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Tous les ac.tres evempiaires originaux sont filmte en commenpant par la premidre page qui comporte une empreinte d'impression ou d'illustration et en teiminant par la dernlAre page qui comporte une tella empreinte. Un des symbolec suivants apparaTtra sur la dernidre image de cheque microfiche, selon ie cas: le symbols — ^ signifie "A SUIVRE", le symbols V signifie "FIN". Les cartes, planches, tableaux, etc.. peuvent Atre filmte a des taux de reduction diff Aronts. Lorsque le document est trop grand pour Atre reproduit en un seul clichA. il est film* A partir de I'angle supArieur gauche, de gauche <^ droite, et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'images nAcessaire. Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la mAthode. 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 iH^-i HUMAN DESTINY 4 HUMAN DESTINY, ROBERT ANDERSON, LL.U., Barristcr-at-Law. .^<^ -BY- <" % > ^ A :e^ ^ ^ (Corjonto, Canada : S. R. B R I G G S, TORONTO WTLLAKD TkAC;T DEl'OSrrOK\ MIJCCCI.XXXV I. 'fl^ff ''n4|l^,y,»»^— >< PREFACE. Most subjects appeal only to some special class, but the destiny of mankind is of interest to all. This consideration has been kept in view in framing the l.uowing chapters. In recent years the controversy to which the study of eschatology has given rise has become narrowed to certain definite issues. To state and discuss those issues fairly, simply, and briefly, is the purpose of these pages. 39. I^iNDEN Gardens, W. CONTENTS. CHArTBR I. THE QUESTION STATED II. "ETERNAL HOPE" . III. "SALVATOK MUNDI" IV. "THE RESTITUTION OF ALL THINGS" V. " THE WIDER HOPE " VI. WHAT IS LIFE ? . VII. "ETERNAL LIFE IN CHRIST" VIII. ANNIHILATION . IX. CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY X. THE QUESTION RESTATED . XI. THE QUESTION DISCUSSED XII. THE QUESTION ANSWERED PACE I 7 »7 34 49 63 n 99 113 147 Vlll CONTENTS. H \ APPENDIX, PART I. Acts iii. 21 I Corinthians xv. 22 Philippians ii. lO Revelation v. 13; xxi. 4, Romans v. Ephcsians i. 10 Colossians i. 20 John i. 29 I John ii. 2 . I Timothy ii. 4 ; iv. 10 Matthew v. 26 John iii. 17 ; xii. 32 . Conclusion 5 ; 't'ti'- 3 PACE 181 183 186 187 187 190 197 198 200 201 204 APPENDIX, PART II. Words used in the New Testament to express endless duration 207 Words rend. red iinniortalUy or innnortal . . . 215 Words rendered /le//, or which relate to the abode of the lost 216 Words rendered ('csfriictioii 218 Words rendered destroy .219 Words rendered torment or tormented .... 225 %. \ \ Chapter I. THE QUESTION STATED. According to the most careful estimate, th' population of the world exceeds one thousand four hundred millions. Not one- third of these are Christian even in name; and of this small minority how few there are whose lives give proof that they are travelling heavenw^ard ! And what is the destiny of all the rest? Any estimate of their number must be inaccurate and fanciful ; and accuracy, if attainable, would be prac- tically useless. As a matter of arithmetic, it is as easy to deal with millions as with tens; but when we come to realise that every unit is a human being, with a litde world of joys and sorro.vs all his own, and an unbounded capacity for happiness or ^i I II CM AN DESTINY. \ \ misery, the mind is utterly paralysed by the effort to realise the problem. And tht.se fourteen hundred millions are but a single wave of the great tide of human life that breaks, generation afte^* generation, upon the shore of the unknown world. What future then awaits these untold myriads of millions of mankind ? Most of us have been trained in the belief that their portion is an existence of endless, hopeless tormenc. But few there are, surely, who have carried this belief to middle age unchallenged. Sometimes it is the vnstness of the numbers whose fate is involved that startles us into scep- ticism. Sometimes it is the memory of friends now gone, who lived and died impenitent. As we think of an eternity in which they ** shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever," the mind grows weary and the heart grows sick, and we turn to ask ourselves, Is not God infinite in \o\it? Is not the great Atonement r0-~- THE (QUESTION STATED. infinite in value ? Is it credible then that such a future is to be the sequel to a brief and sorely-tempted life of sin ? Is it credible that for all eternity — that eternity in which the triumph of the Cross shall be complete, and God shall be all in all — there shall still remain an under-world of seething sin and misery and horror ? We can have no companionship with those who refuse to bring these questions to the test of Scripture. If such a hell be there revealed, faith iiiust assert its supre- macy, and all our difficulties, whether intellectual or moral, must be put aside unsolved. But what is, in fact, the voice of Scripture on the subject? The voice of the Church, it is true, has been heard in every age in support of the doctrine of an endless hell; and in some sense the testimony gains in weight from the fact that a minority L.'jr has been wanting to protest against the dogma, thus keeping it unceasingly upon tne open field of free discussion. it i I HUMAN DESTINY. This affords sufficient proof, no doubt, that Scripture seems to teach the doctrine here in question. But more than this must by no means be conceded. On such a subject no appeal to authority will avail to silence doubt. The minority may, after all, be right. What men call heresy proves some- times to be the truth of God. But how is such an inquiry to be entered on? It needs some scholarship and not a little patient study, and yet it is of interest to thousands who have neither learning nor leisure. Common folk whose opportunities and talents are but few must take advan- tage of the labours of others more favoured than themselves. And we turn to their writings with the honest wish to find there an escape from the teaching of our childhood. Some, indeed, have used language which betokens pleasure at the th ught of endless torment; but apart from the enthusiasm or the bitterness of contro- versy this would be impossible. Surely THE QUESTION STATED. there is no one unwilling to be convinced that hell itself shall share at last in the reconciliation God has wrought ; or, if the lost of earth are lost for ever, that in the infinite mercy of God their misery shall end with a last great death that shall put a term to their existence. But here are two alternatives which are wholly inconsistent, two paths which diverge at the very threshold of the inquiry. Of which shall we make choice ? If our instincts and prejudices are in the least to guide us, none will hesitate. We refuse to contemplate the annihilation of the lost save as an escape from something still more grievous. But what if Scripture warrants the belief that all the lost shall yet be saved, the banished ones brought home, and God's great prison closed for ever as the crowning triumph of redemp- tion ? This is indeed a hope that with eagerness we would struggle to accept. %ptcr II. "ETERNAL IIOrE." There Is one volume which cannot be ignored in any inquiry as to the future of the lost. It has made more stir in this controversy than any other publica- tion in recent years, both here and in America ; and according to a high authority, it ** may fairly be looked on as an epoch-making book, both in the wide circulation it has attained, and the discussion of which it has been the starting-point."* Its title, and a glance at its contents, will lead the inquirer to expect from its pages tlie light he is irf search of. No sooner does he enter on the study of it than he finds himself carried away by a rushing, bubbling * Dr. Plumptre, T/ie Spirits in Prison^ p. viii. HUMAN DESTINY. torrent of impassioned rhetoric, which leaves him at the last with a bewildered, vague impression that heaven is the final goal of all the human race, and that the conception of an endless hell is but a hateful dream. But though this is undoubtedly the lesson which superticial readers have generally extracted from the book, it is by no means the writer's own con- clusion. The following is his scheme : — '* There are, in the main " (he tells us), ''three classes of men: there are the saints ; there are the reprobates ; and there is that vast intermediate class lying between yet shading off by infinite gradations from these two ex- tremes." Of the saints he declines to speak. They are " few," he declares, '' and mostly poor." He does not sug- gest the possibility that he himself or those whom he addresses could be of the number, and his description of C\ \ ** ETERNAL HOPEr them would preclude their venturing to claim so high a place. ** But " (he pro- ceeds), " if they be unassailably secure, eternally happy, what of the other ex- treme ? what of the reprobates?" He indicates the slaves of brutal vice, the most depraved of our criminals, as falling within the category, and then proceeds : "If you ask me whether I must not believe in endless torments for these reprobates of earth, my answer is, Ay, for these, and for thee, and for me, too, unless we learn with all our hearts to love good, and not evil ; but whether God foi Christ's sake may not enable us to do this even beyond the grave, if we have failed to do so in this life, I cannot say." Other statements scattered through the volume throw further light on this. " I cannot preach the certainty of univer- salism," he declares. "God has given 14s no clear and decisive revelation on I If lO HUMAN DESTINY. the final condition of those who have died in sin." " My hope is that the vast majority, at any rate, of the lost, may at length be found." It thus ap- pears that this apostle of " the wider hope," who seemed to us to exhaust the thunders of his rhetoric in denouncing all who believe in an endless hell, himself believes in an endless hell. He thus admits that the conception of "end- less torments" is warranted by Scripture, and therefore compatible with infinite love. In a word, the chief difference in this respect between his own posi- tion and that of the so-called orthodox, is a mere question either of statistics or of words. Both he and they agree to believe in hell. Both he and they would adm.it that it is reserved for reprobates. But while they would give the term a wider scope, he would limit it to "a small but desperate minority." Might they not retort upon him that ''ETERNAL HOPE:' I I have : the lost, s ap- widcr 3t the incing hell, . He ** end- ipture, nfinite erence posi- lodox, itistics agree they for 1 give 1 limit ority. that a fuller and truer apprehension of the Gospel would teach him that, if indeed there be hope beyond the grave, Divine love will most surely reach forth to the very class which he has singled out as possible victims of the most hopeless doom. The wretched offspring of de- praved and vicious parents, this world has been no better than a hell to them from cradled infancy. If there be after- mercy for the pampered sinners of the synagogue, shall it be denied to these poor outcasts of humanity ? But "the saints" are "few, and mostly poor," and "the reprobates" are "a small and desperate minority." The "vast intermediate class" remains; the class, in fact, to which we all belong. What shall be said of these ? There are thousands among us who, we know, cannot be " saints " — for, as the writer tells us, there "is an Adam in them, and there is a Christ" — but whose lives, 12 HUMAV DESTINY. ''I ii though marred by blemishes akid sins, are still set heavenward. Though deeply conscious that they deserve only judg- ment, they have learned to believe that Christ died for their sins, and that trusting in Him, their portion shall be life, and not judgment. They believe that God justifies " freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus," and that being thus "justified by His blood," they "shall be saved from wrath through Him." They regard these great doctrines of the Reformation as Divine truths ; and, living in the faith of Christ, they hope at death to pass into His presence in blessedness and joy. If our author shares in this belief he carefully conceals it. He admits, no doubt, that earth's sinners can have no ^z^/e to God's heaven, save through Christ's redemption. But, according to his teaching, personal fitness for the scene does not depend on Christ at all^ ''ETERNAL HOPE:' 13 but must be won either by a life of saintship, or, for the vast majority who never could attain to saintship as here defined, and are " incapable of any other redemption," by being purified in " that Gehenna of aionian fire " beyond the grave. And if we ask whether these are " endless torments," we are answered Yes, " unless we learn with all our hearts to love good and not evil." This is our constant prayer and effort, but we know how utterly we fail of it ; and in terror we inquire " whether God for Christ's sake may not enable us to do this even beyond the grave, if we have failed to do so in this life." The author's answer is *' I cannot say." " I CANNOT SAY ! " We are to bury our dead in the sure and certain expecta- tion of *'£eonian fire," but with a dim and distant hope that in the " uncove- nanted mercy " of God they shall reach heaven at last ! ""\; i' 14 HUMAN DESTINY. 41 f V ' ^.i The writer's argument is wrapped in clouds of words, and his statements some- times seem contradictory, but on close analysis his scheme stands out consistent and clear. The future happiness of the "saints" is assured. They, however, are a minority so insignificant that for our present purpose we may ignore them. The rest of the departed (believers and unbelievers, regenerate and unregenerate alike, for these are distinctions of which the writer takes no account) are cast into Gehenna ; but the torments of Gehenna are purgatorial, and sooner or later " the vast majority " will pass to heaven purified in " seonian fire." And mark, the awful discipline is Ionian. Its duration will be measured, not as with us, by days or years, but by ages ; and in the case of "a desperate minority," ''eternal hope" means a hope that will last eternally, only because it will be eternally unsatisfied. And if any one object that any part of • • E TERN A L HOPE. ' ' 15 this scheme is oposed to Scripture, he will be told it is in accordance with "the broad unifying principles of Scripture," and that the /e^/er of the Scripture /:t7/s. That is to say, the effect of Holy Writ upon the minds of common men, who accept its statements in their plain and simple meaning, is absolutely mischievous and destructive.* Surely we may well * This is not the only feature of the writer's scheme which savours of Rome. He implicitly bases his statement on 2 Cor. iii. 6 ; but surely no one who is not too absorbed by the study of "the broad unifying principles of Scripture " to give his attention to a particular passage, can fail to see that the Apostle is there contrasting, not the letter of Scripture with the spirit of it, but the old covenant with the new, law with grace. The texts to which the writer refers in support of his position shall be considered in the sequel. It is enough to say here that most of them have no special bearing on the question in dispute (see p. 41, and App. I., post), and the rest are of no account for the author's purpose, unless they be construed to teach the universalism which he himself repudiates. As for his remarks on the word aiwi'tos, nothing further 51Vi! W. i6 HUMAN DESTINY. exclaim, Is this what English theology is coming to ? need be said than he hims'^lf has elsewhere said in answer to his critics : " Some of the greatest masters of Greek, both in classical times and among the fathers, saw quite clearly that though the word might connote endlessness, by being attributively added to endless things, it had in itself no such meaning." i '•• M 1 ! 1 1 1 Lll 1 chapter III. " SALVATOR MUNDI." The author referred to in the preceding chapter has publicly acknowledged that while preparing the sermons which form the basis of his book, he was " largely indebted" to an earlier work on this same subject. The volume alluded to is from the pen of a noted expositor of Scripture, and it has obtained such a wide circulation, and is held in such hiirh authority in the controversy, that it is impossible to pass it by unnoticed. "The Question Raised" is the title of the opening chapter. If, the writer asks. Tyre and Sidon and the cities of the plain would have repented had they seen the mighty works of Christ, are they never to see Him? Are th(iy to be [4 i8 HUMAN DESTINY, ^t ! \ \\ damned for not having seen Him ? Must there not be a "place of repent- ance " for such in the under-world ? Suffice it here to say that this question is altogether wide of the real issue in this controversy, which is not whether the destiny of all mankind is fixed at death, but whether all mankind shall yet be saved, including those who have re- jected the full revelation of the Gospel. The author then proceeds to fix the "limits of the argument." The appeal is to the Bible ; but before he will open the Bible he must insist that reason and conscience are also to have a voice. That is to say, the question is what the lawgiver has decreed against the criminal, and the criminal himself is practically to formulate the answer. The next point is that the Old Testament, the Book of Revelation, and the parables of our Lord, are all to be eliminated from the inquiry. No one has a right to insist • 1 :■&; ^^ *' SALVATOR MUNDir 19 on such conditions, but yet they might be accepted without endangering the issue, provided always, first, that it is only the symbolic visions of the Apo- calypse which are to be excluded ; and, secondly, that the Scriptures themselves, and not the critic, shall decide what is " parable " and what is not.* Next comes the inevitable protest against the use of the words "damna- tion," ''hell," and ''everlasting." Much of what is said about the first of these words is true, and would be helpful if written in any other connection. As for the second, he argues that whereas Hades and Gehenna both refer to the intermediate state, "our word 'hell' de- notes the final and everlasting torment of the wicked," and therefore it should be banished from our language altogether. * He has no warrant for including in the category the closing passage of Matt. xxv. and the latter half of Luke xvi - -^•— - -^ ^ ^^ A. JH MWI I'mmt ^ $i tm k '4 '. mm 20 HUMAN DESTINY. \ \y The fact is, that so far from this being the only meaning of "hell," it is a mean- ing which the word scarcely possesses at all in classical English. It is only they who believe that Gehenna indicates the final state who have any right to object that "hell" is a mistranslation. A word about this Gehenna. The writer tells us how the beautiful valley of Hinnom, under the south-western wall of Jerusalem, in time "became the common cesspool of the city, into which offal was cast, and the carcases of animals, and even the bodies of great criminals who had lived a life so vile as to be judged unworthy of decent burial. Worms preyed on their cor- rupting flesh, and fires were kept burning lest the pestilential infection should rise from the valley and float through the streets of Jerusalem." Such is the author's own description. And what is the moral he would S ALVA TOR MUNDl. 