Hearst Fountain 
 
tc//. 
 
 THE WORLD TO COME 
 
 BIBLE TEACHINQS 
 
 CONCERNING ITS 
 
 REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS. 
 
 BY A LAYMAN. 
 
 "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord." Rom. 6:23. 
 
 OAKLAND, CAL.: 
 
 PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR. 
 1884. 
 
 ^ *4 
 
ENTERED ACCORDING TO ACT OF CONGRESS IN THE YEAR 1884, 
 BY E. C. WILLIAMS. 
 
 IN THE OFFICE OF THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS, AT WASHINGTON, D. C. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 Page 16, fourth line from bottom, leave out "are." 
 
 63, eleventh line from top, "skat hath" should be shachath 
 
 but through faithful, loving service to their Lord, to make that 
 life fuller and richer in bliss through the rewards meted out 
 by him for such service. (See Matt. 10 : 42.) And last and 
 greatest, to claim for Jesus Christ that which the religious 
 teachings of the age, if not formally, impliedly deny to him, 
 but which he emphatically asserts to be his sole prerogative, 
 the power to confer immortality upon men. John 5 : 24, 29 
 and 10 : 28. If there is truth in these pages, that God will 
 use it for his glory; if error, that he will overrule it to the same 
 end, is the earnest prayer of the AUTHOR. 
 
 679896 
 
PREKACK. 
 
 HE writer of this little book asks only for a prayerful, 
 unprejudiced investigation of its subject matter from the 
 Bible standpoint, regardless of creeds, and systems, 
 and teachings of men. It is unnecessary for him to say that 
 he possesses no literary ability, for one will scarcely read this 
 short preface without making that discovery. 
 
 His purpose in giving these pages to the public is three- 
 fold. First, to bring to the attention of the learned and influ- 
 ential of our religious teachers, the impressions which the 
 language of the Bible, understood in the sense generally at- 
 tached to it in ordinary use, makes upon a person of common 
 intelligence, who, sincerely desiring to know the truth, seeks it 
 at the Fountain Head, in humble dependence upon the prom- 
 ised guidance of the Holy Spirit. And for a second object, 
 to strengthen the faith and comfort the hearts of believers in 
 general, to stimulate them not only to secure a life without end, 
 but through faithful, loving service to their Lord, to make that 
 life fuller and richer in bliss through the rewards meted out 
 by him for such service. (See Matt. 10 : 42.) And last and 
 greatest, to claim for Jesus Christ that which the religious 
 teachings of the age, if not formally, impliedly deny to him, 
 but which he emphatically asserts to be his sole prerogative, 
 the power to confer immortality upon men. John $ : 24, 29 
 and 10 : 28. If there is truth in these pages, that God will 
 use it for his glory; if error, that he will overrule it to the same 
 end, is the earnest prayer of the AUTHOR. 
 
 679896 
 
INDEX. 
 
 CHAPTER I. Gen. 3 :22: And now lest he take of the Tree of Life 
 and eat and live forever. Gen. 2:7: And man became a living 
 soul in connection with Gen. I : 20, 21-24; Lev. n : 10, and Eze. 
 47 ' 9 Page 7 
 
 CHAPTER II. Definition of the words "life" and "death." Languageto 
 be intelligible must be constant in its meaning. Life the same for 
 the Creator as for the creature. Eze. 18: The soul mortal. 
 Spiritual life and death, as the terms are used, impossible. There 
 is no spiritual life except from Jesus Christ Pag e 1 7 
 
 CHAPTER III. John 6 : 57, 58: The HvingGoA. The work of Moses 
 in providing manna rescued and sustained the life of the body. 
 The work of Jesus redeems and sustains the life of the soul, also. 
 Zoe aionios does not mean holiness and felicity. "Becatise I live." 
 According to all natural law, the same principle of life that is in 
 God will be found in his offspring. Man has no life in himself. 
 All he has is from without Page 25 
 
 CHAPTER IV. Some objections to the foregoing definitions considered. 
 Eph. 2 : I and Col. 2 : 13: " The wages of sin is death." Evan- 
 gelical definition of eternal life. Inconsistencies of such a defini- 
 tion Page 33 
 
 CHAPTER V. Our definition of life confirmed by Heb. 7 123, and 
 other texts. Death the opposite of life. Spiritual death as de- 
 fined in Chapter II, not the penalty for sin. Rebellion against an 
 earthly government not physical death: neither is rebellion against 
 God eternal death. No condition pertaining to a living being is 
 either its life or its death. What death meant to Job, David, and 
 Hezekiah, and how they regarded the future state Page 45 
 
 CHAPTER VI. The figures and metaphors of Scripture agree with our 
 definition. Fire the most common figure used in connection with 
 the doom of the wicked. Prolonged suffering not denoted by any 
 Hebrew word used in this connection. Pentecost not the baptism 
 
 (v) 
 
vi INDEX. 
 
 of fire of Matt. 3: n, 12. Parable of tares and wheat. Greek 
 for "burn up." " Their worm dieth not." Mark 9 : 43. " God a 
 consuming fire." 2 Thess. I 19. The meaning of perish in the 
 Old Testament. Its meaning in the New Testament Page 60 
 
 CHAPTER VII. Matt. 25:46 considered. Parable of the rich man 
 and Lazarus. Rev/ 14 : 1 1. Page 76- 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. The death threatened at such places as Eze. 18 :$ r 
 John 8 : 24, Rom. 8:13, has no significance if the orthodox defi- 
 nition of death is accepted. Is the soul of man immortal ? The 
 answer of the Bible is, No Page 83. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. Former hopes not destroyed without giving something 
 in return. No conflict between the doctrine of the destruction of 
 the sinner, and the character of God as seen in his word and works* 
 but, on the contrary, his unity declared. The a.i m of revelation .to 
 re-establish faith in man. Faith towards God exercised by Old 
 Testament believers, and faith towards God to be exercised by us. 
 Impolitic to assert that Old Testament saints believed in Jesus 
 Christ. Many may be partakers of the benefits of his salvation 
 who never heard his name Page 90 
 
 CHAPTER X. Stumbling blocks. Perversions of Scripture. Province 
 of human reason in relation to religious truth. Objections to the 
 Bible on the ground that it awards endless torments to so large a 
 proportion of the race. The destruction of the wicked necessitates 
 no positive interposition of God. Distinction between penalty for 
 sin, and the results of sin. Objected that destruction is a release 
 from suffering. Objected that our doctrine enco urages sin . Page 102 
 
 CHAPTER XI. Eternal life a free gift, but the con ditions pertaining to it 
 may be influenced by man. Hope of reward a powerful and legit- 
 imate stimulus to active religion. The Roman Catholics wiser in 
 this respect than Protestants. The begetting from above necessarily 
 confers eternal life, but not consummate bliss. The attractiveness 
 of Heaven not taken away or lessened. He that doeth the will of 
 God abideth. The last enemy to be destroyed. The place given 
 by the apostles to the resurrection of our Lord confirms our posi- 
 tion. No necessary connection bet ween it and holiness and happi- 
 ness. Jesus Christ a Saviour from sin and death. I Cor. 15 : 54. 
 His kingdom everlasting Page 115 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 FTER deciding that the Bible is a revelation from 
 God of man's relation to him as the Creator, and of 
 his purposes regarding the race, any one who seeks 
 to learn from its pages what those purposes are, 
 must first of all settle the meaning of these two words, 
 " life," " death," for since to teach men how to attain the 
 one and avoid the other, is the main purpose of this 
 revelation, if any ambiguity attaches to these words, the 
 whole Bible must necessarily be to the same degree am- 
 biguous. 
 
 If the student is content to rest his knowledge of 
 Scripture truth upon the opinion of others, it will be 
 comparatively easy, and to a degree profitable, to take 
 some commentator of acknowledged piety and learningj 
 and follow where he leads the way. The searcher for 
 truth may be sure that he shall find a well-beaten path 
 for his feet, leading through smiling fields, and beside 
 still waters; while every now and again from some jut- 
 ting headland, he shall get a glimpse of the gates of 
 pearl, and almost hear the songs of triumph from the 
 blessed ones who have passed within these heavenly por- 
 tals. This journey may prove very enjoyable, but the 
 traveler will fail of attaining that vigor and energy 
 which, in religious character, as in physical development, 
 
 (7) 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 come only from exercise. Better, it seems to me, to 
 take the word itself, relying upon the promise of God 
 to guide us into the truth. It is true that at the first 
 we may feel called upon to clear up those hidden things 
 which belong to God, and only learn our error when 
 upon some dizzy height, from which we dare not turn 
 our downward look, we see still above us altitudes 
 to which no seraph's wing may hope to soar, and hum- 
 bly retrace our steps to lower levels. Or, it may be 
 that we shall try to sound the deep things of God, and 
 through days and weeks keep on adding piece after 
 piece to our short line of investigation, till at last we 
 learn that no finite understanding can hope to fathom 
 the depths of the wisdom and knowledge of the Infi- 
 nite. But these attempts, though unsuccessful, if made 
 in a reverential, filial spirit, will not have been fruitless. 
 We will have learned more of God than we knew 
 before, and for a child of God, this is to be drawn 
 nearer to him, and become more like him. 
 
