishment could have no beneficial effect upon the universe, or even upon the offender, unless it were just and right in itself. And if just and right in itself, then the reason for its continuance lies, not in any benefit to the universe, or to the sufferer, to accrue therefrom.

F. L. Patton, in Brit. and For. Ev. Rev., Jan. 1878:126-139, on the Philosophy of Punishment—“If the Universalist's position were true, we should expect to find some manifestations of love and pity and sympathy in the infliction of the dreadful punishments of the future. We look in vain for this, however. We read of God's anger, of his judgments, of his fury, of his taking vengeance; but we get no hint, in any passage which describes the sufferings of the next world, that they are designed to work the redemption and recovery of the soul. If the punishments of the wicked were chastisements, we should expect to see some bright outlook in the Bible-picture of the place of doom. A gleam of light, one might suppose, might make its way from the celestial city to this dark abode. The sufferers would catch some sweet refrain of heavenly music which would be a promise and prophecy of a far-off but coming glory. But there is a finality about the Scripture statements as to the condition of the lost, which is simply terrible.”

The reason for punishment lies not in the benevolence, but in the holiness, of God. That holiness reveals itself in the moral constitution of the universe. It makes itself felt in conscience—imperfectly here, fully hereafter. The wrong merits punishment. The right binds, not because it is the expedient, but because it is the very nature of God. “But the great ethical significance of this word right will not be known,” (we quote again from Dr. Patton,) “its imperative claims, its sovereign behests, its holy and imperious sway over the moral creation will not be understood, until we witness, during the lapse of the judgment hours, the terrible retribution which measures the ill-desert of wrong.” When Dr. Johnson seemed overfearful as to his future, Boswell said to him: “Think of the mercy of your Savior.” “Sir,” replied Johnson, “my Savior has said that he will place some on his right hand, and some on his left.”

A Universalist during our Civil War announced his conversion to Calvinism, upon the ground that hell was a military necessity. “In Rom. 12:19, ‘vengeance,’ ἐκδίκησις, means primarily ‘vindication.’ God will show to the sinner and to the universe that the apparent prosperity of evil was a delusion and a snare” (Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 319 note). That strange book, Letters from Hell, shows how memory may increase our knowledge of past evil deeds, but may lose the knowledge of God's promises. Since we retain most perfectly that which has been the subject of most constant thought, retribution may come to us through the operation of the laws of our own nature.

Jackson, James Martineau, 193-195—“Plato holds that the wise transgressor will seek, not shun, his punishment. James Martineau painted a fearful picture of the possible lashing of conscience. He regarded suffering for sin, though dreadful, yet as altogether desirable, not to be asked reprieve from, but to be prayed for: ‘Smite, Lord; for thy mercy's sake, spare not!’ The soul denied such suffering is not favored, but defrauded. It learns the truth of its condition, and the truth and the right of the universe are vindicated.”The Connecticut preacher said: “My friends, some believe that all will be saved; but we hope for better things. Chaff and wheat are not to be together always. One goes to the garner, and the other to the furnace.”

[pg 1048]

Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 2:755—“Luxurious ages and luxurious men recalcitrate at hell, and ‘kick against the goad’ (Acts 26:14). No theological doctrine is more important than eternal retribution to those modern nations which, like England, Germany and the United States, are growing rapidly in riches, luxury and earthly power. Without it, they will infallibly go down in that vortex of sensuality and wickedness that swallowed up Babylon and Rome. The bestial and shameless vice of the dissolute rich that has recently been uncovered in the commercial metropolis of the world is a powerful argument for the necessity and reality of ‘the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone’ (Rev. 21:8).” The conviction that after death there must be punishment for sin has greatly modified the older Universalism. There is little modern talk of all men, righteous and wicked alike, entering heaven the moment this life is ended. A purgatorial state must intervene. E. G. Robinson: “Universalism results from an exaggerated idea of the atonement. There is no genuine Universalism in our day. Restorationism has taken its place.”

(b) But guilt, or ill-desert, is endless. However long the sinner may be punished, he never ceases to be ill-deserving. Justice, therefore, which gives to all according to their deserts, cannot cease to punish. Since the reason for punishment is endless, the punishment itself must be endless. Even past sins involve an endless guilt, to which endless punishment is simply the inevitable correlate.