21 draw from it? That the ofifal and the carcases were thrown there to purify and fit them for some high and noble use ! It is amazing how any one can be so blind as not to see in this a figure the most graphic and terrible of utter and hopeless destruction. Two more chapters being thus ac- counted for, in the fifth and sixth the author takes up the words which are variously rendered in our English Bible to express infinite duration. "If (he pleads) these words really carried in themselves the sense of eternity or everlastingness, they could not possibly have been applied," as, in fact, they were applied, to what was material or transitory. Will the author specify any words which carry in themselves this meaning, or indeed any meaning whatsoever? What is true of most words is true in a special degree of these ; chameleon- 22 HUMAN DESTINY. like, they take a colour from what they touch, and their significance must in every case be sett^led by the subject- matter and the context. "Words are the counters of wise men, the money of fools : " these teachers one and all seem to take them for more than counters. Every tyro in philology is aware that it is the use of a word which decides its meaning ; and to be guided only by its derivation is as unwise as it would be to accept a man of sixty on a character given to him when a schoolboy. But yes, the author tells us there is a word ** which unquestionably means * for ever.' " This word, however, occurs only twice in the New Testament, and in one of these two passages, as he himself notices, it un- questionably does not mean " for ever." * •'' (liSios. Rom. ,i. 20, and Jude vi., where the " everlasting chains " are only " until the day of j'.dginent." '' SALVATOR MUNDir tj the of But the author's disquisition upon the "Greek word aion and its derivative aidnios, must by no means be dismissed thus Hghtly. With other writers such a discussion is mere skirmishing ; here it is vital to his scheme. These words, he declares, "so far from denoting either that which is above time, or that which will outlast time, are saturated through and through with the thought and element of time." Thij needs looking into. The heathen philosophers and poets had probably no thought of "Eternity" as distinguished from time.* Their conception was limited to the son which includes all time, but that these words were used to express that - conception is admitted. It is further admitted that the New Testament un- * I do not stop to inquire whether such a concep- tion be possible apart from revelation. The inquiry would be most appropriate if my subject were the Kantian philosophy and not the destiny of mankind. tttSSm asaBKUBiwpi HUMAN DESTINY. I I folds an "economy of times and seasons," many "ages'' 'heading up in one great " age " within which all the manifold purposes of God in relation to earth shall be fulfilled. Here again these same words are applicable and are used. But revelation has taught men a higher conception of eternity than the heathen ever grasped. How then could such a conception be expressed in the language of ancient Greece, a language formed upon and moulded by the thoughts of a heathen nation ? To invent a word is impossible, and yet words are but counters. Therefore when translating the sacred Hebrew into Greek the Rabbis could only take up some of the counters ready to their hand, and, as it were, restamp them to mark a higher value than they had formerly possessed. Thus, when they came on statements such as that of the 90th ''SALVATOR MUNDir 1 1 Psalm, ** From everlasting to everlast- ing, thou art God," they could but fall back on this very v/ord aion* Now the New Testament is written in the language of the Septuagint version of the Old ; not in the language of heathen Greece, but in that language as moulded and elevated by contact with the God-breathed Scriptures. Many a word had thus gained a fuller or a higher meaning than ordinarily pertained to it. The question here, therefore, is not what is the meaning of aion and aidnios in the classics, but what was the thought of the injpired writers in such passages as that above quoted. The ** seonian " scholarship of Christen- dom has recognised that they are used to express eternity in . the fullest sense, and this conclusion is wholly unaffected by ouv author's bold denial of it. * aTTo Tov aiSvos cws Tov aiajvos (tu tXy Psalm Ixxxix. (xc.) 2, (LXX), the Hebrew being Meoldm adohhn. 26 HUMAN DESTINY. l| \>ii But let us for the moment accept the author's theory, and see what it will lead to. Brushing aside all other con- siderations, let us come at once to the foundations of our faith, and see how they will bear this new "doctrine of the aeons." If it be true, the sacrifice of Calvary is no longer what we dreamed it was, the climax of a Divine purpose formed in a bygone eternity when the Word was alone with God, and the supreme and final display for all eternity to come of God's great love to man. The author will tell us that "the his- torical cross of Christ was but a mani- festation within the bounds of time and space of the eternal passion of the Father" — a passion which "must con- tinue to manifest itself in appropriate forms through all the ages and changes of time." And lest charity should put an innocent interpretation on this lan- guage, and thus destroy his argument, ** SAL VA TOR MUNDI. ' ' 27 he repeats his thought in still plainer words : "If God has once shown that He will make any sacrifice for the salva- tion of the guilty, must not that be always true of Him ? Must He not continue to manifest His blended severity and mercy in the ages to come?" As we hear the Cross of Christ thus lowered and degraded, we cannot but demand, What part then can it have in man's redemption? and as far as the author can enlighten us the answer must be, practically none. He shall speak for himself Here is his new Gospel of **the larger hope." " The Scriptures, then, have much to teach us of the future, though not much of the final, estate of men. And what they teach, in so far at least as we have been able to gather it up, comes to this. No man is wholly good, no man wholly bad. SfiU some men may fairly be calLd good on the whole, although much sin and imj^erfection still cleaves to them ; others may fairly be called bad on the whole, although there is still much in tiiem that is good, and still more which is capable of becoming good. When 28 HUMAN DESTINY. we die, we shall all receive the due recompense of our deeds, of all our deeds, whether they have been good or whether they have been bad. If by the grace of God we have been good on the whole, we may hope to rise into a large and happy spiritual kingdom, in which all that is pure and noble and kind in us will develop into new vigour and clothe itself with new beauty ; in which also we shall find the very discipline we need in order that we may be wholly purged from sin and imperfection ; in which we may undo much that we have done wrongly, do again and with perfect grace that which we have done imperfectly, become what we have wished and aimed to be, achieve what we have longed to achieve, attain the wisdom, the gifts and powers and graces to which we have aspired; in which, above all, we may be engaged in errands of usefulness and compassion, by which the purpose of the Divine love and grace will be fully accomplished. If we have been bad on the whole we may hope — and we ought to hope for it — to pasf into a painful discipline so keen and searching that we shall become conscious of our sins and feel that we are only receiving the due reward of them ; but since there has been some good in us, and this good is capable of being drawn out and disentangled from the evil which clouded and marred it, we may also hope, by the very disci- pline and torment of our spirits, to be led to repent- ance, and, through repentance, unto life; we may " SAL VA TOR MUNDir 29 hope that the disclosures of the spiritual world will take a spiritual effect upon us, gradually raising and renewing us till we too are prepared to enter the Paradise of God and behold the presence ot the Lord and the glory of His power : we may hope that our friends who have already been redeemed will pity us and minister to us, bringing us not simply a cup of cold water to cool our tongue, but words of instruction and life. And as for the great mass of our fellow-men, we may hope and believe that those who have had no chance of salvation here will have one there ; that those who have had a poor chance will get a better one ; that those who have had a good chance and lost it will get a new but a severer chance, and even as they suffer the inevitable results of their folly and sin will feel * the hands that reach through darkness, moulding men.' " This, on the ivhole^ I take to be the teaclihig of Scripture concerning the lot of men in the age to come, — a teaching which enables us to see * beneath the abyss of hell a bottomless abyss of love.' And if it clash with some dogmas that we have held and some interpretations which are familiar to us, it never- theless accords, not with * the mind of Christ ' only, but also with the dictates of Reason and Conscience, the voices of God within the soul. It presents no such sudden break in our life as, in the teeth of all probability, we have been wont to conceive; no heaven for which we feel that even the best of us must UWKMP ■» ^ssmmm 30 HUMAN DESTINY. ; I' ^^ unfit y no hell which is a monstrous offence to our sense of justice. It promises to every man the mercy of justice, of a due reward for all he has been and done ; and, while it impresses on us the utter hatefulness and misery of sin, itholds out to every one of us the prospect of being redeemed from all sin and unclean- ness by that just God Who is also a Saviour. Nor does it less accord with the demands of Science than with the dictates of Reason and the Moral Sense ; for it carries on the evolution of the human race through all the ages to come. And, therefore, let others think as they will, and cherish what trust they will : but as for us, with the Apostle of the Gentiles, our own Apostle, *we trust in the living God Who is the Saviour of all men.'""' -'= Throughout the quotation the italics are my own. I have reluctantly quoted at such length that the reader may be enabled to judge what this doctrine implies. To refute the errors, expressed and implied, of this book, would involve a treatise upon each one of the fundamental truths of Christianity. If any can read the above extract unshocked by the heathen darkness and contemptuous unbelief which characterise it, it is idle to discuss the matter with them within the limits of the present volume. If any one thinks this language too strong, let him turn back upon the quotation and seek to find where there is room for redemption in the writer's scheme. It is a deliberate and systematic denial of Christianity. I \ *' S ALVA TOR AIUNDir 3J This is not an isolated paragraph snatched from its context ; it is the author's recapitulation, the closing pas- sage of his book. We read it again and again, and study it with bewildered wonder. The question here is no longer of the doom of the lost, but of the truth of Christianity. Of ihe vital and charac- teristic truths of our religion there is not so much as one which it does not ignore or deny. The righteousness oi God, the grace of God, man's ruin, re- demption through the blood of Christ, the forgiveness of sins, the justification of the believer by grace through redemp- tion, eternal life as the free gift of God, the resurrection of the just in the image of the heavenly, and of the unjust to appear at the last great judgment — not a trace ol one of these foundation doctrines of our faith remains. And what is offered us instead.-* The weak- ness of an easy-going deity who will mmmommm I . Ji' I' 11^ 32 HUMAN DESTINY. Strike an average between good and evil, sending those who are "good on the whole " to a purgatorial paradise, and those who are " bad on the whole " to a purgatorial hell. A redemption " to be achieved in due time " for men with the aid of "the aeonial fire, which alone could burn out their sins," and "the seonial Spirit," who " will still be at work for the regeneration of the race." In- stead of eternal life, we have " the spiritual life distinctive of the Christian aeons"; and eternal punishment is but " the punishment which those inflict on themselves who adjudge themselves un- worthy of that life."* " This, on the whole," he takes to be " the teaching of Scripture concerning the lot of men in the age to come." "The teaching of Scripture!" It was not thus the Church's million martyrs * The words in inverted commas in the above paragraph are quoted from other parts of the book. hi /. :^' :*5v; t( SALVATOR MUNDir 33 • (.' read the mingled warnings and promises of God. Such views are utterly opposed to the great creeds of the Reformation and the older creeds of Christendom. The author's scheme renders due homage doubtless to that miserable bantling of modern science, evolution ; but whether it accords with "the dictates of reason*' we are not concerned to discuss. It is enough to be assured that it is not Christianity* — it is not even a bastard * Finding, perhaps, that even in this infidel age the unchristianity of his book was too pronounced, the author has pubHshed "a sequel," in which he attempts to restate the question "as a part of the Christian doctrine of atonement." But the " sequel " restates with increased definiteness his dogma of retribution, which denies **the Christian doctrine of atonement" altogether. It then offers as "a new argument" for his views, the theory that there is a "surface current" and a "deeper current" in Scripture, the former of which is false, as ex. gr. Israel's hope of the promised messianic kingdom ! Next comes a disquisition on i Cor. v. 5 (as proving that " destruction may be a condition of salvation "), ■9m 5 .1 1 I I , ' i 1 i Ml 34 HUMAN DESTINY. Judaism; it is the most utter heathenism, concealed by the thinnest possible veneer of Christian phraseology. and on demoniacal possession in connection there- with. As the result, the veneer is somewhat strengthened perhaps, but the heathenism remains. i< ' \ • ;f I !! ; (( C^apfar IV. THE RESTITUTION OF ALL THINGS." Every step in this inquiry is discouraging. But a good cause may suffer from injudi- cious advocacy, and it must not be assumed that the "wider hope" is false, because its latest champions have thus discredited it. With a sense of relief we turn to another book, which both these writers have singled out for special commenda- tion. Here at last we find ourselves in the calm atmosphere of reverent and patient study of the Scriptures, to the sacredness and authority of which the author gives a noble testimony. The volume might with fairness be adopted as a handbook in the controversy; but it may be better, while giving it the attention it so well deserves, to pass on -ji"i-. ^ut^rr-^^tir^ mmsmm RMR tmummif I 36 HUMAN DESTINY. to a discussion of the subject on a wider basis. The writer has the courage of his convictions. Taking his stand upon the great sacrifice of Calvary, he pro- claims the gospel of universal restora- tion. Not only fallen men, but fallen angels, shall share in it. Not even Satan shall be excluded. This is truly a glorious anticipation : this is indeed to ** think noble things of God.** Who is there who would not crave to find a warrant for accepting it as true ? Certain posits in the writer's argu- ment are peculiar, and claim special notice. " The letter of Scripture '* (he declares) "is a veil quite as much as a revelation, hiding while it reveals, and yet revealing while it hides ; presenting to the eye something very different from that which is within." This naturally prepares the reader to find meanings he never thought of assigned to various passages of Scripture. And as ''THE RESTITUTION OF ALL THING Sr 2>7 a signal instance of this, to which con- tinued emphasis is given throughout the volume, the author points to the law of the firstborn and the law of the firstfruits as affording *• the key to one part of the apparent contradiction between mercy * upon all ' and yet * the election ' of a * little hock.' " " The firstborn and the firstfruits are the ' few ' and * little flock ' ; but these, though first delivered from the curse, have a relation to the whole creation, which shall be saved in the appointed times by the first- born seed, that is by Christ and His body, through those appointed baptisms, whether of fire or water, which are required to bring about * the restitu- tion of all things.' " Passing by the extraordinary theory stated here and elsewhere in the book, that creation will be saved in part by the Church, this appeal to the types needs looking into. ^- T si'.