 It is also true that the course of study advocated 
 may be marked by slow progress, but what advance is 
 made will be in the direction best suited to the learner's 
 need. The word of God is the food by which our relig- 
 ious natures are to be nourished and developed; and 
 as that which some require for healthy growth physic- 
 ally is unnecessary or even harmful to others, and each, 
 if he expects health and sustenance, must select that 
 which his system demands, and avoid that which dis- 
 agrees with it; so the table which God in his word has 
 spread for his children, has every variety which any one 
 can need, milk for babes, strong meat for those of 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 9 
 
 larger growth, reproof for the presumptuous, caution for 
 the unwary, promises for the discouraged, reproof for 
 the careless, rest for the weary, and the all-loving, all- 
 sufficient Christ for every human need. But to this 
 table so bountifully spread by their Father, God's chil- 
 dren must come, and each, for himself, take that which 
 his personal needs demand, not trusting to some stray 
 crumb from the hand of another, unsuited, perhaps, to 
 his wants, and insufficient in supply. The Bible, under 
 the guidance of the Holy Spirit, furnishes the food for 
 our religious life, and, like our material nourishment, this 
 food must be taken and assimilated by each one for him- 
 self, if he, is to progress far beyond the stage of infancy. 
 
 Under what, at the time, appeared to the writer a 
 very trying providence, he was compelled to leave his 
 family, and sojourn for several years in an extremely 
 isolated condition, when prompted, he trusts, by the 
 Holy Spirit, he was, in the many leisure hours at his 
 command, led to seek to know for himself what the 
 teachings of God's word were. And with no human 
 help save Alford's New Testament for English readers, 
 and Cruden's Concordance, he began the study of the 
 Bible, relying upon the promises, " If any man will do 
 his will, he shall know of the doctrine," and " if he lack 
 wisdom, let him ask of God, and it shall be given him." 
 
 As before stated, it seemed imperative that the mean- 
 ing of these two words, " life " and " death," should be 
 clearly defined before a satisfactory study of the Bible 
 could be pursued. Whatever definition is given to 
 " life," we must adopt its contrary as the meaning of 
 "death," and the converse of this is equally true. And 
 
io THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 more than this, we must adopt such definitions for 
 both as will make the Bible intelligible and harmonious 
 as a whole, so far as man's relation to God, and his 
 duties and hopes growing out of this relation, are the 
 subject. Diplomats may think and say that language 
 is made to conceal the meaning of the speaker, but it 
 is incredible that God should give to man a revelation 
 concerning matters of such momentous import, in lan- 
 guage of doubtful or uncertain meaning. The above 
 had been written years before the following from the 
 pen of the late Daniel Webster met my eye. He says: 
 " I believe the Bible is to be understood and received 
 in the plain and obvious meaning of its passages. Since 
 I cannot persuade myself that a book intended for the 
 instruction and conversion of the whole world, should 
 cover its true meaning in any such mystery and doubt 
 that none but critics or philosophers can discover it." 
 Aside from the haze in which the teachings of the 
 schools have enveloped it, every one understands well 
 enough what life is in its manifestations, though it may 
 well be, that only he who says of himself, " I am the 
 life," knows, or ever will know, what it is in its essence. 
 That life in its highest sense, or eternal life, does not 
 mean, as the evangelical churches teach, a renewal of 
 those filial relations with God which sin had interrupted, 
 and blessedness consequent upon such renewal, seems, 
 among other reasons, apparent from the precautions 
 taken by God after the fall of our first parents, lest 
 Adam should gain access to the " tree of life and eat and 
 live forever." It is not necessary for the present pur- 
 pose that we determine, or even imagine, what this tree 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 of life was. Whatever it may have been, the Bible 
 clearly implies that it was accessible to Adam, and that, 
 partaken of, its effects would be to confer upon the sin- 
 ful pair an unending life. The words of God are, " And 
 now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree 
 of life, and eat and live forever." Gen. 3:22. If, as the 
 churches teach, eternal life means the return of man in 
 penitence and faith to God, a changed character and the 
 blessedness resulting from God's favor, then this action 
 on the part of God is utterly at variance with all that 
 he tells us is his will concerning us, and with all his 
 recorded dealings with our race. Could access to the 
 tree of life have absolved man from guilt, re-implanted 
 in his nature a love for God, and holy proclivities and 
 actions, God certainly would not so carefully have cut 
 off all approach to the tree, but, on the contrary, would 
 have made haste to direct the fallen man to its healing 
 virtues, through which, not only would the evils conse- 
 quent upon the fall be repaired, but this relation once 
 restored should continue forever. This condition of 
 things is what God repeatedly assures us is just what 
 he wishes to bring about (See Eze. 18:32; 33:11; 2 Pet. 
 3:9); and if access to the tree of life could have accom- 
 plished it, all the subsequent rebellion of the race, and 
 the humiliation and death of his well-beloved Son could 
 have been avoided. The meaning of the expression 
 " live forever," in this place, is made plainer by compar- 
 ing Deut. 32:40, where Jehovah says, " I lift my hand to 
 heaven and say, I live forever." What God asserts 
 here, regarding himself, is the eternal duration of his 
 being, without any reference to his moral perfections 
 
12 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 so in Gen. 3:22, where the same expression is applied 
 to Adam, it must mean the eternal duration of his 
 being, without any reference to his moral character. 
 And with this understanding of the language there 
 is nothing mysterious, nothing inconsistent in shutting off 
 from Adam all approach to the tree of life. As said 
 before, what this tree of life was, we are not told, nor 
 need we be. It was some provision made by the Crea- 
 tor availing himself of which, Adam, had he passed his 
 probation successfully, would have secured for himself 
 and his posterity eternal life. By eternal life I wish 
 to be understood as meaning here, and throughout 
 these pages, a life as unending as is that which God 
 claims for himself in D?ut. 32:40, where he says, "I 
 live forever," with no reference to the conditions per- 
 taining to it. There was now danger that Adam 
 might turn to this tree of life as a remedy for the ills he 
 had brought upon himself by transgression, and become 
 possessed of an eternal existence, before being recon- 
 ciled to his offended Creator, thus perpetuating forever 
 a deformed and marred specimen of a being made orig- 
 inally very good. If eternal life means what the churches 
 tell us it means, then all that God has revealed of his 
 own glorious character, all that he has repeatedly declared 
 concerning his desire that the wicked shoulTf turn and 
 live, assures us that he would at once have pointed out 
 to Adam the way of restoration to all he had lost, and 
 bade him eat and live forever. Thus the work of 
 Satan should have been at once undone, man reinstated 
 in his pristine relation to God, never again to be im- 
 paired, and Gethsemane, and Calvary would never have 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 13 
 
 astonished the angelic beholders with their awful mys- 
 teries. 
 
 But if to live forever means just that, and 
 nothing else, and the partaking of the tree of life by 
 Adam was to confer eternal life upon this sinful creat- 
 ure and all his posterity, irrespective of their return to 
 God, and submission to his holy will, then how consist- 
 ent is God with himself, and with all his declared pur- 
 poses respecting the race, in guarding the way to the tree 
 of life. Every attribute of his glorious character shines 
 out most resplendently from this, to me, otherwise inex- 
 plicable mystery; and from the flaming sword, turning 
 every way to keep the way of the tree of life, flashes 
 forth not only the hatred of God for sin, but his unspeak- 
 able love for the sinner; not only his inflexible justice^ 
 but his infinite mercy. In cutting man off from eternal 
 life in Eden, equally with procuring it for him on Cal- 
 vary, is it true 
 
 " Here the whole Deity is known, 
 
 Nor dare a creature guess 
 Which of the glories brightest shone, 
 The justice or the grace." 
 