For full statement of this argument that guilt, as never coming to an end, demands endless punishment, see Shedd, Doctrine of Endless Punishment, 118-163—“Suffering that is penal can never come to an end, because guilt is the reason for its infliction, and guilt once incurred, never ceases to be.... One sin makes guilt, and guilt makes hell.” Man does not punish endlessly, because he does not take account of God. “Human punishment is only approximate and imperfect, not absolute and perfect like the divine. It is not adjusted exactly and precisely to the whole guilt of the offence, but is more or less modified, first, by not considering its relation to God's honor and majesty; secondly, by human ignorance of inward motives; and thirdly, by social expediency.” But “hell is not a penitentiary.... The Lamb of God is also Lion of the tribe of Judah.... The human penalty that approaches nearest to the divine is capital punishment. This punishment has a kind of endlessness. Death is a finality. It forever separates the murderer from earthly society, even as future punishment separates forever from the society of God and heaven.” See Martineau, Types, 2:65-69.

The lapse of time does not convert guilt into innocence. The verdict “Guilty for ten days” was Hibernian. Guilt is indivisible and untransferable. The whole of it rests upon the criminal at every moment. Richelieu: “All places are temples, and all seasons summer, for justice.” George Eliot: “Conscience is harder than our enemies, knows more, accuses with more nicety.” Shedd: “Sin is the only perpetual motion that has ever been discovered. A slip in youth, committed in a moment, entails lifelong suffering. The punishment nature inflicts is infinitely longer than the time consumed in the violation of law, yet the punishment is the legitimate outgrowth of the offence.”

(c) Not only eternal guilt, but eternal sin, demands eternal punishment. So long as moral creatures are opposed to God, they deserve punishment. Since we cannot measure the power of the depraved will to resist God, we cannot deny the possibility of endless sinning. Sin tends evermore to reproduce itself. The Scriptures speak of an “eternal sin” (Mark 3:29). But it is just in God to visit endless sinning with endless punishment. Sin, moreover, is not only an act, but also a condition or state, of the soul; this state is impure and abnormal, involves misery; this misery, as appointed by God to vindicate law and holiness, is punishment; this punishment is the necessary manifestation of God's justice. Not the punishing, but the not-punishing, would impugn his justice; for if it is just to punish sin at all, it is just to punish it as long as it exists.

Mark 3:29—“whosoever shall blaspheme against the Holy Spirit hath never forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”; Rev. 22:11—“He that is unrighteous, let him do unrighteousness still; and he that is filthy, let him be made filthy still.” Calvin: “God has the best reason for punishing everlasting sin everlastingly.” [pg 1049]President Dwight: “Every sinner is condemned for his first sin, and for every sin that follows, though they continue forever.” What Martineau (Study, 2:106) says of this life, we may apply to the next: “Sin being there, it would be simply monstrous that there should be no suffering.”

But we must remember that men are finally condemned, not merely for sins, but for sin; they are punished, not simply for acts of disobedience, but for evil character. The judgment is essentially a remanding of men to their “own place” (Acts 1:25). The soul that is permanently unlike God cannot dwell with God. The consciences of the wicked will justify their doom, and they will themselves prefer hell to heaven. He who does not love God is at war with himself, as well as with God, and cannot be at peace. Even though there were no positive inflictions from God's hand, the impure soul that has banished itself from the presence of God and from the society of the holy has in its own evil conscience a source of torment.

And conscience gives us a pledge of the eternity of this suffering. Remorse has no tendency to exhaust itself. The memory of an evil deed grows not less but more keen with time, and self-reproach grows not less but more bitter. Ever renewed affirmation of its evil decision presents to the soul forever new occasion for conviction and shame. F. W. Robertson speaks of “the infinite maddening of remorse.” And Dr. Shedd, in the book above quoted, remarks: “Though the will to resist sin may die out of a man, the conscience to condemn it never can. This remains eternally. And when the process is complete; when the responsible creature, in the abuse of free agency, has perfected his ruin; when his will to good is all gone; there remain these two in his immortal spirit—sin and conscience, ‘brimstone and fire’ (Rev. 21:8).”