-.riViiaa^'j; ^ ,^ i;»W; .j.jy,^,. _i 'm ■55C ne 9R 38 HUMAN DESTINY. It is admitted that the firstfruits included the harvest of which it was a party and the redemption of the firstborn secured that of the families to which they belonged. If then it can be proved from Scripture that the harvest of the saved shall include the whole Adamic race, and that "the elect" are "kins- men" to them, this type will serve to illustrate the truth. But the first- fruits had no relation save to the harvest of the favoured land, and the redemption of the firstborn was side by side with judgment on the Egyp- tians, the tribes of the wilderness and the nations of Canaan. Therefore while these types are a real difficulty in the way of those who would limit redemption to " the Church of the firstborn," they seem no less incon- sistent with the author's own position. If types can be thus used at all, they establish the views of those who hold " THE RESTITUTION OF ALL I'HINGSr 39 a place between these two extremes. The sheaf of the firstfruits, the wave- loaves of Pentecost, and the great festival of harvest will have their dis- pensational fulfilment in the ever-widen- ing circle of blessing upon earth ; but if the final harvest will include the lost of previous dispensations, this must be established from other scriptures, for there is nothing in the type to cor- respond with it. / But further : our author here avc. s that the whole creation shall be saved through the appointed baptisms, whether of fire or water. So elsewhere he says the fearful and unbelieving must reach the new creation through the lake of fire. This is no flourish of rhetoric, but the sober statement of a doctrine repeated again and again throughout the volume, and vital to the writer's argument, that death is the only way to life, judgment the T 40 HUMAN DESTINY. V\ only means of deliverance. Not, be it observed, the death of the Sin-beaier, the judgment which He bore ; but death and judgment absolutely. Death and judgment lead to life and deliver- ance, so that the sinner's doom becomes a pledge and means of his ultimate salvation. And this he assumes as an axiom of theology ! Let us notwith- standing, refusing to be prejudiced against a cause which seems to need such arguments, turn with open mind to pursue the inquiry. No candid person will dispute that the revelation of Divine love creates a presumption against the possibility of eternal punishment. On the other hand, it is still more dishonest to deny — and in fact it is admitted — that certain passages of Scripture support the doctrine. The fairest mode, therefore, in which ' this inquiry can possibly be entered on is to dismiss for the moment both r w ''THE RESTITUTION OF ALL TIIINGSr 41 the presumption against, and the texts in favour of, the "orthodox" belief, and to consider without any bias the passages which are used to prove universal reconciliation. If these should be found to teach that doctrine un- equivocally, the question is at an end, for in a seeming conflict of texts the presumption against endless misery must turn the scale. But more than this : even should these Scriptures seem of doubtful meaning, we shall be pre- pared to lean towards the broader interpretation, provided only that such a rendering will neither disturb founda- tion truths, nor land us in difficulties akin to those we seek escape from. We may at once dismiss from notice three classes of texts which are much in vogue with writers on this question. The first consists of passages which testify to the boundlessness of Divine mercy and love. It is impossible to IITIH TH 42 HUMAN DESTINY, estimate too highly the love and grace of God ; but it is the merest trifling to suppose that creatures like ourselves, with minds so limited in capacity, and moreover so warped by sin, can decide what measure of punishment is incon- sistent with infinite love.'^ Then again, we must entirely ignore the numberless predictions of a reign of righteousness and peace on earth in days to com* These, though freely used in this con- troversy, have no bearing on it what- ever, unless indeed it be to indicate that at the last great harvest-home, the proportion of the blessed to the lost of earth may prove, perchance, to be vastly greater than a narrow theology sup- * Do not such arguments as are here alluded to remind us of a king's baby children in the royal nursery discussing the fate of some notorious criminal, and deciding that they knew their father so well as to be assured he could not and would not sign a death-warrant? . __ .^ " THE HESTITUTIOX OF ALL TIl/XGSr 43 poses.* And this suggests the third class of texts above referred to — namely, those which speak in general terms of the triumphs of redemption. A noted example will be found in the great Eden promise that the Seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head. Does the truth of this rest on the statistics of the Judgment ')ay? In Christ's triumph over Satan does victory depend, as in some of the games of our child- hood, upon which side has the larger, following? The suspicion is irresistible that they who argue thus have but a poor appreciation of the moral glories of redemption. It will be found, however, that the special texts which are the very founda- tion of universalism really come within * Therefore, these passages tell against the view they are cited in support of, by weakening the popular argument based on the supposition that the saved will be an insignificant minority. ' m^mmmm. ■■■ 44 HUMAN DESTINY. :i f ■ 1 ■ i \ 1 \ \ ^ i ^ ? ill neither of these categories. But, it will be asked, does not Scripture speak of the restitution of all ? The answer is emphatically No. The passage which is thus perverted speaks of " the times of the restitution of all things," of which every prophet testified, from Moses to Malachi.* Was the burden of their prophecies the final state ? The answer shall be given by one of the authors already quoted : *' It is as certainly true as any such wide proposition can be, that the psalmists and prophets of old time never got more than momentary and partial glimpses of the life to come." Therefore, he argues, the Old Testament '' will be of no avail to us " in considering this question ; and yet he cites and relies upon a quotation from the New Testament which is ex- pressly declared to refer to the very ^ Acts jii. 21 — 24. p. 181 post. On this passage, see Appendix, " THE RESTITUTION OF ALL THINGS^ 45 prophecies that foretell a reign of righteousness cind peace on earth. But does not St. Paul speak of the reconciliation of all things ? Assuredly he does : not, however, as a hope to be realised in eternity to come, but as a present truth — a fact accomplished in the death of Christ.* In keeping with this, and as a part of it, God has revealed Himself as the Saviour of all men ; Christ has been manifested as *'a ransom for ally'* the propitiation for the whole world'' \ But will these teachers tell us how men can be reconciled who refuse the recon ciliation ; how sinners can be saved who reject the Saviour ; how the lost can be restored who trample under foot the propitiation ? It is these very truths which make the sinner's doom irreversible and hopeless. " See p. i<)$post. t On these and other passages of a like import j see Appendix, Part I., p. 181 j)ost. I 46 HUMAN DESTINY. \ It would be unpardonable to attempt to write upon this question without having formed a deliberate judgment upon every text of Scripture relied on as teaching universal restoration ; and the expression of such a judgment is offered in these pages. But here arises a formidable practical difficulty. If the progress of the argument is to depend on the reader's accepting in every in- stance the proposed exposition, further advance must be impossible. To impose such a condition would be unreasonable and unjust. All that is essential here is to show that the passages in ques- tion bear an explanation wholly different from that which these writers put upon them ; and this at least has been ac- complished. Indeed, it is sufficiently established by the admitted fact that such an explanation has been given by the overwhelming majority of theo- logians in every age. The advocates of ''THE RESTITUTION OF ALL THINGS^ 47 ST universalism have been content to plead that the surface teaching of these Scrip- tures is in favour of their views : they must go further, and oust the alternative meanings assigned to them by the scholarship of Christendom. But this they have never attempted to do. This position is not assumed to avoid the necessity of explaining the passages referred to. The reader will find in the Appendix a full exposition of every text on which the universalist relies to prove his doctrine. This exegesis is offered in acknowledgment of the obligation to explain these Scriptures, but it is dis- missed to the Appendix as a protest against the assumption that the accept- ance of it is vital to the argument. It is not vital. On the contrary, having thus cleared the ground, we shall now suppose for the sake of argument, — and it is only on that ground the admission can be m.ade, — that the meaning of 48 HUMAN DESTINY, these passages is doubtful, and proceed on this assumption to discuss the question in the light of great founda- tion truths. \\\ Cljapt^r V. "THE WIDER IIOrE." ■■■V-;:".i The volumes noticed in preceding pages have not been selected at random. Their respective authors are representative men, the acknowledged champions of "the wider hope"; and their books, when read together, may be taken as a full and exhaustive state- ment of the doctrine. The omissions therefore common to them all are ominously significant. Where, for ex- ample, do they offer us any reasonable explanation of such passages as the following? '*The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord 4 '< \(\ M: I I / 50 HUMAN DESTINY. Jesus Christ ; who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord."* How can such language be reconciled with the dogma of universal restoration ? Is it credible that any one holding that dogma could use such words Pf But there are other omissions of a still more serious kind, and, for our present purpose, far more embarrassing. We may agree to exclude from view any number of "isolated texts," but how can common ground be reached save in the acknowledgment of truths such as the righteousness of God, the grace of God, the "resurrection of the dead, both of the just and of the unjust," and the great judgment which is to close * 2 Thess. i. 7-9. t The author last referred to, with the candour which characterises him, says, "I confess I cannot perfectly explain all these texts." ,. , ■ mmmmmm " THE WIDER hope: 51 dour innot the history of Adam's race ?* It is on this ground alone we can consent to discuss the question. It will, therefore, be taken as admitted that the many die unsaved, and that these shall be raised from the dead, and shall stand before God in judg- ment, and be remitted to punish- ment for their sins. The question here is not of what may be called the " The respective schemes of the first two writers seem inconsistent with belief in the "resurrection of judgment." The third writer dismisses it thus : "Of the details of this resurrection, of the nature and state of the bodies of the judged, — if indeed bodies in tvhich there is any image of a man^ and therefore of God, then are given to them, — and of the scene of judgment, very little is said in Scripture." The meaning of this is clearly that the body given at the " resurrection of judgment " is merely a tem- porary clothing for the soul, and that the soul shall not be reunited to the heavenly and final body until after punishment shall have been en- dured. ^ ^smm wmmm «■■ ■■ \i ' 52 HUMAN DESTINY. providential consequences of sin, the results which in God's moral govern- ment follow the violation of His laws. Neither is it a question of corrective discipline to purge and train the penitent. There is no need of a Day of Judgment to apportion punishment in either of these senses : the one follows the sin by unchanging law ; the other belongs entirely to the Father's house. The final punishment of the lost will be the consequence of a judicial sentence. Such punishment, therefore, must be the penalty due to their sins ; else it were unrighteous to impose it. If, then, the lost are ultimately to be saved, it must be either because they shall have satisfied the penalty; or else through redemption — that is, because Christ has borne that penalty for them* But if sinners can be saved by satisfying Divine justice in enduring the penalty ''THE WIDER hope: 53 ilty due to sin, Christ need not have died. If, on the other hand, the redeemed may yet be doomed, though ordained to eternal life in Christ, themselves to endure the penalty for sin, the foundations of our faith are destroyed. It is not, I repeat, the providential or disciplinary, but the penal consequences of sin, which follow the judgment. We can therefore understand how the sinner may escape his doom through his debt being paid vicariously, or we can (in theory, at all events) admit that he may be discharged on payment personally of " the uttermost farthing " ; but that the sinner should be made to pay a portion of his debt, and then released because some one else had paid the whole before he was remitted to punishment at all, — this is absolutely inconsistent with both righteousness and grace. But as the advocates of the ''larger ■ism 54 HUMAN DESTINY, I '! ii hope " seem to ignore the penal element in punishment, they would probably urge that this is satisfied by redemption, and that the sufferings of the lost will be essentially of a disciplinary kind. All who know much of the darker side of human nature would probably agree that the poetry indulged in about sinners being purified in aeonian fire would not bear translation into simple prose. The idea of reformation by punishment has been generally aban- doned by all who have had experience of criminals and crime. But passing that by, it may be answered, first, that such a view is incompatible with the language of Scripture. ''Wrath," "ven- geance," ''destruction" are not words that express parental chastisement. But as these writers must be supposed to have some reasonable explanation of such Scriptures, it may be answered, secondly, that if their doctrines be ''THE WIDER HOPE." 55 sound, it is in the intermediate state that suffering would produce these results ; and if a further non-penal "punishment" is to be intlicted after the resurrection and the judgment, this must be in order to coerce the sinner to submission. It might be asked, in passing, what value can possibly attach to a repentance wrung in this way from unwilling souls ? and, moreover, if hell and the lake of fire shall produce results so blessed, how can it be evil to warn men of the coming horrors ? If the reality shall be so beneficial, surely the fear of its terrors can work only good ; and the more appalling the description, the greater will be the effect produced. Thirdly, the question arises whether regeneration, and the need of it, have any place in the theology of the advo- cates of these doctrines. Divine ''chas- tening " may produce " the peaceable ■ «■ 56 HUMAN DESTINY. I fruit of righteousness " in those who are already "sons"; but to hold that punishment is necessary either as a preparation for, or a completion of, " the new birth," is to deny the plainest teaching of Scripture. Again, it may be asked still more definitely, what room is there in this scheme for the day of judgment ? The believer "cometh not into judgment,' just because, for him, the penalty of sin has been borne, the judicial question settled, in the deat^ of Christ ; and if this be true for all, the judgment of " the great assize " oecomes an ana- chronism and an impossibility.* ''' The language of John v. 24 is explicit. It is not that the believer "shall not come into condemnation" as the A. V. renders it, but that he ^^ Cometh not into judgment" (cis Kpiaiv ovk epxtrai). This statement must not be made to clash with Rom. xiv. 10, and 2 Cor. v. 10, which relate to the judgment of the saved. At the ''THE WIDER hope:' 57 This suggests another difficulty. The sceptic who demands, '* How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come ? " is branded as a fool. But is it folly to inquire, How shall the lost be translated, and with what body shall they come ? And let it be kept promi- nently in view that the resurrection precedes the judgment. They who have part in the " resurrection of life " shall bear " the image of the heavenly." *' When He shall appear we shall be resurrection the believer shall appear in " the image of the heavenly," — "we shall be like Him." That is to say, his destiny is not only fixed but declared at the resurrection. For him, therefore, the judgment will be on that basis : it will be a matter of reward or loss, not of life or death. As Heb. ix. 27, 28 teaches, the cross of Christ and His glorious advent are, for the believer, the correlatives of death and judgment. Matt. XXV. 31 — 46 describes a session of judgment for living nations on earth, and has no bearing on the special point here raised. ' ! ^1 '! I / 58 HUMAN DESTINY. like Him," is the amazing statement of the Scripture. But in contrast with the "resurrection of Hfe" there is also the "resurrection of judgment." Why then call up the evil body at all, unless it be the final condition of the lost? It is net the body that repents, or believes, or turns to God ; and, as already urged, if torment could be remedial, it is in the intermediate state it would be effica- cious. The conclusion is inevitable that the body is reunited to the soul in order that the sinner may in the body in which he sinned endure the punishment his sins deserve. And this is the plain teaching of Scripture. But when we are asked to believe that, after the ages of his torment shall have passed, the sinner will be translated in a new and heavenly body,* to share the peace and blessedness of I See note, p. 5 t ante. 1 ,' m THE WIDER HOPEr 59 the redeemed, we part company with Scripture altogether. It is not a question here of ** isolated texts/ but of the great foundation truths of Christianity. If these torments be necessary, where are the triumphs of redemption through the Cross } If unnecessary, what becomes of the love of God ? If sinners can reach heaven through the lake of fire, redemp- tion is but "a short cut" to the same goal to which the broad way ultimately leads. Christ need not have died, or, at all events, far too much has been said about His death. Will they who thus reach heaven through '^aeonian torments" have much appreciation of the brief agonies of Calvary?