 While the uniform declaration of Scripture is that 
 it is the will of God that men should escape from death 
 and obtain eternal life, the condition precedent just as 
 uniformly is, that they must come back to him in sincere 
 repentance and humble faith; and for Adam to have 
 become possessed of eternal life by eating of the tree of 
 life without first turning to God in repentance and faith } 
 would have subverted God's plans, and accomplished 
 what Satan apparently had in view, the perpetuation 
 
14 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 of a portion, at least, of the race, eternally existent, and, 
 like himself, eternally at enmity with God and all good. 
 With this definition of the words " live forever," the 
 incident, as related, is within the comprehension of a 
 child. Can any other definition of " live forever " make it 
 plain, even to the highest intellect ? So far, it does not 
 seem as if "life" can mean filial relation towards God, 
 on the part of man, and the consequent favor of God, 
 with all the blessedness resulting therefrom. Therefore 
 " death " cannot mean sinful proclivities, alienation from 
 God and his consequent disfavor, with all the infelicity 
 growing out of this relation, for whatever meaning is 
 given to one of the words, " life " and " death, " its con- 
 trary must be found in the other; the constant usage of 
 Scripture makes this necessary. 
 
 In Gen. 2:7, we read, "and man became a liv- 
 ing soul." This term living soul, in chapter 1:20, 21, 24, 
 is applied to the water and land animals equally with 
 Adam in this *verse. How did man become a 
 living soul? It is said in the immediate context, 
 "And the Lord God formed man out of the dust 
 of the ground," but this form was inert, wanting 
 in that which even the meanest reptile then crawling 
 upon the earth possessed, until, as the record goes on to 
 say, his Creator " breathed into his nostrils the breath of 
 life," in consequence of which the heretofore motionless 
 form was vitalized in common with the other creatures. 
 Is there any intimation here, even the most remote, that 
 the life conferred by the Creator consisted in the enjoy- 
 ment by Adam of the favor of God, or in the happiness 
 
 * Murphy on Gen., page 84. 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 15 
 
 bestowed upon him, or in the innocence possessed by the 
 new creature, or in his moral rectitude and harmony 
 with the will of God ? If there is, I have not found 
 any one to point it out to me. If Murphy is authority 
 for the rendering of the original, in the mere matter of 
 life, man and the animals possessed it in common. This 
 all seems to accord with the plain declaration of the 
 Bible in other places. Speaking of the lower order of 
 animal life in Lev. I i:io, God says, "of all that move in 
 the waters, and of any living thing which is in the 
 waters," also in Eze. 47:9, " every thing that liveth, which 
 moveth." "Living thing" in the first quotation, and 
 " thing that liveth," in the second, are in the original 
 the same words that in Gen. 2:7 are translated "living 
 soul." Thesi are in addition to Gen. 1:20, 21, 24, where 
 the same Hebrew words are used in reference to the 
 brutes. One more quotation in this connection will suf- 
 fice. Gen. 7:22 reads, "all in whose nostrils was the 
 breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died." The 
 Hebrew here for " nostril . . . breath of life " is the same 
 that in Gen. 2:7 is used in narrating the process of giv- 
 ing life to the first man. From the testimony of the 
 Bible it appears that so far as life itself is concerned, it 
 was bestowed by the Creator upon the lower order of his 
 creatures, as well as upon man who stood at the head 
 of all his works on earth; and as concerns the possession 
 of life, there is no difference between the man and the 
 brute, and it is to be carefully noted that in the passages 
 before quoted, the words used in the original for " liv- 
 ing" and " life" are the same in all the different texts, 
 so that whatever life means in one place it must mean 
 the others. 
 
16 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 While insisting that the same meaning attaches to 
 the word " life " both for man and brute in the before 
 quoted verses, I by no means claim that, morally or 
 intellectually, the lives of all animate creatures move on 
 the same plane; for in this respect they are radically 
 different What I do assert, and shall endeavor to 
 prove from the word of God, is that the intellect and 
 moral sense in man, and the instinct in the brute, is not 
 the respective life of each, but merely properties per- 
 taining to life. Discarding all prejudice, and standing 
 by the entire word of God, aside from human creeds, 
 and simply comparing scripture with scripture, I think 
 it capable of absolute demonstration, that neither man's 
 relations to God as an accountable being, his original 
 innocence and attendant felicity, nor the renewal of the 
 filial relation broken by sin, and the resultant happiness, 
 4Btt any, or all of them combined, constitute his life, or 
 any part of his life, as the word is used in the quota- 
 tions made, but are merely conditions under which his 
 life is developed and maintained. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 jROM the Bible alone, comparing the various pas- 
 sages in which the word is used and adopting a 
 definition that attaches no ambiguity to any of 
 them, nor needs any labored explanation to 
 make the meaning plain to an ordinary mind, I 
 understand the term "life," as applied to man in 
 the Bible, to mean that principle conferred by the Crea- 
 tor, through the operation of which both his material and 
 immaterial parts are maintained in being, enabled to sub- 
 serve the end of their creation, and preserved from disor- 
 ganization and consumption. The word is also used, at 
 times, to designate the outward, visible activities of the 
 organism it pervades and preserves; but this is a second- 
 ary meaning. It may be objected that the immaterial 
 part of man, i. e., the soul, is not subject to disorganiza- 
 tion; but is not this a mere assumption, and a wrong one ? 
 Is not life as necessary to the soul, to guard it against 
 disorganization and extinction, as it is to the body? 
 The immaterial part of man, called the soul, wills, 
 elects, loves, fears, and suffers, wholly independently of the 
 body; and the discharge of these functions, so diverse in 
 their character, necessitates an organism of varied capa- 
 bilities; for, to use the argument of Paul (i Cor. 12:17), 
 If the whole soul were a will, where were the love ? If 
 
 (17) 
 
i8 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 the whole were perception, where were the choosing? 
 These functions necessitate the organism by which they 
 are discharged, or an harmonious arrangement in one 
 being, of several powers and faculties with the condi- 
 tions necessary for their exercise; and this, it seems to 
 me, may properly be called an organism. The principle 
 which preserves this organism intact, is its life; and that 
 which holds the material part of man secure against 
 disorganization and decay, is its life. Going still far- 
 ther, that which sustains the oak in being, through the 
 centuries, or preserves the fragile plant, blooming its 
 single summer in the garden border, is respectively the 
 life of each. 
 
 I therefore restate my definition of life as being 
 that principle conferred by the Creator, through the op- 
 eration of which both the material and immaterial parts 
 of man are maintained in being, and preserved from dis- 
 organization and consumption, and enabled to subserve 
 the end of their creation. If the above is the true def- 
 inition of life, then death cannot mean irreclaimably sin- 
 ful habits, or alienation from God and all good, nor eter- 
 nal, unmitigated sorrow and sufferings; but simply the 
 withdrawal of this vital principle, and the consequent 
 disorganization and extinction of that which its presence 
 had preserved in being, and made active in the direction 
 of the end for which it was created. And this definition 
 of death applies equally to man, beast, or vegetable, and 
 needs no explanation to make clear the meaning of any 
 passage in the Bible where the word is used. 
 
 In John 19 : 19, we read that when our Lord was 
 crucified, Pilate had written and put upon his cross, 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 19 
 
 " Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews; " " and it was 
 written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin." It would 
 have been a comparatively easy matter for a person 
 knowing either one of these languages to ascertain 
 what the corresponding word in either of the other 
 inscriptions meant, though entirely ignorant of the lan- 
 guage in other respects. So the Rosetta stone, by its 
 one sentence in a known language, gave the key with 
 which to unlock the secrets of the otherwise unintel- 
 ligible characters upon its face. In like manner, some 
 texts of Scripture seem so arranged that we may ob- 
 tain a clear understanding as to what was the mind 
 of the Spirit regarding the meaning of these words, 
 " life " and " death." One of these passages is found in 
 Eze. 33 : 1 1, and reads, " Say unto them, As / live, saith 
 the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the 
 wicked ; but that the wicked turn from his way and 
 live; turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why 
 will ye die, O house of Israel?" That which separates 
 Jehovah from all else in the universe and which he 
 claims as the distinctive mark of his Deity, is his being. 
 Others there may be who are holy even as he, who are 
 so strong in virtue as to defy the fiercest assaults of evil, 
 whose power is equal to creating worlds, and whose wis- 
 dom may suffice to govern them; but if there are such 
 exalted intelligences as these, all their powers, yes, their 
 very being itself, is derived from him who claims for him- 
 self alone, inherent uncreated existence. 
 
 We are told in the third chapter of Exodus, when 
 God appeared to Moses at Horeb, that Moses hesitated 
 about going to his countrymen in Egypt, and when he 
 
20 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 asked the name of the God who sent him, God replied, 
 ' : Say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me." 
 This distinctive quality of uncreated, self-sustained be- 
 ing, God repeatedly alludes to, when he wishes to im- 
 press upon men, with the utmost emphasis, some impor- 
 tant truth. "As I live saith the Lord," is an expression 
 many times used in the Bible, and u As the Lord liveth," 
 became in the mouths of prophets and holy men the 
 most solemn form of affirmation. 
 