* * I have already shown that of the books quoted stipra two practically ignore redemption. I desire to be perfectly fair, and I have searched the volume last noticed (which was the first written, and inspired the other two) to find a warrant for clearing the author from this reproach ; but I cannot. And if such an one as he is betrayed into such language l/jraiKii I 60 HUMAN DESTINY. To recapitulate. The question is not whether the destiny of all be fixed at death, but whether the judgment of the great day be irreversible and final. Not whether God be a Saviour to all men, as the following, it may be taken as certain that the views he advocates are inconsistent with Christian doctrine. "What does he say here" (he writes, quoting Rev. xxi. 5-8), " but that all things shall be made new, though in the way to this the fearful and unbelieving must pass the lake of fire? . . . The saints have died with Christy not only to the elements of this world, but also to sin, that is the dark spirit world. . . , The ungodly have not so died to sin. At the death of the body, therefore, and still more when they are raised to judgment, because their spirit yet lives, they are still within the limits of thai dark and fiery world, the life of which has been and is the life of their spirit. To get out of this world there is but one 7uay, death. Not the first, for that is passed, but the second death." The italics are my own. The extraordinary mysti- cism which pervades this makes it difficult to fix its meaning, but I am unable to understand it if it does not teach that the lake 0/ fire (the second death) is to the impenitent what the cross of Christ is to the believer. Lisui-a ■mi ''THE WIDER hope:' 6i but whether all men shall be saved, in- cluding those who reject the Saviour. Not whether Christ be a propitiation for the whole world, but whether the whole world shall sh^re the pardon, including those who despise the propitiation. There is not a single text of Scripture which unequivocally teaches that all men shall in fact be saved ; there are many which declare in the plainest terms that the judgment-doom of the lost is final The dogma of universalism depends solely \ on the assumption that the love of God is incompatible with the perdition of ungodly men — an assumption which may rest entirely on our ignorance, and wh ch, moreover, when worked out to its legi. mate results, undermines Christianity altogether It is blind folly to abandon the doctrine of eternal punishment because of difficulties which surround it, and then to take refuge in a belief which is beset with difficulties far more j 63 HUMAN DESTINY. hopeless. If, then, there be no other escape, we fall back unhesitatingly upon the faith of the Church in all ages. But another alternative remains : punishment may be final, and yet it may not be endless. fijjaphr VI. WHAT IS LIFE? To some the doctrine of endless punish- ment seems to present no difficulty. Others again are so decided in rejecting it that if only the dogma of universal restoration be discredited, they are pre- pared at once to adopt what seems the only alternative, the extermination of the wicked. For the one class these pages can have but a speculative in- terest. For the other, their practical importance ceases at the point already reached. But it is only the superficial who can ignore the difficulties that beset the problem which still claims discus- sion. And, moreover, the rejection of the ''wider hope," just because it narrows the inquiry, deepens immensely its im- wmm ■mp ' ). r 64 HUMAN DESTINY. portance and solemnity. When our escape from pressing difficulties depends upon a single door, more care is needed than when we supposed we had a choice. Two questions lie across the threshold of the inquiry : What is the meaning of the Greek word aidnios ? and, Does man by nature possess immortality? If, to borrow a military term, we can mask these difficulties, instead of delaying to settle them, we shall avoid an almost " interminable controversy. It is maintained by some that aidnios means age-long, and nothing else ; but these admit that all men have an age-long existence.* Others, again, contend that the word means everlasting ; but these insist that all men shall exist for ever. In either case, therefore, the solemn / * Whether this be natural to the race, or the result of redemption, makes no difference to my argument. WHA2 IS LIFE? 6^ language of Scripture, which declares eeonian life to be the peculiar blessing of the believer, loses all its significance, unless we understand the word to de- scribe the quality of the life, and not duration merely.* We must conclude, then, that in all such passages the emphasis is upon life, and it is here our attention should be concentrated. This brings in the second question. The word immortality occurs but thrice in the New Testament. In one of these passages St. Paul declares that God " only hath immortality " : in the other, the believer is twice described as a * I say advisedly, "not duration merely.'^ "Eternal life," Dr. Westcott writes, " is not an endless duration of being in time, but being of which time is not a measure." And again, it " is beyond the limitations of time ; it belongs to the being of God." {Epistles of St. John, pp. 205 and 207.) But surely endless duration is implied in this, though it is not the main element in it. I do not stop to discuss wherein the above statement differs from Mr. Maurice's view. 66 HUMAN DESTINY. mortal who is destined to ^' put on im- mortality."* It certainly seems strange, therefore, that any who profess to follow Holy Writ should contend for the ex- pression "the immortality of the soul"; more especially as man's spiritual con- dition by nature is described as death and not life? What then is life? i Here science can tell us nothing. If we seek the origin of life. Reason answers in one word, God. Let the existence of life be taken for granted, and then, no doubt, evolution will offer to account for all the varied forms of life in the world. f But until science * The passages in which St. Paul uses aBavaa-ia are i Cor. xv. 53, 54, and i Tim. vi. 16. *K(^6apcria {incorruption) is rendered "immortality" in Rom. ii. 7 and 2 Tim. i. 10. It occurs also in i Cor. XV. 42, 50, 53 and 54 ; Eph. vi. 24, and Titus ii. 7 (sincerity). t "Of the causes which have led to the origi- nation of living matter, then, it may be said that we know absolutely nothing. But postulating the is WHAT IS LIFE,' 67 can get rid of God, the theory is un- necessary, and therefore unphilosophical. It is the old question, Does the hen come from the ^gg, or the egg from the hen ? If science could account for the eggy it would be entitled 10 put that first. But as we are shut up to believe in a Creator, it is more reason- able, and therefore more philosophical, to assume that He created the hen. This, of course, is apart from Revela- tion, which, for the Christian, puts the question at rest for ever. existence of living matter endowed with that power of hereditary transmission, and with that tendency to vary which is found in all such matter, Mr. Darwin has shown good reasons for believing that the inter- action between living matter and surrounding con- ditions, which results in the survival of the fittest, is sufficient to account for the gradual evolution of plants and animals from their simplest to their most complicated forms." — Prof. Huxley, Encyclo- padia Britannica (9th ed.), " Biology," vol. iii., p. 687. **'i I 90 HUMAN DESTINY. The apostle desires to prove that Adam sinned as federal head of the race, involving his posterity in the con- sequences of his sin ; and to establish this, he appeals to the fact that death reigned even at a time when, and over persons in respect of whom, there was no question of actual transgression, death being admittedly one of the consequences of the Eden sin.* Further, we are told that the death with which Adam was threatened was also the curse of the law, " literal death," that is, implying destruction in the sense in which these writers use the word. To this it may be answered, first, that here again the argument moves in the usual vicious circle, that which is to be proved being taken for granted; and, * Some advocates of conditional immortality do not admit tiiis; but one must really draw a line somewhere as to turning aside to prove facts and truths accepted by all Christendom. ■> ETERNAL LIFE 1 ^ CHRISTr 91 secondly, that the statement confounds the curse with the consequences of the curse. The same word, " cursed," is applied to the law-breaker, to the serpent in Eden, and to the ground condemned to bring forth thorns and thistles.* In no case was ic the end of their existence, but the ban under which exist- ence was to continue. True it is the law-breaker was put to death, be^'^'^.se in the Commonwealth of Israel the sinner who came under the Divine cur=e was utterly outlawed. The death was inflicted by man, and therefore the offender might escape it. In fact, during the apostacy of the nation escape was the almost universal rule ; but the Divine curse upon the law-breaker was none the less certain and inexorable. One point more remains, and it is * Gen. iii. 14, 17; Deut. xxvii. 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, etc. The same word ah-rar is used in all these passages. t 1 jl, I- J ft,'! [' I li \ ' I , 0^ 92 HUMAN DESTINY. W incomparably the most important. What- ever be the death which is the penalty of sin, that death was endured by Christ. This at least is a statement which none will gainsay. If then death be ''the destruction " (that is, the extinctioii) '' of the life of humanity," " death for ever^ dissolution without hope of the resurrec- tion," did this death befall the blessed Lord ? One might have supposed that the mere statement of the question would have been enough ; but it would seem that the advocate of " conditional immortality " is prepared to defend his position no matter what the cost. He not only meets the question, but answers it as follows, by an uncompromising affirmative : *' When Christ died, He was, as a 7nan, destroyed." "When the curse had taken effect upon the manhood " — of Jesus — " it was still open to the Divine Inhabitant, absorbing the Spirit into His own essence, to restore the ' destroyed temple ' ''ETERNAL LIFE IN CHRISXr 93 from its ruins, and taking possession of it in virtue of His Divinity (not legally, as a man), to raise it up on the third day." Or, still more plainly in borrowed words which the author adopts, "It was the life of man, — a life common to Him with those He died to redeem, that expired on the tree : but the life He now enjoys is the life of God. Of justice He takes back no part of the penalty He had paid. It is to the power of His eternal Godhead alone that He owes His re- surrection from the dead." Hitherto this argument has been con- ducted with calmness, but at this point the Christian may well exclaim, " With such a theme 'twere treason to be calm." What is the cost at which the advo- cates of *' conditional immortality " here defend their position ? First, as to their own consistency. They begin by insisting that the body is so essentially the fuauy __ 94 HUMAN DESTINY. \ I i\ /t that when the human organism is dissolved the man is no more ; * but when driven to it by the exigencies of an argument based on error, and marked throughout by fallacy, they end by • assuming that the body is no part of the man at all, so that when the blessed Lord gave up His human soul He perfectly satisfied the death which claimed the 7nan as its due. We are told that " if Jesus had been the Son of David only. He could not legally have risen from the dead." But why not .•* If the resurrection was merely a transcendental trick, what did it matter whether the corpie v/hich lay in Joseph's tomb had formerly been animated by Divine life or not ? The human life had been "destroyed," and all claims of * According to the author already quoted, " Both the law and the Gospel deal with man as an integer, consisting of body and soul. The death hicurred by sin was the destruction of this complex humanity,'^ '' ETERNAL LIFE IN CHRIST: 95 r law having thus been met, God could of course reanimate that body. On this theory, indeed, what need was there for redemption at all ? By a like piece of chicanery he who had the power of death might have been cheated of his due in every child of Adam.* But the question is not whether the Lord could have been raised from the dead had He been only the Son of David. The real question is, whether, in fact, He was raised from the dead only as Son of God. Perchance that strange admonition to Timothy had refer- ence to some such heresy as this, even in the infant Church, " Remember that * This same writer avers that the survival of the soul at death is to establish continuity of personality for judgment. " If no spirit survived, it might be truly said that a wholly neiv being was then created to suffer for the offences of another long passed away." So we say if the Man Christ Jesus did not rise from the dead a wholly new being was called to life at the resurrection. • ^ ' r 96 HUMAN DESTINY. /; » Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel."* The wh^ie argument of the apostle in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians is based upon the fact that Christ was raised from the dead as man. The words am, "Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead." Therefore it is that in His resurrection He '* became the firstfruits of them that slept." The firstfruits must of necessity be a part of the harvest ; and such was indeed ** the last Adam^' " the second many the Lord from heaven." Christianity is based upon the very truth which is here denied. Paradise regained is a poet's dream, but it has no place in the theology of the New Testament. The scheme of redemption is not to restore the first Adam to the place he lost by sin, as federal head " ^ 2 Tim. ii. 8. "mam " ETERNAL LIFE IN CHRIST: 97 of the old creation ; but, closing his history for ever in the Cross of Calvary, to unite the redeemed of the fallen race under the Second Adam as federal head of the new creation. The one Media- tor is THE MAN Christ Jesus."* It is as Son of Man He took His place at the right hand of God.f "When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit .upon the throne of His glory." J It is ** because He is the Son of Man'' that the Father "has given Him authority to execute judgment." § " I Tim. ii. 5. t Acts vii. 56. X Matt. XXV. 31. § John V. 27. if f €^Kyitx VIII. ANNIHILATION. The natural immortality of man, we are told, is a theory of heathen philo- sophers, engrafted upon Christianity in post-apostolic days. Man is a dying creature, destined by the operation of natural laws to pass out of existence unless he receive eternal life in Christ. It is admitted, however, that the lost shall be raised from the dead by Divine power in order that in the body they may be judged and punished for their sins. In other words, creatures v/ho are doomed by the law of their nature to decay and pass out of being altogether, are not only kept in exist- ence, but recalled to active life in TOO HUMAN DESTINY. resurrection, solely in order that increased capacities for enduring torment may be added to the horrors of their doom. Not even the coarse hell of mediseval ignorance is more revolting, more incredible than this ; and yet these views are held and taught on the plea that God is a God of love ! But Scripture plainly teaches that the destruction of the wicked — whatever destruction means — is the result, not of natural law, but of Divine judgment. When we read that '' the wages of sin is death," we are to understand extinction of being. Now we know as a matter of experience and of fact that death often entails much antecedent suffering ; but on the same ground we know also that this is purely accidental. Death does not necessarily involve any suffering whatever. If human law sentences a criminal to imprisonment, it consigns him to misery in many ■Mi ANNIHILA TION. lOI forms ; but if it decrees his death, it scrupulously guards him from every kind of suffering save the necessary rigour of confinement. Nor is it that he is dismissed to receive his punishment from God. Our English Viw at least is not so cruel. The conventional language of the death sentence concludes with a prayer for Divine mercy on the condemned, and a minister of religion is appointed to attend him in his cell and on the scaffold. The last words that fall upon his ears are words that tell of pardon and a life beyond the grave. If capital punishment were abolished the public would probably insist on the free use of the lash for grave and brutal crimes ; but how degraded would be the community which would decree a criminal's death, and yet torture him up to the very hour of his execution ! * '■' Some of the Italian tyrants in tiie Middle Ages did this very thing; and a reverend opponent |- msmm I02 HUMAN DESTINY. I, Now let us test the argument in the light of the inevitable admissions. If what we call death were the end of the sinner, all would be plain. But it is admitted that the lost dead are to be raised for judgment, and in their bodies subjected to punitive suffering for their sins ; and that this suffering, though limited in duration, shall yet be terrible. Is not this open to every objection on the ground of reason and sentiment which is urged against the "orthodox faith"? If there be some awful necessity, unexplained to us, why the sinner should continue to exist, we can understand that there may be a like necessity for future punishment ; but if of eternal punishment has had the temerity to compare God to such a monster, if there be an endless hell. If the author were not given up to a reprobate mind, he would have seen as he wrote the blasphemy that a thirty days' hell followed by extinction would more fully satisfy the analogy. His argument is against any hell whatever. - ANNIHILATION. 103 there be no such necessity, what is it but torturing helpless, hopeless victims who might at once be put out of misery, for extinction is their doom? The author already quoted as the champion of conditional immortality is far too keen a reasoner to overlook this difficulty. He has met it boldly by " disclaiming the belief that ages of suffering are to precede that destruction," thus parting company with Scripture altogether. In his view the sufferings of the lost in the final state will be merely such as shall necessarily accompany their "death"; and we must read this statement in the light of the undoubted fact that no suffering whatever is involved in death when inflicted without cruelty. Is there then to be no suffering for sin ? In reply the author will tell us that " the spirit may suffer in Hades for the sins of a lifetime." But what then becomes of the statement that at \ !>• !■ t <.! 104 HUMAN DESTINY. death the man is no more ? If " the spirit " carries with it the moral guilt of life's sins and a capacity of suffering for those sins, this is the personality, this is " the man." Moreover, according to this theory, the amount of a sinners punishment depends, not on the cha- racter of his sin, but on the epoch at which he lived on earth. In the antediluvian sinner it is measured by thousands of years : whereas for the awful Christ-rejecter of the last days it will be briefer than for all the rest ; because Hades is to be cast into the lake of fire, and the lake of fire is absolute extinction of being. But the suffering in Hades precedes the judgment. What room is there then for judgment at all ? The object of the day of judgment is to fix the guilt and apportion the punishment of each, and it becomes but an idle pageant if all alike are to be hurried to a swift and common ANNIHILA TION. 105 doom. To answer that its purpose will be to separate the redeemed from the impenitent is to ignore some of the plainest teaching of Scrip^^ure. That divi- sion will be manifested in and by the resur- rection, for the redeemed shall be raised in " the image of the heavenly," and such are not to come into the judgment.* And what possible purpose can there be in this view for the resurrection of the lost ? We are asked to believe that God not only maintains them in existence by miraculous interference, but that He puts forth His mighty power to raise them from the dead, solely and altogether for a magnificent display of wrath in anni- hilating them. But apart from the essential incredi- bility of such a theory, we must reject it as opposed to the plain testimony of Scripture. We turn, therefore, to seek the explanation from another writer, whose i I * See p. 56 ante. / w 1; p 1^ f 1 06 HUMAN DESTINY, published sermons on this subject are held in high repute by all believers in conditional immortality. He will tell us that the doom of the impenitent "will no*- be a simple act of annihilation, but a process of destruction. The fire of God's wrath will not consume them at once, but they will be tormented in it day and night for the ages of ages that they have yet to live." " Many or few stripes will be inflicted, according to each one's deserts, while in every case it will end in the final loss of life as the neces- sary consequence of not being in Christ." In terms at least this is consistent with the language of Scripture, and therefore it claims consideration. Does not this suggest the inquiry how suicide is to be prevented in the lake of fire? God must put forth His miraculous power to keep in being the victims of His wrath, until the last of the "many or few stripes " which each one deserves A NNIIIILA TION. 107 shall have been inflicted ! Disguise it as we may, the fact is obvious that in this theory the annihilation of the lost is God's act of mercy to close their suffering. It is impious to suppose that their release could be delayed wantonly and cruelly. The delay, therefore, must be diie to the righteous necessity of exacting the full meed of punishment the sin of each deserves. Why then should a God " Who is willing that all men should be saved," not let the damned pass from the scene of torment to some place of rest, instead of putting forth His power to annihilate them ? Further, if annihilation be the penalty of sin, then, as already shown, Christ has not borne that penalty. If it be a term of suffering, from which annihilation gives release, redemption is seriously depreciated. This view is beset by difficulties akin to those which led us to abandon the "wider hope," and in i'i M "T (i ! 108 HUMAN DESTINY. addition to these it presents a difficulty of another and far graver kind. As the writer last quoted puts it, the punishment *• will be inflicted according to each one's deserts," the annihilation will be " the necessary consequence of not being in Christ." We are thus asked to believe in a God who puts forth His power solely to keep His creatures in existence until ** the uttermost farthing " of penalty has been exacted, and who then, when every question of righteous claim is settled, and love might pity and save, turns away to leave them to their fate. And this, too, on the plea that God is a God of love ! Either there exists a righteous necessity to punish sin, or there does not. If there be no such necessity, then all punitive suffering is inflicted wantonly and cruelly. If, on the other hand, sin must be punished, how and when is that punish- ment to cease.** The hell of the Bible is consistent with Divine love, but the ^/' ANNIHILA TION. 109 hell of the annihilationist is more horrible even than the conventional hell of popular theology. Is such a hell to make men righteous and holy — this awful pit of shrieking, cursing men, made desperate by despair, and maddened by the know- ledge that if God would only let them alone their torment would cease for ever ? These sins of the lake of fire, are they to go unpunished ? Does the quality of guilt depend on the atmosphere of earth, and not on the unchanging laws of God ? The only difference between the hell of the annihilationist and the coarse hell of mediaeval theologians con- sists in the duration of the sinner's misery. And yet, while we are told that reason and conscience and natural affection, and our apprehension of the character of God, revolt against the belief in eternal punishment, we are to be satisfied with belief in ages of torment for the sinner, albeit the only possible I ■ ' no HUMAN DESTINY, ■6 explanation of hell, consistently with Divine love, is no longer applicable. If there be some necessity of which we know nothing, why fallen beings should continue to exist, then we can under- stand the Devil's presence in Eden and the fact of an eternal hell ; but if the theories of conditional immortality be accepted, the continuance of evil in this world is no longer an intellectual diffi- culty only, but a moral difficulty of the gravest kind, and hell stands out as a hideous exhibition of wanton and re- morseless wrath. What then is the cost at which the theories of the annihilationist may be accepted as an article of the Christian faith ? First, we must assume that death is extinction of being, which the Scripture unequivocally teaches it is not. Next, we must believe that God's first solemn warning against sin was an idle threat, which He had no intention ANNIHILA TION. Ill of fulfilling ; and that the truest word spoken to Adam was that which, for six thousand years, men have called " the Devil's lie," ** Ye shall not surely die." More than this, we must recog- nise that the death of Christ was the destruction of Hit humanity, and His resurrection a piece of transcendental jugglery to conceal the Devil's triumph aiid deceive the saints of God, who for eighteen centuries have believed that the Blessed One Who wept at the grave of Lazarus, and sat travel-soiled and weary at Sychar's well, was upon the Father's throne as Man, whereas His manhood perished upon Calvary, and He is no longer Man but only God. And all this mingled folly and error must be accepted, forsooth, to screen the reputa- tion of Almighty God, now endangered by our belief in hell in the midst of nineteenth-century enlightenment ! '!. ! > ^^itx IX. CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. The ephemeral literature upon the sub- ject of conditional immortality gives prominence to statements of a kind which, though generally excluded from standard works, have no little influence with ordinary minds. It is urged, for example, that the judgment upon sin was the death of the sou/; and, it is added, the meaning of this can be realised by analogy, for just as the body is dis- solved, and ceases to exist as a body, so shall it be with the soul. But this is to allow ourselves to be misled by using words in a loose and popular sense, unwarranted by Holy Writ. Scripture never speaks of the death of the souL To quote in opposition to this ^' ..I':-: 8 » i /• I r 114 HUMAN DESTINY. the Statement " The soul that sinneth, it shall die," is to trade upon the lan- guage of our English Bible. The word in the original means merely the person, the individual ; the father is not to suffer for the son, nor the son for the father, but the person who sins, he shall die.* Neither does the Scripture speak of the death of the body. In our English version we read of " dead bodies," but not in the original. If our thought be of "natural death," the body comes into prominence; if of "spiritual death," the soul. But in either case it is the man who dies — not his body or his soul.f * See tho U3e of the same word in Lev. v. 2, 4, 15 : " If a soul touch," etc., " If a soul swear," etc., " If a soul commit a trespass." In Lev. vii. 20 we have "The soul that eateth;" and in xxi. 11 it is translated "body." t The word rendered " dead body '' in Rev. xi. 8, 9, is TTTw/Ao. James ii. 26 is the only seeming exception to the above statement. But the con- text shows that there the word dead is used in the s CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 115 It is urged again that just as a branch may continue to live for a time after it has been severed from the tree, so the sinner may exist for a tim.e apart from God ; but that when separated from Him Who is the fountain of Hfe, he must, sooner or later, fade out of exist- ence. Now, this of course is a mere theory, without the slightest pretence of proof Moreover, it abandons the rival theory that sinners are miraculously pre- served in existence with a view to punishment ; and it assumes that their ulti- mate annihilation will be the result of natural law, and not of a Divine judgment. same secondary or figurative sense as when we speak of a Ftone or a log being dead. And no English writer would use our word kill as it is used in Matt. X. 28. The passage is explained by the elasticity which the word aTroKTeiVw possesses. Ac- cording to Liddell and Scott it means, first, to kill, slay ; secondly, to condemn to death ; thirdly, to weary to death, to torment. (And see note, p. 128 post. mmmummmfm mmm V, W, 9 V; V ' /• !' : »■ 11 [] 1 ii ^ f ''■■ liL. Ii6 HUMAN DESTINY. If this theory be true, there must, of course, be an average length of life for the soul as for the body. What the period is we cannot tell, but it must be more than six thousand years, for we know that all who have ever lived on earth shall continue in existence till the judg- ment. But when the judgment comes, the antediluvian dead will of course be comparatively near the end of their sorrow, in contrast with the lost of the latter days. The amount of punishment to be suffered by the sinner will thus depend, not on the guilt of his sin, but on the age of his soul at the time of the judgment. It is not strange that this view of the matter is ignored by writers of repute. It would probably be found, however, that the large majority of those who refuse to believe in what they call " eternal evil " ignore all such arguments and theories as have been here discussed. CONDITIONAT IMMORTALITY. 117 They rest their convictions altogether on the indisputable fact that the Creator is able to put an end to the existence of His creatures. And such, they tell us, Scripture explicitly declares to be His purpose ; for ** Destruction," " Perdi- tion," " The lake of fire," and other words of kindred import, plainly teach the annihilation of the ungodly. This belief deserves, and shall receive, the fullest consideration. But let it be distinctly kept in view that this implies what is called the " natural immortality " of man. If by the law of his being he be destined to cease to exist, or if the death-penalty of sin imply extinction of being, the ques- tion here proposed cannot arise. They who raise it assume that but for the Divine interference in judgment man's existence would continue indefinitely ; and they undertake to prove unequivo- cally from Scripture that the second ■r^c=n fv !' I I i8 HUMAN DESTINY. death, unlike the first, will put an end to him altogether. According to them the element of the miraculous is not in the preservation of the sinner for the judgment, but in his annihilation in and by the judgment. They thus entirely abandon the position taken up by the leading advocates of conditional immortality, and there must be no attempt to fall back on that position, if Scripture, when appealed to, should refuse the testimony they claim from it. The single issue now remaining is whether the Bible teaches the extermination of the wicked ; and the onus of proof rests entirely v/ith those who maintain that it does. Man exists ; and as no crisis or change of which we have any knowledge puts an end to that existence, * we must assume that it will continue indefinitely, unless the contrary be proved. But, we 5 i > ■ * Here I am dealing only with those who accept revelation. -u„^ CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 119 are assured, the Scriptures expressly teach that the wicked shall be put out of existence altogether. This is what has to be proved, and now we turn to examine the proofs. That it is to the New Testament Scrip- tures we must look for a decision upon this question is a statement so obvious that most people will deem it superfluous. We are told, however, that ** in the Hebrew tongue there are no less than fifty roots, m.eaning, habitually or occa- sionally, to destroy ; most of which are used in the Old Testament to specify the ultimate doom of the wicked." A dicttmt of this kind is well fitted to overwhelm ordinary readers, who would never dream that an author of repute, writing on such solemn subjects, could make a statement wholly unfounded. But will the reader take uj< his Bible, and with the aid of a concordance seek out in the Hebrew Scriptures the more than fifty passages ~^ "^liFwiiiit *-■ «•«■ t I i 1 20 HUMAN DESTINY. in which ^^ the ultimate doom of the wicked" is "specified." His labours will lead to a startling result. Can he find ten such passages ? Can he find FIVE.'* If his list should be a much longer one than is here anticipated, a glance at a Hebrew concordance will satisfy him that the same words which, as he supposes, describe eternal judgment, are elsewhere used of death, or of some other temporal judgment.* And he will find further that the extremely rare passages (such as Daniel xii. 2), which admittedly relate to the final state, are precisely those which the advocates of eternal punishment lay stress upon to prove their doctrine. Daniel's prophecy above referred to is * Any one who has access to a good hbrary will find in the "Englishman's Hebrew Concord- ance" all the materials necessary to enable him to settle this question for himself. CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. I 21 the only passage in the Old Testament which plainly announces the resurrection of the wicked. And when in the Episde of Jude the inspired writer seeks a prophecy of the great judgment to come, he finds it in the words of Enoch, outside the canon altogether. Account for it as we may, the silence of the Old Testament Scriptures as to the final state is one of the most striking features of the revelation. It is not merely *' life and immortality " which have been brought to light by the gospel ; it is there also that the dark alternative has been plainly revealed. But even those who would reject the position here assumed as regards the scope of the Old Testament, would freely admit that the ultimate appeal must be to the New. An admission which fairness demands may somewhat clear the ground. The language of the New Testament describing F 1', l\, ( i 122 HUMAN DESTINY. the destruttion of the lost is perfectly con- sistent with the doctrine of conditional immortality. And further, this is all that needs to be proved by authors such as those which have here been quoted, assuming always the validity and success of the arguments on which their position rests. But that is not the question here. These arguments have b^en examined, and they have been found, not only fallacious, but destructive of " the faith once de- livered." The question now is, whether those who reject these reasonings can apart from them altogether find proof in the Scripture hat the doom of the wicked is annihilation. With some, this question will resolve itself into an inquiry whether the word destruction correctly expresses the Greek original in the passages where it is used. But this will not bear investigation. Extinction or annihilation is not i ' CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 123 necessarily implied in the word at all. So far from this being its primary meaning, it is a very remote signification. In the classical use of the word, to destroy a thing is to do it irreparable injury, to unfit it permanently for the purpose for which it was intended. Its meaning as used of a person may be illustrated by a quotation which ought to be familiar to all who speak the English tongue — " No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold 01 liberties or free customs, or be outlawed or exiled or any other- wise destroyed, but by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." According to Magna Charta, then, to drive a man from his home, to deprive him of his property, or to shut him up in prison, is to destroy him.^ The '•' It is an interesting fact that among the peasantry of the west and south of Ireland, with whom English is an acquired language, this is the I BS I ') J 124 HUMAN DESTINY. f| ii ! m thought that we would convey by ruin our ancestors expressed by destroy. The word, therefore, may be fitly used to describe the doom of the wicked, what- ever that doom may be. But the meaning of a word depends upon the use of it. Judged by this test, what is the force of the expression in the New Testament ? There are ten words rendered destroy in the Authorised Version, and three of these occur also in the substantive form as destruction. A full list of these words will be found in the Appendix ; but there are only three of them which need be noticed here, as these alone are used to describe the final state of the lost. We read in 2 Thessalonians ii. 8, that at His coming the Lord shall destroy common meaning of destroy. Any one who is evicted, or robbed, or ill-treated, is said to be " destroyed." CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 1 25 the Lawless One, the Antichrist. The word here used (katargeo) occurs again in Hebrews ii. 14 of the destruction of the Devil at and by the death of Christ. It means to render power- less, or useless, or inoperative (RomJ iii. 3, 31, ex. gr.), and hence "to do away," or ''destroy," in the Magna Charta sense. The same word is used of death in i Corinthians xv. 26 and 2 Timothy i. 10. For the believer, death was " destroyed " de jure at the cross, and will be ** abolished" de facto in the glory. The thought of annihilation cannot be imported into this word at all. The next word, a very much stronger term for "destruction," is used for *' natural death " in the only passage where it occurs as a verb.* Four times only it is used as a noun {plethros), * Lest He that destroyed (6 oXo^pcuW) the firstborn should touch them" (Feb. xi. 28). Il( I 126 HUMAN DESTINY, and in each of these the word ruin would exactly convey the thought intended. In i Corinthians v. 5, a certain person is delivered to Satan ** for the destruction of the flesh," albeit we find in 2 Corinthians ii. 6 that this same person, having profited by his ", punishment," was restored to the fellowship of the Church. In i Thessa- lonians v. 3 we are told that at the advent of Christ "sudden destruction' shall come upon the ungodly. Is this annihilation ? By no means, for, as Scripture elsewhere will tell us, they shall be " reserved to the day of judg- ment to be punished." The same remark applies to the statement in 2 Thessalonians i. 9. And, moreover, it is " everlasting destruction from the face of the Lord : " it is banishment and not annihilation which characterises the ruin. In the last remaining passage where this word occurs, St. Paul de- CONDITIONA L IMMORIA LITY. 1 2 7 clares that the lusts begotten of money- worship ** drown men in destruction and perdition." Is this annihilation? And yet the Greek language contains no stronger terms to express the idea.''