 But to return to the verse quoted from Ezekiel, 
 What is the evident meaning of the words "live" and 
 "die?" 
 
 Language, if it is to be intelligible, must be constant 
 in its meaning, /. *., the same word in the same or simi- 
 lar connections must be supposed to convey the same 
 idea. Of course there are figures of speech wherein 
 words are taken out of the line of their ordinary mean- 
 ing; but even in such cases, the relation of the language 
 to the object referred to is such that there can be no 
 need for mistake. For instance, when we read of the 
 "wings of the wind," the "throne of God," the "sword 
 of the Spirit," the " music of the spheres," the dullest in- 
 tellect recognizes the figure and apprehends the mean- 
 ing. But when treating of ordinary things, and espe- 
 cially when putting on record important historical facts 
 for the instruction of mankind, or edicts for the govern- 
 ment of nations, such a use of language is not permissi- 
 ble, but is carefully guarded against. If an earthly gov- 
 ernment should affix a penalty to the crime of treason, 
 using such ambiguous language that one judge should 
 declare it meant life-long imprisonment, another banish- 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 21 
 
 ment to some penal colony with severe labor, and a third 
 interpret it as awarding death, the whole world would 
 say that such a government was unfit to continue a day. 
 
 I cannot believe that he who created man and placed 
 him under obligation of obedience to his laws, has been 
 less guarded or explicit than are human rulers in the 
 choice of the language used for announcing his decrees 
 and affixing his penalties to their transgression. When 
 he says, " In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely 
 die," and "The soul that sinneth, it shall die," he employs 
 no figure of speech to conceal the fearful import of the 
 words. When he says, "As I live I have no pleasure in 
 the death of him that dieth" (Eze. 18 ; 32), his life is 
 contrasted with the death of the wicked; and when in 
 the same verse he calls upon the wicked to turn from 
 his wickedness "and live," it is that he shall come into 
 possession of that which the speaker in the same verse 
 claims to possess exclusively as an inherent principle, 
 viz., "life." When God says, "As I live," he has no ref- 
 erence to his holiness, or his wisdom, or his power, or 
 beatitude. He most clearly does refer to the distinctive 
 quality which he claims for himself alone as the uncre- 
 ated life. Therefore when in the same verse and con- 
 nection he calls upon the wicked to turn "and live," he 
 does not call him' primarily to the practice of holiness, 
 for this is included in the turning, the result of which is 
 the obtaining life; and for the forgiven sinner to live 
 must be the same thing essentially as for the forgiving 
 Creator to live; although life inheres in the one and is 
 communicated to the other. 
 
 At the risk of being tedious, let me ask atten- 
 
22 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 tion to this eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel from a different 
 point of observation, which, though in a measure em- 
 bracing the previous view, extends somewhat in another 
 direction. In verse 4, God says, " The soul that sinneth, 
 it shall die," and in verse 27 where " the wicked man 
 turneth away from his wickedness .... and do- 
 eth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul 
 alive." The first point to be made here is that the life 
 and death spoken of in this chapter do not apply to the 
 material part of man, or this present stage of being; 
 for as regards these, all men, the righteous and the wicked, 
 fare alike; therefore these terms must refer to con- 
 tinued, eternal life, and radical, permanent death. The 
 one must also be understood as contrary to the other, 
 for verse 13 places them in this relation. It says, "He 
 shall not live; . . . he shall surely die, "and the contrast is 
 repeated in verse 2 1 in the same words, with the order 
 reversed, " He shall surely live, he shall not die." Then 
 again it is to be observed that the Hebrew word trans- 
 lated soul is the same used in Gen. 2:7," and man be- 
 came a living soul" I am aware that this word " soul " 
 is often used to designate a personality, as, for instance, 
 the members of Abram's family when he left Haran are 
 spoken of as "all the souls he had gotten in Haran.'* 
 Gen. 12:2. Neither is this the only other sense in which 
 it is used; but whether employed to signify the affec- 
 tions, or the life, or a person, I do not recollect any place 
 where the connection does not serve to make its meaning 
 plain. The point, however, which I wish to make from 
 this eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel, is not affected either 
 way by this varied use of the word. It is simply this, 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 23 
 
 that the soul which God gave to Adam at his creation is 
 subject to death, for its Creator asserts that in certain 
 events it shall die, and no longer live. If this is so, the 
 soul of man cannot be immortal, for the word " immortal '' 
 means deathless, imperishable, not subject to death. 
 
 At this point our religious teachers meet us with 
 the explanation, " But this death that is spoken of here is 
 spiritual death which the soul shall experience." And 
 when they are asked what spiritual death is, they reply 
 that it is estrangement from God, the loss of spiritual 
 perceptions, the spiritual eyes are blind to spiritual light, 
 the ears deaf to spiritual truth, and the whole spiritual 
 nature is as insensible to spiritual things as the senses 
 of a man physically dead are to natural objects. I have 
 asked several ministers the meaning of spiritual death 
 and think the above is the fairest statement that can be 
 made of the answers they give. Now this is the very 
 condition the sinful soul is already in ; how then does 
 God say, " If you sin you shall come into this condition?'' 
 There is no pertinence to the threat. It is as if God had 
 said, " The soul that is dead shall die." This single con- 
 sideration should seemingly be enough to set aside the 
 explanation as insufficient and unsatisfactory. 
 
 But again, in verse 23, God says," Have I any pleasure 
 at all that the wicked should die? " Now "the wicked" are 
 exactly in that condition described as spiritual death, so 
 the verse really should read, " Have I any pleasure at all 
 that the spiritually dead should die?" If this is the 
 proper interpretation, and to be wicked is to be spiritu- 
 ally dead, then there is an ulterior death for them to un- 
 dergo which is all that I am contending for. But where 
 
24 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 do our teachers find their warrant for the use of this term, 
 "spiritual death"? I do not find it anywhere in the Bi- 
 ble, and by all generally accepted usage, life must pre- 
 cede death, and so far as the Bible teaches us anything 
 regarding this matter, it is that by nature man has no 
 life of this kind to lose. Our Lord, in John 3 : 6, 7, says 
 "That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; and that 
 which is born of the Spirit, is spirit; marvel not that 
 I said unto thee, Ye must be born again." Paul teaches 
 the same truth in i Cor. 15:45,46. " The first man 
 Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam was made 
 a life-giving Spirit; howbeit, that is not first which is spir- 
 itual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which 
 is spiritual," clearly teaching that by nature as derived 
 from Adam man possesses a "living soul," but attains to 
 no spiritual nature until, through the offices of Jesus 
 Christ on his behalf, he is begotten from above, and 
 brought under the operation of his life-giving Spirit- 
 This may come in sharp conflict with long-cherished be- 
 liefs and deep-rooted prejudices, but if language can 
 .convey ideas, this is what the language of the Bible says. 
 This part of the argument is purposely left incom- 
 plete as it will naturally reappear in a later chapter. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 S the living Father hath sent me, and I live because 
 of the Father, so he that eateth me, even he also, 
 shall live because of me." John 6:57. This is an 
 utterance by our divine Master, making still 
 clearer than does Eze. 33 :ii the meaning to be given 
 to this word " life." That passage which we considered 
 in the last chapter, though coming as from God himself, 
 was enunciated through a human mouth-piece, and may, 
 perhaps correctly, be thought to have its true meaning 
 somewhat obscured through the imperfection of the 
 medium; but in the passage before us there is no such 
 possibility. He who speaks is the Eternal Word, with- 
 out whom nothing was made that was made. He also 
 was the life, and knew, as possibly none but God does 
 know, what, in its essence, is that mysterious principle 
 which we call life. At this place he brings the life of 
 the Father, his own life, and the life of believers in him, 
 into such a relation to each other that the meaning of 
 any one of the three being given, that of the others must 
 readily be found. " The living Father." Repeatedly, 
 in the gospels and epistles, the qualification of " living " 
 is prefixed in speaking of God; and though in the New 
 Testament he is spoken of as the " God of peace," " The 
 only wise God," (i The God of hope, " The most high 
 
 (25) 
 