^ The word rendered "perdition" in the verse just quoted is the last which * The champion of Conditional Immortality remarks on i Tim. vi. 9 : "As the Greek language does not afford two stronger expressions than these for denoting the idea of literal death and extinction of being, it requires a large amount of evidence to prove that they were intended by St. Paul to convey the idea of indestructible existence in tor- ment." No one whose mind was not thoroughly warped by dwelling on this controversy would imagine for a moment that the Apostle here in- tended to convey either " extinction of being " or "indestructible existence in torment." But the admission above made is valuable. These are the strongest expressions possible to express annihilation. That the first does not express that thought is certain, for if it did the addition of the second would be mere verbiage. The only question, therefore, is whether drrwAcia implies extinction. - ^ P i iTt l-^ i t 1, I. 1 1 1 1 1.' 1 1 7 \ - i * ■ ! ! I 128 HUMAN- DESTINY. claims mention here. It is perhaps the most important of all. The noun {apoleid) occurs twenty times, the verb (appollwni) ninety-two times, in the New Testament. A reference to the Con- cordance will show that it is sometimes used as a synonym for death in the ordinary sense, and in several passages it describes the present state of the im- penitent. Christ came " to save that which was lost.'' In the parables, the sheep was lost, the piece of silver was lost, the prodigal son was lost. So in every passage where the subject or the context enables us to fix the meaning with certainty, the word means a condition of existence, not a ceasing to exist.* ''• See App., p. 219 post. Matt. x. 28 demands special notice on account of the use which has been made of it : " Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul \ but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." Assume CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 129 He who gives a cup of cold water to a disciple "shall in no wise lose his reward." Christ was "not sent but unto the lost sheep of the House of Israel." If a man put new wine into old bottles "the bottles will be marred^ " The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy y In the Appendix* will be found a list in- cluding every passage where this word occurs, and the reader can judge for himself whether in its use in Scripture it means annihilation. And let it not that "death" and "destruction" imply extinc- tion, and this settles the whole question. But if, refusing to assume anything of the sort, we analyse the words here used and consider what they were intended to convey, the thought we shall take in is this : man's power can reach the body only, not the soul ; but God can destroy both. If we want to know what "destroy" means, we must inquire how the Lord used the word else- where, and this is precisely what I am now investigating. * P. z\%post. ' ■it ! y ,i II f (I 130 HUMAN DESTINY. \ . be forgotten that if the words here noticed fail to convey that idea, the Greek language has none other to express it.* . v But the lake of fire~is not that anni- hilation ? How can any creature live in the midst of fire ? The question need not be discussed ; neither need we consider whether fire be here a figure, as elsewhere in Scripture, to ex- press fierce trouble and judgment. These are speculative inquiries. The practical question which concerns us is settled * Of the Antichrist it is written, "whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of His mouth" (2 Thess. ii. 8). The meaning of the word may be gathered from the only other passage where St. Paul uses it: "If ye bite and devour one another take heed that ye be not consumed one of another " (Gal. V. 15). This word dvaXio-Kco occurs only once again — viz., in Luke ix. 54. Devour y in Heb. x. 27, is the common word for eating, here used in a figurative sense. In I Peter v. 8, a like use is made of the word generally rendered tc stmllow. CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. 131 beyond dispute by the plain testimony of Scripture. In the judgment scene of the 25 th chapter of Matthew the " eternal fire " is expressly called " eter- nal punishment"; and though the word rendered " punishment " be denied its classical meaning of corrective discipline, it cannot possibly signify annihilation.* The Lord's words in the narrative of Lazarus and Dives are plainer still. The sinner is there represented as in a condition of conscious and active existence in hell.f And still more definite is the language of the very Scripture where the lake of fire * Matt. XXV. 41 and 46. This word KoXao-is, used in V. 46, occurs again only in i John iv. 18; "fear hath torments The kindred verb occurs Acts iv. 2 1 and 2 Peter ii. 9, only. It means primarily to prune (trees), to curtail, or check ; and then to chastise or punish. Dr. Trench {Synonyms) denies to it in Scrip- ture the special sense it bears in classical Greek of corrective punishment. t Luke xvi. 19-31. Some perhaps may object tliat LI il .' i^!Pf«P mi 132 HUMAN DESTINY. is mentioned.* The Devil is to be cast into the lake of fire. This, therefore, must be the ** fire prepared for the Devil," spoken of in Matthew XXV. 41. And it is declared that the Devil, the beast, and the false prophet shall be there "tormented for ever and ever." If such language can be con- strued to signify sudden annihilation, words may mean anything. This, more- over, is what Scripture declares will be " the second death." this is not ihe final state of the lost ; but this question need not be discussed, for the sinner is in the flames of Gehenna {cf. vers. 23, 24), and therefore the fire, whatever it means, does not imply extinction. I really must decline to notice the view of the passage urged by one of the writers cited in an earlier chapter, which represents Dives as " one of the elect people." * Rev. xix. 20, XX. 10, 14, 15, xxi. i. i I ■I ■UN Cj^aptir X. THE QUESTION RESTATED. The results recorded in preceding chap- ters are doubtless a surprise. What then is to be the general conclusion ? It was a revolt against the dogmas of certain schools of theology which led to this inquiry : Must we at last fall back on the very position we thus abandoned ? Must we be content, after all, to accept the horrors of mediaeval eschatology, which try the faith of Christians, and not only deepen but embitter the unbelief of sceptics ? Before resigning ourselves to this as a last alternative, surely it behoves us to turn back once more to Scripture, and with care and earnestness and patience ^ I h U 134 HUMAN DESTINY. to inquire how far the difficulties which here perplex us may depend upon the ignorance of finite minds ; how far upon excrescences, the growth of human teaching, by which the truth has been distorted or concealed. What are these difficulties ? That God should tolerate the existence of evil for eternity. That the brief life-sin of finite creatures should lead to punishment of infinite duration. That no matter how dense and hopeless the darkness in which that life is spent, their destiny should be fixed irreversibly at death. That the overwhelming majority of the human race are doomed to exist for ever in a scene of unutterable horror. That while Christ shall have His thousands, the Devil shall boast of millions in his train. That these, the creatures of a God of love, shall be abandoned to the outer darkness, the gnashing of teeth, the torment day and night for ever and THE QUESTION RESTATED. 135 ever. That banished from love and light and peace to their awful prison home, Satan shall reign over them for evermore, and his foul demons shall revel in their anguish. And that this shall be for all without distinction. That the myriad millions of the heathen who never heard of the God of Heaven shall know Him first and only and for ever as the God of Hell. That the good and pure of earth, and little children too, in countless hosts, whose life was quenched ere ever they had fairly launched upon the sea of sin, shall be herded with the vilest and the worst of men, and trampled on by devils ; in time to grow like them, until at last all trace and memory of purity and good shall perish, and hell itself shall lose its power to make the damned more hate- ful, more corrupt, so hideous and awful shall be the depths of their depravity and guilt. ^ - i • i I J ), 1 i! /I ! I ■ 'I ) ' 1 ^mm. I 136 HUMAN DESTINY. And that this shall be for ever, for EVER. That no moving shadow on the dial shall relieve despair by reminding the lost that every day of anguish brings them nearer to deliverance. Just as the tree is said to put forth its roots in exact proportion to its spreading branches, so we could understand if punishment in the under-world were measured by each sinner's life on earth. This would silenc unbelief; all would freely own its equity. But that the doom of the lost shall be eternal punishment, this is a conception which paralyses human thought. With the great majority of Christians it is the chief, if not the only, difficulty. As already stated, a single wave of human life comprises over fourteen hundred millions of mankind. But none will dream that even one of these shall be forgotten. When the judgment comes, it will not be only the great of earth who shall stand before the throne. ** The dead, small THE Q UESriON RESTA TED. \ 3 7 and great y' shall be there. God's great judgments in this world were awful in the suddenness with which all without distinction were engulfed in a common doom. The hoary sinner and the help- less infant perished together under the waters of the Flood. So was it again when fire from heaven consumed the Cities of the Plain. But thi^ was just because there is a judgment to come, and another world beyond, in which perfect justice can be meted out to each. The glimpses afforded us behind the veil which hides that judgment and that world are few and partial ; but this much is absolutely certain, that the lost will not be sent to their doom unheard. Twice in Scripture they are represented as parleying with their Judge.* Each one shall be fairly dealt with. The record of each life shall be laid bare. The books shall be opened, and the dead shall be judged, every man . _ 1- * Matt. XXV. 44; Luke xiii. 25, 26. \i u /- I fi :m i If I \] '< i< I 138 HUMAN DESTINY. according to his works.* Every sinner in the countless multitude to be arraigned at the great assize shall hear his indict- ment, and be heard in his defence. How long then shall be allowed to each ? Take the estimated population of the world for this one century in which we live : sup- pose that for this purpose every human being is allotted less than a quarter of an hour — a brief quarter of an hour ; assume that the session shall go on unceasingly, without a moment's interval, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, till all has been concluded ; and the judgment of this small section of the human race will last one ktmdred thousand years ! And were we to estimate the number of those who have lived and died during the sixty centuries already past, and of those who are still to be born upon the earth, we should be forced to the con- clusion that the duration of the "day of ''' Rev. XX. 12, 13. THE QUESTION RESTATED. 139 judgment " shall be measured by millions of years I ' ^ ' . ;.. ..^ Need a single word be added to emphasise the folly of measuring the events of that world by the calendars of time? That some fallacy underlies the problem the very statement of it proves ; but wherein that fallacy consists we cannot tell. If human reason were under obliga- tions to solve the enigma, the solution might possibly be found in the theories of Kant. In the whole range of meta- physical inquiry no more philosophical suggestion was ever offered than his, that Time is nothing more than a law of human thought. And though neither he nor any of his disciples ever dreamt of his system being turned to such account, may it not be used as the basis of an appeal to Christians to trust God for the explanation of a difficulty which is purely intellectual ?* -' * I wish to guard against misrepresentation here. I appeal to the Transcendental philosophy, not as mp 140 HUMAN DESTINE. /<•' ,v- 14 To lay stress, therefore, upon eternao evil is merely to conceal the real question which, if faith is to depend on the absence of difficulties, reason is bound to give some account of. If the theories of geologists be well founded, this earth must have been the grave of an earlier creation before it became the cradle and home of existing life. And if there was death, there must also have been sin. Some have conjectured that Satan was the federal head of that earlier creation, and that his peculiar enmity to man was because this earth had once been his own domain. At all events the fact is clear -, that sin and death had been active in the universe of God before the Adamic age. Whether the interval since Satan's fall had been a century or a million years, affording the true solution of the difficulty — nothing is farther from my thought — but as a protest against allowing faith to waver in presence of a difficulty which can be so easily disposed of. THE QUESTION RESTATED. 141 the moral difficulty is just the same. Though infinite in power and goodness, God permitted a fallen being to exist, albeit the result was the ruin of Adam and his world. What possible explana- tion can be offered of this fact, if ** the extermination of evil" be His plan and purpose ? It is the existence of evil which is the real difficulty. To accept the fact of Satan's existence during all the ages of our world, and to hold it incredible that he should continue to exist when his power for evil shall have ceased for ever — this is neither faith nor philosophy, but an ad captandum appeal to human ignorance and to the awe inspired in finite minds by the attempt to realise eternity. This last remark suggests another point in the popular travesty of truth respecting the final condition of the lost. The *' everlasting fire " is not to be the Devil's kingdom. It will be his prison, not his palace. Amidst so much 7 m. ■ f m t i 142 HUMAN DESTINY. that is doubtful, this at least is sure. " At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow," in heaven, earth, and hell ; every tongue shall own Him Lord.* ''All things shall be subdued unto Him." f Not until ** He shall have put down all rule and all authority and power" will He deliver up the kingdom to the Father. % Every creature in the uni- verse shall be in absolute subjection to Almighty God. The under-world is not to be a scene of Satanic carnival. The word-pictures which describe the shrieks and curses of the lost of earth, as demons mock their anguish or heap fuel on their torture fires, are relieved from the charge of folly only by the graver charge of profanity. There is no spot in all the Queen's dominions in which the reign of order is so supreme as in a prison. So shall it be in hell. '•' Phil. ii. 10, II. t I Cor. xv. 28. J lb, ver. 24. THE QUESTION RESTATED. 143 To speak of this as producing an alleviation of the sinner's doom betrays the lingering influence of the error here condemned. Obedience will be thoir normal condition there. To speculate how it will be brought about is idle. It may be that the recognition of the per- fect justice and goodness of God will lead the lost to accept their doom. Possibly, too, the poet's dream may yet be realised, that Divine love shall shine out so clearly, even amid the fires of judgment, that when the anthem rises in the palace-home of God, even the prison- house shall join in the refrain, and praise shall issue forth from hell. Speculations such as these are perfectly legitimate in poetry, but they should have no place in the sober prose of theology. To plead that God will still own the bond which binds His creatures to Himself is to forget that the great revelation of Grace implies that all rela- f I h 1 •1^ i>i •* :i !• 1 1 ' ■ 1 i 144 HUMAN' DESTINY. tionships were broken, all claims lost, by the murder of the Son. To argue that "the resurrection of judgment is one part of the redeeming work of Christ," and that "the judgment of the lost is based on a present work of the Re- deemer," is to confound redemption itself with the place and power which Christ has taken in connection with redemption. It was not the Cross which made Him either Son of God or Son of Man, albeit it was in view of our redemption that He was thus revealed. Yet it is as Son of God that He shall recall the dead to life. And it is "because He is the Son of Man " that all judgment is com- mitted to Him.* * John V. 25 — 27. The writer specially referred to in the above paragraph seeks to establish his point by assuming that Scripture statements on this subject are marked by a contradiction (" anti- thesis," he calls it), to be accounted for by the creature being viewed sometimes in a personal, sometimes in a federal aspect. Such a theory is THE QUESTION RESTATED. 145 In considering the destiny of man- kind, it is of immense imp^^rtance to vindicate the Bible from the reproach which mediaeval theology has brought on it. But if the statements of Scripture must needs be coloured or explained away by theories which eliminate all ele- ment of dread from the doom of the impenitent, faith is of course impossible. If the reader will pursue the inquiry to the close, he will find that those state- always open to suspicion : here it seems wholly base- less. The passages he cites to illustrate it are I Cor. XV. 22, as compared with Rom. ii. 7 ; and Gp.1. vi. 2, 5. If the exposition of i Cor. xv. offered at p. 183 post^ be accepted, that passage may not be used as he suggests. And the seeming contradiction in Gal. vi. 2, 5, depends on the poverty of our translation. Burden in that passage represents two words in the original. Bapos denotes the pressure of a weight which may be transferred ; : THE (QUESTION DISCUSSED. 