26 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 God" (but this is evidently a quotation from Gen. 14:18), 
 " The God of all Grace," and in Revelation four times, 
 as "God Almighty," still the prefix "living" is used 
 oftener than all the others together, showing that to those 
 of the new dispensation who were the most illumined by 
 the Holy Spirit, life, more than any or every other 
 quality, was, to them, that which most widely separated 
 God from all his creatures. In order to apprehend the 
 full meaning of this word " living," as used by our Lord 
 in connection with the Father, let us look at some other 
 passages where it is used, and consider its connections. 
 In Matt. 22:32, Jesus, in arguing with the Sadducees 
 regarding the resurrection, says, " God is not the God of 
 the dead, but of the living," and the Greek word trans- 
 lated living there, is the same used in John 6:57. Liv- 
 ing men are, by our Lord, contrasted with dead men; 
 there is not the remotest allusion or reference to any 
 moral condition, or to any state of happiness or suffering, 
 and I do not see where any man or any class of men 
 obtain the authority to say that, in using the word, he 
 meant one thing by it in one place and something rad- 
 ically different in the other places. If, then, in Matt. 
 22:32, the word is used -in its ordinary sense, as desig- 
 nating a living being as contrasted with one deprived of 
 life, why should we not attach a similar meaning to it in 
 John 6:57? It does not seem that we can avoid doing 
 so, if we submit the verse to the test applied to Eze. 
 33:11 in the last chapter. But this is not the only clue 
 to the meaning of the word " living." In Luke 24:5, the 
 angel says to the women at the sepulcher, " Why seek 
 ye the living among the dead," and in Revelation 1:18, 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 27 
 
 our risen Lord says of himself, " I am he that liveth, and 
 was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore; and have 
 the keys of hades and of death." Life and death as here 
 used cannot relate to the moral or spiritual condition of 
 the being referred to, or to his happiness or misery. The 
 contrast is not between such conditions, but between the 
 presence of that principle of life which preserves from 
 disorganization whatever it pervades, and its absence, 
 death. 
 
 If the death, which, in the last text, Jesus says 
 he experienced, had no relation to moral or spiritual 
 conditions, why should the death to which he holds the 
 keys, and which must mean eternal death, be defined as 
 a moral or spiritual condition? And so, also, of the life 
 in the last quotation. If, in the person of Jesus himself, 
 this does not relate to any moral or spiritual condition, 
 but to vital being, where is the authority for saying and 
 insisting that the life which he promises all who 
 will accept it at his hands, is not a like vital existence^ 
 but only the conditions under which that existence shall 
 be passed, and by which it shall be influenced ? If zoe 
 awnios, used in the sixth chapter of John's gospel, in 
 four places, means in the Greek unending holiness, and 
 supreme felicity, why not translate it so instead of giv- 
 ing it an arbitrary equivalent in English, and then, de- 
 fining the equivalent to mean something which, in the 
 ordinary acceptance of the language, it does not mean ? 
 
 This course would makeplain,tothemind of the ordi- 
 nary reader, many points that under the present plan 
 are very much confused. In this verse in John 6:57 the 
 Greek word translated life is used three times, once as 
 
28 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 pertaining to the Father, once to the Lord Jesus Christ 
 and once to the believers on the Lord; and it is impossi- 
 ble that it can have on^ meaning 1 in relation to one of 
 the persons spoken of, and something radically different 
 in relation to the others. Our Lord in the entire chap- 
 ter is evidently speaking of life, and not of the condi- 
 tions attaching to it. The Jews demanded his creden- 
 tials as a prophet or the Messiah, saying that when 
 Moses required obedience he gave proof that he was 
 commissioned by God to exact it, by feeding and sus- 
 taining the lives of the people on the manna supplied in 
 a miraculous way. Jesus replied that in attestation of 
 his divine authority he would, upon all that believed 
 on him, confer eternal life. " Your fathers did eat manna 
 in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread 
 which cometh down out of heaven, that a man may eat 
 thereof and not die." The death experienced by their 
 fathers, had no reference to the circumstances connected 
 with it. Some died in the course of nature, from old 
 age, some were consumed by fire out of heaven, some 
 were swallowed up by the opening of the earth, and 
 went down alive into the pit, some died rebels in heart 
 and act toward God, and some in faith and love; 
 none of these conditions under which they gave up 
 their physical life are so much as alluded to; the one 
 indisputable fact was that "they died." 
 
 The time at length came to each one when the 
 manna supplied by Moses had no sustaining power, 
 and as regards this stage of existence they ceased to 
 be. Now, in contrast to this, Jesus speaks of himself 
 as possessed of power to sustain eternally the lives of 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 all who believe in him, and the death which he thus 
 averts for believers is so compared with the death 
 that Moses was powerless to prevent that both 
 must be taken to mean essentially the same, i. e., 
 the cessation of being. In one case it is the ter- 
 mination of this stage of our being; in the other it is the 
 termination of the future stage of being. If we be- 
 gin at "the living Father," accepting the qualifying pre- 
 fix as referring to essential, uncreated life, inhering in 
 God, and trace this down through the God-man to the 
 believer, giving to him an unending life, independent of 
 ths conditions under which it is maintained, we have a 
 clear, connected, harmonious whole. 
 
 The Father, sole possessor of uncreated, unending 
 being, the Son, the manifestation of the invisible God 
 through his union with the Father, partaking in aH its 
 fullness of the same, and the believer, through the be- 
 getting from above, brought into union with the Son, 
 and thus his eternal life secured. In John 14:19, 
 Jesus says to his disciples, " Because I live, ye shall 
 live also," and this is additional evidence that the eter- 
 nal life, which our Lord so emphatically and repeatedly 
 claims, can be given to men only by himself,* is to be 
 understood of vital existence; otherwise there would 
 be but little force in the statement, and no connection 
 between the premise and the conclusion. 
 
 The argument appears to be this : I am about to 
 die. For a little while I shall be taken away from you 
 and laid in the grave. Your light will go out in dark- 
 ness, your hope expire in despair. But I will not finally 
 
 *Jno. 5:21, 25, 26; 6:47; 10:28. 
 
30 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 leave you thus. I will come to you again. Although 
 the world shall see me no more, ye shall see me, and 
 my appearing alive again after my crucifixion shall 
 demonstrate to you my power over death, and assure 
 you of obtaining the eternal life I have promised, and 
 the ground for your assurance shall be that you see 
 me possessed of a life which death could not destroy, 
 and because I have it, you may be sure that you shall 
 possess it also. Now if life for their Lord means the 
 vital essence by which he is, and continues to be, and 
 through the operation of which he rose from the grave, 
 his disciples might legitimately conclude that he could 
 confer the same upon them, but it would be no warrant 
 for their assuming that he would bestow upon them 
 something else. He will, of his abounding grace, be- 
 stow upon his redeemed ones unnumbered and inestima- 
 ble blessings according to his other promises, but their 
 expectation regarding these is not based upon this " be- 
 cause I have life," nor dependent upon it. It also fol- 
 lows that unless the life which Jesus bestows is of the 
 same nature with that he possesses, there is no logical 
 sequence from the " because I have life," to the " ye 
 shall also have life." 
 
 We have wandered away from John 6:57, with 
 which we began the chapter, though the digression has 
 not taken us away from the subject matter of the verse. 
 The specific promise made by the Lord in the verse is 
 just this : "As I live because of the Father, so he that 
 eateth me, even he shall live because of me." The life 
 of the Father, the life of the Son, and the life of the be- 
 liever must, if language is to be understood, all be the 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 31 
 
 same in character, though different in intensity. If life 
 for the believer means the development in him of the 
 Christian graces, and the subjection of all sinful pas- 
 sions and proclivities, and the final attainment of com- 
 plete holiness and perfect beatitude in the heavenly 
 paradise, then life for the Father and the Son must 
 mean the same; but the whole context, as well in the 
 original as in the translation, forbids any such defini- 
 tion of the word, as applied to the Father and the Son, 
 consequently it cannot be so defined as applied to be- 
 lievers. 
 