159 escape from it was by laying down His life. If the penalty of sin be "natural death" merely, the agony of Gethsemane and *' Immanuel's orphan cry" upon the cross can in no way be accounted for. If it be annihilation, then the death of Chri'^t was a defeat and not a triumph, and, as already shown,* His resurrection was a fraud. Faith grasps the fact that the death of the Sin-bearer, in all which it implies, is an equivalent to the sinner's doom, but how it is so is a mystery which reason seeks in vain to solve. Experience teaches us that even in this world the consequences of sin are disas- trous and abiding. And Scripture leaves no doubt that in the world to come sin's punishment shall be real and searching. We know that it will entail banishment from God ; and further we know that infinite love and perfect justice shall * See p. 94 ante. H u I W i \m \\ V I % \ MtJH< oil !!i 1 60 HUMAN DESTINY. measure the cup which each must drink. But beyond this we know absolutely nothing. The pride of intellect which lured our first parents to their ruin is abnormally developed in their posterity ; but man's vain boast of knowledge beyond what is revealed serves only to awaken echoes which proclaim his folly. What concerns us is not to theorise about the penalty of sin, but to take heed that we escape the " sorer punishment " of despising grace. It were otherwise if Christianity gave those who reject it the alternative of falling back on the position held by all whom the revelation has never reached. But no such choice is ours. The Gospel shuts men up either to accept the blessings it bestows, or else to await the doom of which those shall be "thought worthy " who have " trodden under foot the Son of God." * To cease to exist is * Heb. X. 29. »» THE QUESTION DISCUSSED. l6l to become as though one had not been ; but a fate worse than this awaits the Christ-rejector and the apostate— " Good were it for that man, if he had never been born." : I'' 11 %j3te XII. THE QUESTION ANSWERED. To the reverent and refined there is something far more awful in the solemn measured language of Holy Writ upon the doom of the lost, than in all the word-pictures framed on it by facile pens or fluent tongues. These ser\ e rather to repel, sometimes even to disgust. The outer darkness, the worm that never dies, the fire that is not quenched, the torment of the burning lake — all this may be but figurative language ; but if so, the figures must represent realities still more terrible. It is easy to create a prejudice against the truth by giving prominence to human utterances, often foolish, sometimes coarse and profane, while studiously keeping out of view the great truth of Divine love to a P i I i ■ t i I •> ? ^U 164 HUMAN DESTINY. lost world. But it is the same gospel which reveals that love which also declares the coming wrath.* Just in proportion, therefore, as redemption is depreciated, the guilt of rejecting mercy will be ignored. Man claims to be the arbiter of his own destiny, and ** reason and conscience " tell him that "finite sin" shall have a finite punishment. But who will dare to call it ''finite sin" to kill the Prince of Life ? And such is the guilt of sinners who reject Him — ** they crucify to them- selves the Son of God, and put Him to an open shame." t To strike a fellow-man might be an offence, though possibly a trivial one. To strike a parent would be, morally at least, a heinous crime. But to strike a king would be treason, punishable with death. In every case the guilt and penalty are measured, not by the act itself, but by the position of the outraged person * E.om. i. 16-18. t Heb. vi. 6. _ ^ THE QUESTION ANSWERED. 165 I—— .-iiiM I — ...■■■I ^.1. 11 .i-Mi — I. — .— I.. .11 ,m iiiiu M ■■— ..ii^i.i. I I -.I. -I . — i n , .11 I.I . __.ii I ■ ,^^ , and his relationship to the offender. So is it as between God and men. *' Half measures are impossible in view of the cross of Christ. The day is past when God could plead with men about their sins. The controversy now is not about a broken law, but a rejected Christ. If judgment, therefore, be our portion, it must be measured by God's estimate of the murder of His Son."* But who are they who shall be held guilty of this direst sin ? The answer is with God, and not with us. If any who have heard the gospel can prove that they are guiltless, we may be assured that "the Righteous Judge" will accept the - plea. But let no one dare to trade upon a hope of mercy in that day, while putting mercy from him here and now. Men speak as though the gospel were nothing but a dogma which some may fairly doubt, * and the many fail to understand, forgetting '•' The Gospel and its Ministry (4th Ed.), p. 15. ill II I ) 1 iW w hi T' '1 jL 1 ■ t ^ ^ ^ •i! L^iil i 1 66 HUMAN DES'IINY. that the death of Christ is a great public fact which must bring either blessing or judgment to every soul to whom the testi- mony comes. The question is not of assent to a shibboleth, but of loyalty to a person ; not of belief in salvation, but of devotion to a Saviour. But all this is lost in the religious scepticism of the day, which is eating the very heart out of Christianity. " The Christ of ages past Is now the Christ no more ; Altar and fire are gone, The Victim but a dream ! " Hence the deep and widespread conspiracy that exists to make light both of the guilt and the punishment of sin. Self and not God having become the test and touch- stone of all things, sin is palliated and judgment decried. Men speak as though the love of God were on its trial at the bar of ** reason and conscience," and as if the verdict must needs be deferred till the sinner's doom shall have been declared. i i . ■ THE qUESTION ANSli^ERED. 167 But the love of God has been once and for ever vindicated by the great sacrifice of Calvary. It is measured by the gift of Christ, not by the lightness of their doom who reject Him. ''In this was manifested the love of God toward us, .jecause that God sent His only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him.'' * ** God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."i" Here we have reached what is at once the real centre of the controversy and the climax of the argument. The preceding pages are the reflex of the struggle by which one inquirer has escaped from the difficulties set forth in the opening chapter. Perchance the record may prove helpful to others. The destiny of the lost is a great mystery, but it is only one phase of * I John iv. 9. t John iii. 16. i68 HUMAN DESTINY. M )' 1 1 the crowning mystery of Evil. There must be so/ae moral necessity why evil, once existing, should continue to exist. Otherwise, the presence of the Serpent in Eden, and all the dismal facts of human history, would be inexplicable. But if the existence of Evil be recognised, its punish- ment is, in the very nature of things, inevitable. The real question, there- fore, is not primarily as to the kind and duration of the punishment, but whether Divine love and equity have been placed beyond the shadow of a doubt. And that question will be answered by each accord- ing to his estimate of the gospel. There is no question as to the Creator's power to extinguish creature existence ; and by redemption God has won the un- doubted right to restore the fallen race to blessing. But who can tell what moral hindrances may govern the exercise of that power and that right ? Scripture assumes the continued existence of the A 1 ■mwifliw" THE QUESTION ANSWERED. 169 Adam life. The resurrection is a proof of it. Judgment and hell are them- selves an overwhelming proof of It. The crowning proof of It Is redemption achieved at a cost so priceless. But if the scepticism of the day could be forced to speak out plainly, it would declare that God Is to blame for human sin, and therefore redemption Is merely the natural outcome of Divine benevolence. Any good . man who, through his own default, allowed ruin to overtake others dependent on him, would make any sacri- fice to repair the evil. Is man, then, better than God } Will not God make further and unceasing efforts to restore the lost whom love and grace shall have failed to win ? Or. if that be impossible, will He not in mercy put an end to their existence ? The only answer to all such cavils is the cross of Christ. Behind that cross there is no concealed reserve of mercy ) i 170 HUMAN DESTINY. I* F' or love. Man has lost through sin the pafadisc of earth ; God bids him welcome to the paradise of heaven. The sin was in spite of all that God had done for man. The blessing is in spite of all the return that man has made to God. Men plead that because of what they are they cannot be what they ought to be ; but redemp- tion is for those who are all they ought not to be. Grace is as free as sunlight. God *' will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." It is "■ for the Devil and his angels " that the " everlasting fire " is prepared ; God's own heaven is thrown open to the lost of earth. The weakest or the worst of men has but to choose Christ, and not sin, and he will find in Christ a Saviour from sin, and attain to blessing such as unfallen Adam never dreamed of. But what if he choose sin and reject Christ ? God declares that the alternative to grace is wrath ; but the religious scepticism of tlvr: mgummm I THE qUESTION ANSWERED, 171 clay will tell him that he may despise grace and yet escape wrath; or, at all events, that the wrath will be tempered and limited according to his own esti- mate of his guilt. The possession of a single share in a commercial company is regarded by an English judge as a sufficient reason for leaving the bench if that company be sued ; and yet, in rehearsing the Day of Judgment, men claim to sit as assessors with Almighty God, and to adjudicate upon their own destiny. We conclude, then, that the proclama- tion of grace in the gospel is final, and that the destiny of all who either receive or reject tL,^ message is fixed in this life. In the Lord's own words, *' He that be- lieveth on Him is not condemned; but he that belleveth not is already con- demned."* At death, therefore, the unbeliever passes hence to await, not his * John iii. 18. 1^ i ! *r ! 172 HUMAN DESTINY. trial, but his sentence. Further, we con- clude that in the case of all mankind the judgment of the great day will be irreversible. But whether those who have been denied a revelation in this world shall find " a place of repentance " in the intermediate state, it is not for us to dogmatise. To deny that God can give blessing to those whom the voice of revelation has never reached, is to make the value of redemption depend on man's appreciation of it. To assert that the testimony shall be granted to all mankind is to ignore the apostle's statement that *'as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law." What the fate of such -will be we cannot tell. That they will reap what they have sown, the Scripture plainly states. "^ And this suggests that in one aspect of it, '* future punishment may * Gal. vi. 7. mmm THE QUESTION ANSWERED. 173 follow wickedness In the way of natural consequence."* Death is the wages of sin. But if there were nothing more in future punishment than this, then, as already urged, f there would be no need whatever of a day of judgment. Once we pass beyond the general statements of Scripture, we know absolutely nothing of the fate of the lost. Of course, we can laiinch out in specu- lations. There are no idlers in a well-dis- ciplined gaol : in God's great prison-house is idleness to reign supreme ? The tread- mill, which in former times served only to grind the air, is in our day used for good and needful purposes : are we to suppose that all the energies of the lost are to be consumed in tasks of aimless punishment ? God has told us of their punishment, for that is all we are concerned to know ; but nowhere has He said that it is for punish- * Butler, The Anal i^y, pt. v., ch. II., § 2. t Page 52, ante. m ' ', t V'-' I Jl '\ ' 174 HUMAN DESTINY. ■■f: ment alone they shall exist. If throughout creation, and even in the world which the microscope reveals to us, every creature seems to have its mission, why should we assume it will be otherwise in hell? It were but folly to press the matter further, and theorise about the possible employ- ments of :he lost ; but may we not suppose that in the infinite wisdom of God there are purposes to the accomplishment of which even they will be made to minister ? If heaven were the fools' paradise of our hymnology, the conventional hell might well be accepted as its counterpart. If the redeemed are to sit in one vast sur- pliced choir, to spend eternity in song, why should not the lost be battened down in some huge dungeon, with no occupation save to bewail for evermore their doom 1 One of the commonest artifices in this controversy is to seize on the popular conception of hell, and then to demand whether existence in such a condition for THE QUESTION ANSWERED. 175 millions of ages be not incredible. Let any one put his heaven to the same test, and he will be startled at reaching a like conclusion. That an eternal paradise will be eternal happiness the believer is assured. But it is entirely a matter of faith. Reason cannot grasp it. The mind is utterly overwhelmed by the attempt to realise eternity at all. On this whole subject ** orthodoxy " has gone beyond what Scripture warrants, and "heresy" ignores or denies some of its jtluinust ti^ttt^hing- Our choice, however, dooH lint ||@ R^IWi^n orthodoxy and heresy, an judged by creeds and Churches, but between revelation ow the one hand, and the opinions of men on the. other. In a spliere where reason can tell us nothing, we are bound to keep strictly to the very words of Scripture, neither enlarging their scope nor drawing infer- ences from them. But in contrast with this, the inspired words have been used in 176 HUMAN DESTINY. such a way as to produce a menial revolt which endangers faith. Divine love is boundless. Christ's redemption is of in- finite value. Grace is supreme ; and it is " salvation-bringing to all men " — such is its scope and tendency, But even if it were certain that in the under-world God will reveal Himself as a Saviour to those who fail to hear of Him thi on earth, this wnilM only emphasize the truth which is as plain on the page of Scripture as ivords can mal e it, that the gospel of His grace is 2. final revelation to those it n, aches. Man boasts of the proud but perilous dignity of an independent will. He used it in turning away from God. He may use it again in refusing to turn back to God. And what then ? The gospel of a free pardon through the death of Christ is " preached in the whole creation under heaven." The amnesty has been proclaimed ; and, because God is un- I )n tn n- THE (QUESTION ANSWERE3. 177 willinp^ that any should perish, judgment w.iits. But if men despise the grace and reject the Saviour, the sure and inevit- able alternative is Perdition. Strange it is that they who are most emphatic in asserting that God must give salvation to all men in the next wonu, are precisely those who dismiss as fanati- cism the truth that He gives salvation here and now to those who seek Him. The Church of Rome denies grace alto- gether, and represents Divine love as dependent for its display on the human weakness of a traditional Jesus and the womanly tenderness of a traditional Mary. This conception of God has produced the coarse conventional hell of theology, which again has led to the creation of purgatory and masses for the dead, to alleviate the horrors of the system. In asserting the doctrine of justification by faith, the Refor- mation in great measure restored the lost truth of grace Mariolatry and purgatory 12 fl trm IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-S) ^^ ///A ^SV f/. 1.0 1.1 lj£ 1^ 122 u lii Its lU IM ?.o HM L25 Iju 1.6 ^ 6-' — ► V w ^, 7a / ^? ^V^ > >> ^v <^ ,^ '/ ^ ?>' Photographic Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, N.Y. 145(0 (716)872-4503 ^v- »% 'V ^ t^m 178 HUMAN DESTINY. .--,,^--- — disappeared with the darkness which produced them, but the mediaeval hell remained. Protestantism, however, when separated from spiritual life, is a mere soulless body ; and while the religious movement of the present century h?s deepened faith in the doctrines of the Reformation, those who have resisted its influences are either turning back to Rome or lapsing to infidelity. On the one side, we see a revival of the old errors of intercession for the dead and the power of "seonian fire" to purify the soul. On the other side, the great truths of Christianity are dismissed as narrow cant ; the mystery of Divine love to a lost world is degraded to the level of good-natured benevolence to erring creatures ; sin is but human frailty, righteousness a myth, and judgment but the appointed means by which the lost of earth shall be fitted for the heaven to which their relationship to God entitles I ^^ mammtm THE Q UESTION A NS WERED. I 7 9 them. In a shallow, and, therefore, a sceptical age, this is the most popular religion. It vaunts itself as the outcome of increased enlightenment ; in fact it is but the mingled ignorance and insolence of unbelief. ?' mm m^f^m im flP^^ ■KVP APPENDIX. it 'r ! . PART I. The following are the passages of the New Testament principally relied on to prove the doctrines of universalism. The exposition here offered is commended to the consideration of the reader. Acts iii. 21. "Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began." — The word here rendered "restitution"* occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, but the kindred verb is used in eight passages,t two of which throw light on this one. The prophetic Scriptures abound in p»'edictions of a coming period of mingled blessing and judgment upon * aTroKaTcicrTacns. t Matt. xii. 13, xvii. 11 ; Mark iii. 5, viii. 25, ix. 12 ; Luke vi. 10 ; Acts i. 6 ; Heb. xiii. 19. npi" 182 APPENDIX. ^ I earth, and the Old Testament closes with the statement that its advent will be heralded b«' the return of Elijah." This was used by the Scribes to disprove the claims of Jesus to Messiahship, and in Matt, xvii. lO the dis- ciples referred the difficulty to their Master. The Lord in reply expressly confirmed the prophecy, declaring that " Elias truly shall come first and restore all things^ f So again in Mark ix. 12, "Elias verily Cometh first and restoreih all things^^ St. Peter's words, in Acts iii. 21, unmistakably refer to this the common hope of the people he was addressing, — a hope confirmed by Christ Himself. If, even then, Israel would but re- pent, God would send them the Messiah appointed for them, even Jesus ; % whom the heaven must receive until the times of restora- tion of all tilings, of which (times) God spake by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the * Mai. iv. 5. t "Our Lord speaks here plainly in the future, and uses the very word of the prophecy (Mai. iv. 6). The double allusion is only the assertion that the Elias (in spirit and power) who foreran our Lord's first coming was a partial fulfilment of the great prophecy which announces the ;'^rt//iV/(«j." — Alford, on Matt. xvii. 11. X The Authorised Version fails to give the meaning of the original. mmmmm APPENDIX. 