 A little consideration of the twenty-first verse of 
 the fifth chapter of this same Gospel may confirm 
 this position. We there read, " For as the Father 
 raiseth up the dead and giveth them life, even so the 
 Son giveth life to whosoever he will;" and in the 
 twenty-sixth verse, " For as the Father hath life in him- 
 self, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.'' 
 The Father being himself the essence and source of all 
 life, th* Son, by his oneness with the Father, is equally 
 so, and this quality of inherent life pertaining to the 
 Deity he can reproduce in other beings at his will. 
 But, as in all the laws which God has made, the opera- 
 tions of which come under our observation, we see like 
 uniformly producing like, and the offspring, in its nature, 
 closely resembling the progenitor, so we must believe, 
 in the absence of any authority to the contrary, that 
 the life which flows out from the " Living God " is, in 
 its nature, clearly analagous to his own life, though he 
 may permit, or cause it to be maintained, under very 
 varied conditions in different orders of beings or even in 
 
32 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 individuals of the same class. In the fifth and sixth 
 chapters of John, where so much is said of eternal life as 
 derived from Jesus Christ, there is no allusion, in the remot- 
 est degree, to happiness or misery, to harmony with God, 
 or rebellion against him, to sin or holiness, to punishment 
 or reward, in connection with the subject, except the 
 gift of life by the Son to believers, and by implication 
 the loss of it to all who fail to obtain it from his-hand; for 
 in the fifty-third verse of the sixth chapter heemphatically 
 asserts that, aside from his work, there is no life in man; 
 all the life he has is from without, and may at any mo- 
 ment be withdrawn. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ; N the preceding pages, my case, though by no 
 means complete, has been so far presented that it is 
 perhaps advisable to devote this chapter to a consid- 
 eration of some of the objections which are urged by 
 Christians against the definition herein given to " life " 
 and " death." The only objections that will be consid- 
 ered will be those based upon the Bible, for it is from 
 this book alone that I hope for the confirmation of my 
 views if true, or will accept their refutation if erroneous. 
 The first objection most likely to be raised is that this 
 life-giving : which was treated of in the last chapter, is 
 not literally a bestowal of life, but a bringing of the soul 
 out from under the power of sinful passions and affec- 
 tions, which, so long as they continue dominant, keep 
 the man in a state of spiritual death. On page 23, chap- 
 ter 2, we considered the term "spiritual death "in one 
 light, leaving the subject to be resumed at this point for 
 further investigation. The above objection is sustained 
 by quoting Eph. 2:1," who were dead in trespasses and 
 sins," and Col. 2:13, "And you being dead in your sins 
 . . . . hath he made alive together with him," i. e. 
 Jesus texts which, to many, appear entirely subversive 
 of my position, while to me they only serve to strengthen 
 and confirm it. The Revised Version in both places reads 
 3 (33) 
 
34 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 "through" instead of "in," making the meaning much 
 plainer. 
 
 Let us first take Eph. 2 : I. In the first part of 
 this epistle, Paul, referring possibly to Jewish believ- 
 ers, says they have been predestinated to the adoption 
 of children and accepted in the Beloved, in whom they 
 have obtained an inheritance that they should be to his 
 glory who first trusted in Christ. Thus to Eph. 1:12, 
 where the "us" of verse 3 is dropped and the Ephe- 
 sian converts are addressed : " In whom ye also trusted " 
 and " were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise which 
 is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of 
 the purchased possession." In 2 Cor. 5 : 4, 5, Paul tells 
 us of what the Spirit was the earnest ; we there read, " We 
 who are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened, 
 not that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that 
 mortality might be swallowed up of life," i. e., that a life 
 subject to death might be merged in or succeeded by a life 
 not subject to death, or eternal life. " Now he who hath 
 wrought us for the self-same thing is God, who also hath 
 given unto us the earnest of tJie Spirit'' So we see tha 
 the purchased possession of Eph. 2 : I is eternal life, as 
 the earnest or pledge of which, God had given them the 
 Holy Spirit; and Paul prays for these Ephesian believ- 
 ers, that they might have given them wisdom, and knowl- 
 edge, and understanding, that they might know that the 
 same mighty power that raised Jesus from the dead, was 
 pledged thus effectively to work on their behalf; now 
 comes the verse quoted, "And you hath he made alive, 
 when you were dead because of your trespasses and 
 sins." There appears to be nothing here that necessi- 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 35 
 
 tates or makes possible the introduction of any other 
 life or death than the same which we have all along been 
 considering. The death Paul is writing of is the death in- 
 curred by transgression, which passed upon all men be- 
 cause of their trespasses and sins; and the life is so as- 
 sociated with the resurrection from the dead of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ that there is no possibility of separating it 
 from that life which it is his prerogative to bestow upon 
 men. Thus far for Eph. 2 : I. Col. 2 : 13 reads, "And 
 you, being dead because of your sins .... hath 
 he made alive together with him," i. e., Christ. Chap- 
 ter 3, verse i, goes on to say, "If ye are risen with 
 Christ," referring to Col. 2 : 12, "seek those things that 
 are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. 
 
 . . . For ye are dead, and your life is hid with 
 Christ in God." Here again is the same state of things 
 repeated. We are dead because of sin ; made alive by 
 Jesus. Christ. Paul tells them that they had no life of 
 their own, that they were dead, and the only source to 
 which they could turn for life was Jesus Christ, whose 
 life-giving power and the effects it produced were brought 
 to our notice in the last chapter. 
 
 . Our definition of life and death seems as well adapted 
 to explain these two verses as any other ; indeed they 
 need no explaining except, perhaps, as regards the tenses 
 of the verbs. Paul says ye are dead. I understand this 
 as meaning that, because of sin, man had incurred the 
 penalty affixed to sin, which is death eternal death, 
 with no hope of a resurrection. Rom. 4 : 17 says that 
 God " speaketh of those things which are not as though 
 they were." Col. 3 : 3 and the verse above quoted, speak 
 
36 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 of men as already dead. Rom. 5:12 says, "death passed 
 upon all men," and in Rom. 8 : 30 we read, "And whom 
 he called, them he also justified, and whom he justified, 
 them he also glorified." The very last of the race, who 
 shall be made a partaker of the grace of God through 
 his Son, is spoken of by Paul as in the sight of God al- 
 ready glorified, and, as most generally spoken of in the 
 Bible, the whole race of man was as much dead when 
 Adam sinned in Eden, as the saints were glorified when, 
 in the councils of eternity, infinite love and wisdom de- 
 vised redemption for them. 
 
 In these quotations from Ephesians and Colossians, 
 Paul merely says to believers, when, because of your 
 sins, you had come under the penalty of death, Jesus 
 Christ interposed, and by his own death redeemed 
 you and gave you eternal life. The words he used 
 are "dead" and "alive," not some spiritual, mental, 
 or moral condition resembling death or life, but the 
 thing itself. As regards God and his word, man, aside 
 from Jesus Christ, down to the very last one who shall 
 stand upon this earth, is already dead ; and every one 
 who shall accept the offers of his grace, glorified. It is 
 only as regards man's experiences, that the death and the 
 glory are ingthe future. It is asserted by many that the 
 being in this sinful condition, spoken of in Eph. 2:1 and 
 Col. 2:13, is death, and that this is the meaning of the 
 word as used there and in like passages. Such an un- 
 derstanding of the term would necessitate paraphrasing 
 such passages as follows: "And you who were estranged 
 from God by wicked works, disobedient to his commands, 
 oblivious to his perfections and the beauties of holiness, 
 
THE WORLD TO COMK. 37 
 
 despisers of his love, and aliens from his favor, hath he 
 brought back to himself, made conformable to his will, 
 revealed to you the excellence that is in himself, given 
 you the spirit of a child, and a place in your father's 
 house and heart." 
 
 The former of these conditions they say is what 
 is meant by death, i. e., spiritual death ; and the latter 
 is by them called life, i. e., spiritual life. The erroneous 
 character of such an assumption cannot fail to be 
 perceived upon a little examination. Sin is nowhere 
 in the Bible recognized as death; but from Gen. 2:17, 
 where death is first mentioned, to Rev. 21:8, where the 
 word is last used, sin is uniformly stated as the procuring 
 cause of death. Rom. 5:12 says, " Wherefore as by one 
 man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, so 
 death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." 
 Death, in the above, is plainly the penalty for sin, and 
 not the sinful state into which mankind had fallen, and 
 by means of which the penalty was incurred. Rom. 6:21 
 says, " What fruit had ye then in those things whereof 
 ye are now ashamed ? for the end of those things is 
 death." Any definite course of action, and the penalty 
 attached to such a line of conduct, or the results arrived 
 at by it, are certainly separate and distinct things. 
 Therefore the end of this sinful course being death, the 
 course pursued to reach this end cannot also be death. 
 Rom. 6 : 23, "For the wages of sin is death." No one 
 will attempt to show that the service rendered, and the 
 wages received for the service performed, are identical. 
 And to be dead because of sin and trespass is as different 
 a thing from a sinful condition, at enmity with God, as 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 are the wages paid for a piece of work done by a man 
 a different thing from the work by which the wages were 
 earned. Therefore, if the wages of sin is death, the sin,. 
 by which the wages were earned, cannot be death also. 
 The civil law says that vagrancy is a misdemeanor to- 
 be punished by imprisonment. But vagrancy is one 
 thing and the imprisonment a very different thing. Sup- 
 posing a poor wretch, convicted of vagrancy, should be 
 told by the Court, " You shall go on wandering about,. 
 picking up your food where you can, sheltering your- 
 self as best you may, ragged., homeless, and forlorn," and 
 the judge should say to him, " This is what the statute 
 means by imprisonment," would he not be thought a 
 lunatic ? Again, suppose a sinner at the bar of God, 
 found guilty of estrangement from him by wicked works,. 
 of disobedience to his commands, and rebellion against 
 his authority, of indifference to his perfections and of 
 despising the offers of his grace, should be told by the 
 Judge of living and dead that he should go on doing 
 just as he had been doing, and that this was death, the 
 penalty prescribed for transgression, would the anomaly 
 be less than in the other case ? I may seem needlessly 
 prolix in regard to these passages from Ephesians and 
 Colossians, but they are so much depended on to over- 
 throw the position taken regarding the meaning of death 
 in these pages that it seemed important to give them 
 full consideration. 
 