183 world began. He goes on to assert emphati- cally that every prophet, from Samuel onwards, foretold of those days, and he ends by con- necting with these same prophecies the promise to Abraham that in his Seed aL" the kindreds of the earth shall be blessed. It is as clear as light, therefore, that " the times of restoration of all things ** are no other than " the times of refreshing" of the 19th verse, "the great season of joy and rest on earthy which it was understood the coming of Messiah in His glory was to bring with it." * Moreover, " all the prophets " " have foretold of tJiese days," and their voice is almost, if not entirely, silent, about events beyond the last great judgment of " the quick and dead." We are forced to the conclusion, therefore, that the use which has been made of the apostle's words is a perversion of the Scriptufj. It must not be overlooked that "the times of restoration of all things " will be marked by the destruction of the obdurate and disobedient.f I Corinthians xv. 22. " For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." — Does this teach * Alford, i7i loco. t Compare ver. z^i with what goes before. I 184 APPENDIX. universal blessing ? The words can be read in two ways. Either " death " may be taken to mean no more than physical death, and "life" as implying only the resurrection ; or else the words may be understood in their deeper spiritual significance. If we adopt the former reading, then the passage means that as death is the lot of every human being, so every human being shall be raised from the dead by Christ's power. But who disputes this } It is the common faith of Christendom ! * But, it will be urged, the words mean more than this : " life " means salvation in the highest sense. Then " death " must be con- strued on the same principle, for the words are correlatives. How then shall we read the verse 1 As every human being dies, i.e. shall be finally lost, so every human being shall live, i,e. shall be finally saved. But these propositions are contradictory and absurd. We must either be content, therefore, to take the words as asserting merely the universality of death and resurrection, or else we must adopt a Second possible rendering,! and construe them * I pass by special questions which might be raised as to whether death be in fact the lot of all. it ..ertainly is not, as ver. 5 1 expressly states. t The passage might, no doubt, be read that just as the APPENDIX. I«5 thus : As in Adam all who belong to Adam die, so in Christ al) who belong to Christ shall be made alive. That this is in fact the apostle's meaning the immediate sequel proves. He adds, "But each in his own order; Christ, the firstfruits, afterwards they that are Christ's {i.e. who belong to Christ) at His coming." That there will be beyond that "resurrection to life " a resurrection to judgment, we know from other Scriptures; but this is outside the scope of the apostle's argum'^- ', and he makes no mention of it here. If the 22nd verse be bracketed with the 21st, it will be read on the first principle above suggested ; if with the 23rd, it will be pregnant with higher truth. But in neither case can it have the slightest bearing on the present controversy. In the passage under consideration the climax is reached in the statement of the 28th verse that the great end of the " mediatorial king- dom" is "that God maybe all in all." These words are held to imply universal restoration. sin of Adam, if left to work out its results unhindered, would lead to the perdition of all men, so, on the same principle, the death of Christ would lead to their salva- tion. But this would not advance the argument the least, and it is not pretended that it is the meaning of the passage. • i »i » I m II iS6 APPENDIX. But this result is declared to be "when He shall have put down all rule, and all authority, and power." It is not attained " till He hath put all enemies under His fee ty' till " all things shall be subdued unto Him " ; and this is not the sort of language in which Scripture speaks of winning back the lost to God. Moreover, the absolute and acknowleged supremacy of the Almighty is all that is involved in the words " that God may be all in all." The gloss "all things i?i all men" betrays either dishonesty or levity in handling Scripture. The supremacy is universal, and if it be brought about by reconciliation, the blessing must be shared by all the hosts of darkness. Philippians ii. lo. This last remark applies with equal force to the statement of the Divine purpose " that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth." Not merely angels and saints and men on earth shall own Him Lord, but also the dwellers in the under-world. But till it has been proved that this acknowledgment shall be obtained from all by reconciliation, it must not be assumed that it will not 1 3, in the case of some, by judgment APPENDIX. 187 Revelation v. 13 ; xxi. 4, 5 ; xxii. 3. With this statement in Phih'ppians the vision of Rev. V. 13 appears to be connected. But this perhaps has been assumed too easily. The language seems to be figurative, for it is not in- telhgent beings only, but all animated creation, that join in the anthem of praise. No argument can fairly be based on it.* The use made in this controversy of the description of the blessedness of the redeemed in the new creation must excite surprise in the mind of any one who strdies the context. For the redeemed there is to be no more curse or death or sorrow, " but " (in awful contrast with this) "the fearful and unbelieving . . . shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." Romans v. . It is idle to ignore the fact that theologians widely differ in their exegesis of the 5th chapter of Romans. But all that is essential here is to determine whether the meaning put upon the passage by the advocates of universalism be the * Is it certain, that woKaTO) rij? y?)? is equivalent to the KOTaxBovioi of Phil. ii. lo ? The latter is a classic term for hades ; the former is used by the LXX. in Exod. xx. 4 ("the water under the earth''). Why should hades be brought in between the earth and the sea ? :^jk::-.----^=^^ mm i88 APPENDIX, «!!' I'll true interpretation of it. The difficulty of the passage is centred in the statement of the i8th verse, that " as through one trespass [the judg- ment came] unto all men to condemnation; even so through one act of righteousness [the free gift came] unto all men to justification of I'fe."* Verses 13 to 17 are parenthetical, and in the apostle's argument the words just quoted follow upon the statement of the 12th verse, that, by- reason of Adam's sin, " death passed upon all men." Therefore, he concludes, as the result of that one trespass was unto all men to condem- nation, even so the result of Christ's one act of righteousnessf was unto all men to justification. But surely the second of these correlative clauses is governed by the first. Men have " many trespasses," as the i6th verse declares, and the ')(cipL Mark Luke Rom. 2 Cor. God. i* n iv. 17. Exceeding and e^ifr^a/ weight of glory. iv. 18. The things which are not seen are eternal. v. I. House not made with hands eternal in the heavens. 2 Thess. i. 9. Punished with everlasting destruction. ii. 16. Hath given us ez/^r/aj/m^ consolation. vi. 16. To Whom be honour and power ever- lasting. I Tim. 212 APPENDIX. 2 Tim. ii. lo. In Christ Jesus with c/ernal g\ory. Ilcb. V. 9. The author of ^/fr;/^;/ salvation. ,, vi. 2. And of c/^^;?a/ judgment. ix. 12. Having obtained f/^r72«/ redemption. ,, ix. 14. Who through the etc7'7ial Spirit offered Himself. ,, ix. 15. The promise of f/<:;';;rt!/ inheritance. ,, xiii. 20. Blood of the everlasting covenant. 1 Peter v. 10. Called us unto his eternal glory. 2 Peter i. 11. The e7>cr/asfmgV.\\\^doxt\ of our Lord. Judo 7. Suffering the vengeance oi eternal Hre. Rev. xiv. 6. Having the ^I'^rAw//;/^ gospel. The meaning of aloov has been discussed at pp. 23 — 25 ante. It is unnecessary to set out all the passages where it occurs, but the following list includes all the passages where it is used in the three several phrases which in the New Testament 'ordinarily express endless future duration. That such is unmistakably the meaning of these phrases the reader can judge for himself. To urge that the first of these expressions cannot really mean "for ever," because the other and stronger expressions can mean no more, is to trade both upon popular ignorance of the science of words, and upon an untenable theory of inspiration.* Moreover, the argument may be turned against those who use it, for it only confirms the obvious conclusion * Compare, ex. gr., Rev. xiv. 11 with xix. 3 and xx. 10. APPENDIX. 21^ that the last and strongest of these phrases must mean all time to come. And it will be noticed that this same phrase is used both of the life of God and of the existence of the lost. Matt. Mark >> Luke John XXI. 19. iii. 29. xi. 14. i-55- iv. 14. vi. 51. vi. 58. viii. 35- viii. 51. viii. 52. X. 28. xi. 26. xii. 34. xiii. 8. M xiv. 16. 1 Cor. viii. 13. 2 Cor. ix. 9. et? Tov aL(tiva. Grow on thee henceforward yb/* ever. Against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness (Ut. noi/or ever). No man eat fruit of thee hQxcviitQX for ever. To Abraham, and to his scad for ever. Whosoever drinketh shall never thirst (lit. noi/or ever). If any man eat of this bread, he shall Wvcfor ever. Eateth of this bread shall Y\\c/or ever. The servant abideth not in the \\o\xsc/or ever, (but) the Son abideth y^r ever. If a man keep My saying, he shall never see death (lit. v\ot/ur ever). Keep My saying, he shall never taste of death (lit. not fur ever). They shall never perish (lit. not for ever). Whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die (lit. not for ever). That Christ abidethyi^r ever. Thou shalt never wash my feet (lit. not for ever). He may abide with yon for ever. 1 will eat no flesh while the world slaudelh {lit. not for ex er). His righteousness remainethyc;,*' ever. 214 APPENDIX. Hcb. V. VI. Vll. Vll. Vll. I Peter Vll. i. 1 John 2 John Jude • 1. ii. Matt. vi. Luke i. Rom. i. >» ix. »> >> 2 Cor. XI. xvi. xi. Heb. xiii. Jude 8. Thy throne, O God, is fur ever and ever (i. ,, XV. 54. Shall have put on incorruption. Eph. vi. 24. That love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. 2 Tim. i. 10. Hath brought life and immortality to light. Titus ii. 7. Uncorruptncss, gravity, sincerity. a^OapTos; (aphthartos). Rom. 1. 2;^. The glory of the lutcorruptible God. I Cor. ix. 25. But we an incorruptible (crown). ,, XV. 52. The dead shall be raised incorruptible. I Tim. i. 17. Unto the King eternal, immortal. I Peter i. 4. To an inheritance incorruptible. i. 2^. Born again ... of incorruptible (seed). iii. 4. In that which is not corruptible. II The following are the passages in which the several words are used which are sometimes rendered /icll in the Authorised Version, or which relate to the r bode of the lost : — Matt. Luke >> Acts n aBTj^i (hades). xi. 2^. (Capernaum) shalt be brought down to /lell. xvi. 18. The gates of ^ell shall not prevail against it. X. 15. Shalt be thrust down to /lell. xvi. 23. In /lell he lift up his eyes. ii. 2";^. Thou wilt not leave my soul in /icll. ii. 31. His soul was not left in /lell. APPENDIX, 217 I Cor. XV. 55. O grave ^ where is thy victory ? Rev. i. 18. And have the keys of hell and of death. vi. 8. Death, and hell followed with him. XX. 13. Death and //e// deUvered up the dead. XX. 14. Death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. ft yeevva (gc-cnna). Matt. V. 22. Shall be in danger of hell fire. v. 29. Whole body should be cast into hell. V. 30. Whole body should be cast into hell. X. 28. Able to destroy both soul and body in hell. xviii. 9. Having two eyes to be cast into hell fire. More the child of hell than yourselves. How can ye escape the damnation of hell? Having two hands to go into hell. Having two feet to be cast into hell. Having two eyes to be cast into hell fire. 5. Hath power to cast into hell. 6. (The tongue) is set on fire of hell. raprapoQ) (tartaroo). 2 Peter ii. 4. But casl (them) doimi to hell {i.e., the angels that sinned). a^vcrao^ (abussos). Luke viii. 31. Would not command them (the demons) to go out into the dce/>. Rom. x. 7. Who shall descend into the deep .^ Rev. ix. I. The key of the (^6'//6'// >» Luke James xxin. 15. xxiii. II. ix. 43. ix. 45. ix. 47. xii. q. iii. >> X. 7. ix. I. ix. 2. ix. II. xi. 7. A 218 APPENDIX. tt i> XVil. XX. « ^ A. • Luke John >> Rev. XIV. 5. iv. II. iv. 12. ix. I. iX. ix. ix. Rev. xvli. 8. Shall ascend out of the bottomless ^it. I. Having the key of the bottomless ;pit. 3 . Cast him into the bottomless pit. > Mark John Acts >> Rom. Phil. 13- 8. vii. xxvi. xiv. 4. xvii. 12. I ; >i tt I APPENDIX. 2IQ 2 Peter ii >• iii Rev. 2 Cor. >> >> 3. T\\G\x damftai/an slumbereth not. 7. Judgment and^^/-^////t;;^ of ungodly men. iii. 16. Unto their own destrtiction. xvii. ^. Kxi^gQVL\\.o -perditiott. xvii. II. And goeth into /^r«Y//£?;2. Kadaipeaa (kathairesis). X. 4. The ^2^///«^^ow« of strong holds. X. 8. And not for your destruction. xiii. 10. To edification and not to destructiun. I Cor. V. 1 Thess. V. 2 Thess. i. I Tim. vi. Rom. 6\€6pneris/i viii. 25. Lord, save us: we j!>eris/i. Matt. If t* ii 220 APPENDIX. Matt. i* >i IX. 17, X, 6. X. 28. X. 39. X. 42. xii. 14. XV. 24. xvi. 25, XVlll. II. ,, xvni. 14. XXI. 41, >> xxii. 7. M XXVI. 52. >> xxvii. 20. Mark i. 24. >> 11. 22. M iii. 6. >» iv. 38. >> vm. 35. >> ix. 22. >> IX. 41. >t xi. 18. }> xii. 9. The wine runneth out, and the bottles perish. Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Able to destroy both soul and body in hell. He that findeth his life shall lose it ; and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it. Shall in no v^^ise lose his reward. How they tnight destroy Him. Unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Whosoever will save his life shall lose it ; and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it. Is come to save that which was lost. That one of these little ones should perish. He will miserably destroy those wicked men. (The king) destroyed those murderers. Shall ;perish with the sword. Should ask Barabbas, and ^c'5'/r J > >> >} tr »» »» »» n »» >> >> >» >» John M IX. 25. ix. 56. xi. 51. xiii. 3. xiii. 5. xiii. ^;]. XV. 4. XV. 6. XV. 8. XV. 9. XV. 17. XV. 24. XV. 32. xvii. 27. xvii. 29. xvii. 3i. xix. 10. xix. 47. XX. 16. xxi. 18. iii. 15. iii. 16. vi. 12. vi. 27. vi. 39. X. 10. Art Tliou come /» >» Acts Rom. >> I Cor. >» 2 Cor. >> >) 2 Thcss Heb. James >> I Peter >> II. They shall n&vet ;perish, neither. That the whole nation ^^r/j"^ not. He that loveth his life shall lose it. I have kept, and none of them is lost. Thou gavest Me have I lost none. One man should die for the people. He also ;perished {i.e. Judas of Galilee). Shall also perish without law. Destroy not him with thy meat. To them that perish foolishness. I 'will destroy the wisdom of the wise. Shall the weak brother perish. And were destroyed of serpents. Were destroyed of the destroyer. Fallen asleep in Christ are ;perished. Are saved, and in them that perish. It is hid to them that are lost. Cast down, but not destroyed. Unrighteousness in them that ;perish. They shall ;perish^ but thou remainest. The fashion of itperisheth. Is able to save and to destroy. Precious than of gold that ;perisheth. Being overflowed with water, perished. Not willing that any should perish. That we lose not these things. Destroyed them that believed not. Perished in the gainsaying of Core. BLa^deipa (diaphtheiro). >- Luke xii. ^t^. Neither moth corrtipteth. 2 Cor. iv. 16. Though our outward man perish. I Tim. vi. 5. Disputings of men of c> 2 Cor. xni. iii. 7- 3- 111.31, iv. 14. vi. 6. vii. 2. vii. 6. i. 28. ii. Karapyico (katargeo). Why ctimbereth it the ground ? Shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect ? Do we then make void the law. And the promise made of none effect. That the body of sin might be destroyed. She is loosed from the law of her husband. Now we are delivered from the law. 2o bring to nought things that are. 6. The princes of this world that come to nought. vi. 13. God shall destroy both it and them, xiii. 8. Prophecies, they i'/m///^//; knowledge, it shall vanish away. xiii. 10. Thatv/hich is in part shall be done away. xiii. II. 1 ^ut away childish things. XV. 24. When he shall have put down all rule. XV. 26. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death, iii. 7. Which glory was to be done away. iii. II. That which is done away. iii. 13. To the end of that which is abolished. 224 APPENDIX, 2 Cor. iii. 14 Gal. iii. 17 91 V. 4 V. II 11. 15. Which vail is done away in Christ. Make the promise of no7ie effect. Christ is becojne of no effect unto you. Then is the offence of the cross ceased. Ilavhtg abolished in his flesh the enmity. 2 Thess. ii, 8. i\v\d shall destroy [the Kni\chx\si]yi\ih. the brightness of His coming. Christ, Who hath abolished death. He might destroy him that had the power of death. Eph. 2 Tim. Heb. 1. 10. ii. 14. \v(o (luo), ' to loosen, dissolve, undo. Occurs forty-three times in the New Testament, and is translated destroy in John ii. 19 [destroy this temple), and i John iii. 8 (that He might destroy the works of the devil). okodpevo) (olothreuo). Heb. xi. 28. Lest he that destroyed the firstborn. (oXo^peuTJjv, destroyer, occurs i Cor. x. 10 ; and i^oko- dpfvofjiai is used Acts iii. 23.) iropdio) (portheo), to lay waste, harass. Is used three times in the New Testament — viz., Acts ix. 21 ; Gal. i. 13 and 2^. twn), and ii. ig. The following are the words rendered torment or tormented in the Authorised Version, with a complete list of the passages where they occur : — ^d<7avo^ * (basanos). With divers diseases and torments. He lift up his eyes, being in torments. Lest they also come into this place of torment. Matt. iv. 24 Luke xvi. 23, ,, xvi. 28 Rev. >> >> >» >> ^a(TavLaiJL6> Mark >> Luke 2 Peter ^aa-avi^co (basanizo). Sick of the palsy, grievously tormented. Art Thou come hither to torment us ? Midst of the sea tossed with waves. That Thou torment me not. vi. 48. He saw them toiling in rowing, viii. 28. I beseech Thee torment me not. 8. Fc";v^<:/ his righteous soul. viii. 6 viii. 29 xiv. 24, V. 7, 11. * ^aaavos is literally the touch-stone ; then, a test, a trial whether a thing is genuine ; then torture, tor- menting disease, etc. 15 ■iii !.-..-■ x',:"AUT'T r 226 APPENDIX. I i! Rev. ix. 5. Shotild be tormented fiVQ moxiihs. ,, xi. 10. These two prophets tormented them. ,, xii. 2. In birth, and ^a?«^(a? to be delivered. ,, xiv. ID. He sAatt de tormented vfith hre. „ XX. 10. Shatl be torme7ited day and night. ^aaavicFTr)'! (basanistes). Matt, xviii. 34. Delivered him to the tormentors. KoKaaifi (kolasis). Matt. XXV. ^6. Into e.\ex\a.simg ^umshmejii. 1 John iv. i8. Because fear hath ^i??'?;^^^/. Luke >> Acts Heb. oSvvdofiai (odunaomai). ii. 48. 1 have sought thee sorrowing. xvi. 24. For I a7n torme7ited in this flame, xvi. 25. And thou art tormented. XX. 38. Sorrowt7tg most of all for the words. KaKovxovfievo^ (kakoukoumenos). xi. ;^'j. Being destitute, afflicted, tormented. xiii. 3. Them which suffer «t/sy^rj"//y. / 1 Printed by Hazell, Watson, and Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. \,