 That I have not misrepresented the position of the 
 orthodox churches on this point will be seen in the fol- 
 lowing pages. I asked an esteemed brother in Christ^ 
 a doctor of divinity of an evangelical denomination, to 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 39 
 
 give me his definition of eternal life as I had heard it in 
 the pulpit the preceding Sunday. It is as- follows, and 
 I think it is the accepted one in all the churches. He 
 says: 
 
 ''God's gift to man is eternal life; sin is death; un- 
 checked, unremedied, unpardoned, it ultimates in the 
 destruction of the moral nature. The remedy for dark- 
 ness is light, for ignorance, knowledge, and for sin 
 (which is death), life. This is God's answer to the ques- 
 tion of questions, How shall man be saved from sin? 
 * Give him a fresh gift of life.' As the Chicago River 
 was cured of its foulness by pouring Lake Michigan 
 through it, so is man rescued from depravity and ruin 
 by a fresh impartation of life from God. What is life? 
 It consists in actions, conduct. But back of conduct 
 lies the will, and back of the will, lie motives, and the 
 same motives affect different men differently. Back of 
 motives, lies a spirit, a disposition, the fountain-head 
 whence the life-stream flows; and the radical gospel of 
 Jesus Christ says, Go to the fountain-head; plant in the 
 heart a new spirit, and the result will be new principles, 
 new motives, a changed will, a changed life. As you 
 transform a tree by inserting into it a living scion from 
 another tree, so does God graft the heart with a new 
 spirit, a living principle from his own heart, a scion from 
 the tree of life; and presently the man is a new man, 
 the life a new life. God opens his heart and in the per- 
 son of his Son pours out his life-blood that we may live 
 thereby. He offers himself to us, saying, This is my 
 body, eat it; this represents my blood, drink it all, in 
 expressive symbol and token of the great central, vital 
 
40 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 truth, that he is the life of our life, that we live in him 
 and upon him, thus becoming partakers of the divine 
 nature." 
 
 The first statement, that " God's gift " to man is eter- 
 nal life, passes unchallenged. But the next, that "sin is 
 death," is, I think, wholly untenable. Jas. 1:15 says> 
 " Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." The 
 illustration is drawn from a natural birth; death is repre- 
 sented as the offspring of sin, and unless this child and 
 the parent are one and the same person, death, and sin 
 which brings forth death, cannot be one and the same 
 thing. For a fuller consideration of this point see chap- 
 ter 4, page 28. But the definition goes on to say, " un- 
 checked, unremedied, unpardoned, it ultimates in the 
 destruction of the moral nature." The apostle James, 
 as quoted above, says, " Sin, when it is finished \ bringeth 
 forth death," but with the above definition, sin never is 
 finished. The sinner, " unchecked, unremedied, unpar- 
 doned," goes on endlessly in sin and never arrives at that 
 point where his sin can be said to be finished and the 
 destruction of his moral nature effected. " How shall 
 man be saved from sin?" God answers, " Give him a 
 fresh gift of life." "As the Chicago River was cured of 
 its foulness by pouring Lake Michigan through it, so is 
 man rescued from depravity and ruin by a fresh impar- 
 tation of life from God." It appears to me that here 
 cause is put for result. The uniform teaching of Script- 
 ure, I believe, is that men must turn away from sin, and 
 towards God, before he will bestow upon them eternal 
 life; and not that this is bestowed to produce such a turn- 
 ing. In Matt. 19 : 16, the young man who would obtain 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 41 
 
 eternal life, is told by our Lord to come into harmony 
 with the law of God, and then he might hope for the 
 gift; and. in the 29th verse, eternal life is represented as 
 being bestowed only upon such as have shown a fitness 
 for it, and not as the agency to produce that fitness. In 
 Matt. 25 : 46, it is the already righteous that enter into 
 life eternal, and the eternal life does not appear to have 
 been in the least degree the producing cause of their 
 righteousness. In Luke 10 : 27, the lawyer who asked 
 how he could obtain eternal life, was told by our Lord 
 to love God with all his heart, and his neighbor as him- 
 self; virtually he was to leave off all sinful habits and 
 affections, and when this was done he should receive the 
 coveted boon. But eternal life was not given to help him 
 gain this freedom from sin, for he would be well on the 
 road to holiness before he could expect the fulfillment 
 of the promise. In John 10 : 27, 28, Jesus says, "My 
 sheep hear my voice, .... and I give unto them 
 eternal life." He gives it to those already his followers, 
 not that they may become so. John 12 : 25, " He that 
 hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eter- 
 nal." It is right relations towards God that result in 
 eternal life, and not these that produce these relations. 
 Rom. 2:7," To them who by patient continuance in well 
 doing seek for glory, and honor, and immortality, eternal 
 life." These recipients of the gift have been a long time 
 patiently and continuously striving against sin } but it 
 does not appear as if they had been assisted in this strife 
 by eternal life, but rather that this is the outcome of the 
 conflict. Rom. 6:22: "But now being made free 
 from sin, and become servants to God, ye have 
 
42 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life." 
 The apostle certainly teaches, as do all of these passages 
 quoted (and the Bible is full of similar ones); that eter- 
 nal life is the end or outcome of holiness, and not the 
 means of its attainment. It seems to be needless to go 
 farther in this direction. 
 
 My brother asks, "What is life?" and answers, " It 
 consists in actions, conduct." But is this so? Are ac- 
 tions, conduct life? The most that can be rightly 
 claimed for these, to my mind, is that they evince the 
 possession of life by the being in whom they are seen; 
 but to say that these visible manifestations of life are 
 life itself, is confounding visible things with invisible; 
 the known with the unknown; the sun with the verdure 
 with which its light and warmth cover the field and for- 
 est. But to proceed. " But back of conduct, lies the 
 will; and back of the will, lie motives." I know very 
 well that I have no business to venture my little canoe 
 on the wide ocean of metaphysics, and shall attempt 
 nothing so rash; but I think I risk nothing in asserting 
 that will and motive are entirely separate and radically 
 distinct from the life which makes the exercise of the 
 will and the operation of motives possible. But again. 
 " Back of motive, lies a spirit, a disposition, the fountain- 
 head from whence the life-stream flows." Here, again, 
 I am at variance with my brother, for the Bible teaches 
 me that God alone is the Fountain-head of all life. 
 John 5 : 40, which reads, "Ye will not come to me that 
 ye might have life," and Ps. 36 : 9, "For with me is the 
 fountain of life," should be enough to settle this point. 
 
 And further, " The radical Gospel of Jesus Christ 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 43 
 
 says, Go to the fountain-head. .... Plant in the 
 heart a new spirit." I may be very dull of comprehen- 
 sion, but to my mind the subject is getting very much 
 mixed. First, " The spirit was the fountain-head from 
 which the life-stream flowed." Now it is the heart that 
 is the fountain-head, and the life is two removes from 
 God: First, the life finding its fountain-head in the 
 spirit or disposition; then the heart the abode of the 
 spirit. Where does the life touch the Eternal Word, 
 who says of himself, "I am the Life." 
 
 But when this new spirit or disposition is implanted 
 in the heart, " the result will be new principles, new mo- 
 tives, a changed will, a changed life." This all seems to 
 me to read backward if the earlier part of this definition 
 is correct; for there the foul stream of man's polluted 
 nature was to be cured and rescued from ruin and de- 
 pravity by the fresh impartation of life from God; but 
 here the life comes in, as I have claimed it should, at the 
 end, as the outcome; or, as my brother says, "the result 
 of new principles, new motives, a changed will." But 
 in continuation, "As you transform a tree by inserting 
 into it a living scion from another tree, so does God 
 graft the heart with a new spirit, a living principle from 
 his own heart, a scion from the tree of life; and presently 
 the man is a new man, the life a new life; God opens his 
 heart, and, in the person of his Son, pours out his life- 
 blood that we may live thereby. He offers himself to 
 us, saying, This is my body, eat it; this represents my 
 blood, drink it all, in expressive symbol and token of the 
 great central, vital truth, that he is the life of our life, 
 that we live in him, and upon him, thus becoming par- 
 takers of the divine nature." 
 
44 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 I must say that, though the language is all in accord 
 with what is constantly heard from the pulpit, when 
 I attempt to analyze it, and bring it to the test of Script- 
 ure, it is not intelligible, and conveys no clear, definite 
 impression, to my mind. I cannot see, from the teach- 
 ing of the Bible, how eternal life is any factor in produc- 
 ing holiness in men; for this is the specific work of the 
 Holy Spirit upon all who, accepting Jesus Christ as a 
 Saviour, are made partakers of the benefits of his medi- 
 ation; first, in forgiveness of sin and justification before 
 God, then of the indwelling, renewing, comforting pres- 
 ence and power of the Holy Spirit, the resurrection of 
 the body, and the end. everlasting life. It seems to me 
 that my definition is simple, where the other is involved; 
 clear, where that is obscure; scriptural, where that is not 
 so; and definite and intelligible, where that is vague 
 and incomprehensible. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 S confirming the correctness of our definition of life 
 let us look at Heb. 7:23. The writer says that un- 
 der the Levitical economy there must of necessity 
 have been a succession of priests, because one after an- 
 other these died, leaving their office vacant, until it was 
 filled by a new man. But Jesus, " Because \\eabidetk for- 
 ever -hath an unchangeable priesthood," and in the next 
 verse we learn that his ability to save completely those 
 who put their trust in him, rests upon the fact that he lives 
 forever. In the sixteenth verse the radical difference 
 pointed out as existing between the Aaronic priesthood 
 and that of Jesus, is that the former was according to 
 the law of a carnal commandment, the other according 
 to the power of an endless life. The living forever of 
 verse 25, and the endless life of verse 16, which so dis- 
 tinguish our Great High Priest, have no reference to his 
 moral nature or to the conditions by which he is envi- 
 roned, but to the fact that he possesses in himself a life 
 which is unending. 
 
 If this is the character of the life of our Lord, why 
 should it be supposed or said that the eternal life de- 
 rived from him should not be of the same character? 
 And when, as in John 3:16, he says that believers in him 
 
 (45) 
 
46 THE WOULD TO COME. 
 
 should never perish, but have eternal life, and in John 
 10: 28, " and I give unto them eternal life, and they shall 
 never perish," why should not the language be accepted 
 in its ordinary straightforward meaning? Isaiah 55:3 
 says: " Hear, and your soul shall live, and I will make 
 an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies 
 of David." If for the soul to live, is to be in a condi- 
 tion of beatific holiness, where is the need of any fur- 
 ther covenanted good? All that it can possess or enjoy 
 of good is already secured, and it can have neither 
 need nor capacity for more. But God says here, " Your 
 soul shall live and I will make an everlasting covenant 
 with you." The life promised is evidently one thing and 
 the covenanted mercies are something super-added to 
 the life; for the two are spoken of as distinct. 
 
 It seems to me that it has been shown from the 
 Bible that the life which is given to men by Jesus 
 Christ, and which he says is eternal in duration, does 
 not consist in any relation which man sustains towards 
 God, nor in the conditions or surroundings growing out 
 of such relation, but rather in the conferring of a princi- 
 ple which insures perpetuity of being to the regenerated 
 man. If my former proposition is correct that death is 
 the contrary of life, the Bible, if it is to support me in 
 my definition, should represent death not as a condition 
 under which life is continued, but as the extinction of 
 life. Incidentally we have examined this question par- 
 tially, but a more extended and careful consideration is 
 necessary for a satisfactory answer, and I pray that the 
 reader may come to the investigation with all prejudices 
 laid aside, and with a sincere desire to know the truth. 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 47 
 
 Our religious teachers tell us that frequently, indeed, 
 generally, as used in the Bible, the term death is 
 to be qualified by the adjective u spiritual," understood 
 as added or prefixed. The definition given to the term 
 thus amended will be found on page 23, chapter 2, and 
 page 37, chapter 4, and it is unnecessary to repeat 
 it, but it seems to me just as incorrect to say that such 
 relations towards God are death, as it would be to say 
 that disloyalty to an earthly sovereign, or open rebellion 
 against him is physical death. 
 
 In all civilized countries I think actual treason has 
 death for its penalty, but the treasonable condition of a 
 man's mind and the plotting with his fellow conspira- 
 tors cannot with the least propriety be styled death. 
 Under the government of God, disloyalty towards him 
 and the withholding from him on the part of man of that 
 full allegiance which he justly demands, has death affixed 
 to it as its penalty; but to say that this state of disloy- 
 alty and rebellion, called in the Bible sin, is death, is as 
 incorrect and unwarrantable as would be the calling of 
 the treasonable conduct of a subject of a human gov- 
 ernment, death. There is another sense in which death 
 is used by our religious teachers of the day, interchang- 
 ably with destruction, either term being, in the sense 
 used, as unscriptural as the one above called spiritual 
 death. This other death, or destruction, is a state of 
 intolerable but unmitigated suffering, which the finally 
 impenitent are doomed to undergo as the penalty de- 
 nounced against transgression. But this condition of 
 unrest, of ungratified desire, of hopeless despair, and in- 
 extinguishable hatred to all good, is no more death, or 
 
48 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 destruction, than are the adverse and painful circumstan- 
 ces that afflict men in this world the death or destruc- 
 tion of the body. A man may suffer excruciating pain 
 he may be bereaved and sorrow stricken, he may be 
 poor and friendless; but all of these, or any other con- 
 ceivable surroundings or conditions, cannot, with any 
 propriety, be called death or destruction. Neither, on 
 the other hand, can any condition of rank, or power, or 
 wealth, or happiness, be called the life of the possessor, 
 though in some cases they may prolong or shorten it, or 
 make it more or less enjoyable. 
 
 Our Lord draws very clearly and unmistakably the 
 line between the life, and those things which modify the 
 conditions of a living being. In Mark 8:36, he asks, 
 What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole 
 world, and forfeit his life ? The loss of his life takes 
 from him every opportunity for enjoying the pleasure 
 which, had he lived, he might have derived from the pos- 
 session of every source of earthly good. The thought is 
 the same as we find in Luke 12:15: "A man's life con- 
 sisteth not in the abundance of the things which hepos- 
 sesseth." And the original of this word " consisteth," 
 it seems to me, might with greater propriety be rendered 
 " is " (a man's life is not, etc.), as it is in other places in 
 both the authorized and revised versions. It is worthy 
 of note that the Greek word translated life, is zoe, the 
 same that is invariably used with the adjective when 
 eternal life is the theme; but that in the twenty-second 
 and twenty-third verses an entirely different Greek word 
 is found, which is never used except in connection with 
 the physical stage of being. These quotations from the 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 49 
 
 sayings of our Lord, show that the world, with all of 
 material good with which it can surround a man, is 
 one thing, and the life is another, and entirely differ- 
 ent thing. If, then, this mortal life (psuche\ is some- 
 thing wholly distinct from the conditions under which it 
 is maintained, why should not the eternal life (zoe) t be 
 something just as distinct from the conditions under 
 which it is maintained? 
 
 Let us now turn to the Old Testament and see if 
 it can afford us any light upon the meaning of the word. 
 The penalty pronounced by the Creator against trans- 
 gression, was death. " In the day that thou eatest 
 thereof, thou shalt surely die." What significance the 
 language may have had to Adam, we cannot tell. He 
 must instinctively have shrunk from the experience in- 
 dicated, because God had affixed it as a punishment for 
 disobedience, though, possibly, he may no more have 
 understood the full import of the warning than would 
 a little child who had never seen or heard of death. 
 But whatever uncertainty exists in our minds regarding 
 the meaning of the word to Adam, it does not appear 
 that there need be any doubt as to what it meant to 
 those who came after him, down to the time when the 
 Sun of Righteousness gave at least a twilight glow to 
 the previous obscurity, and illumined somewhat the 
 darkness of the grave. 
 
 The recorded sayings of Job, David, and Heze- 
 kiah will give us a very clear idea of what death 
 meant to them, and these we will now take up. From 
 the way in which the Old Testament writers speak of 
 physical death, it is plain that they regarded it as 
 4 
 
50 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 resulting differently to different persons. For such as 
 left this world in the favor of God, it was a change for 
 the better in all cases; and to the tried and afflicted, and 
 sorrowful, if they were in covenant relations with God, 
 it was a blessed release from present evils, and the en- 
 trance upon a happier and an enduring stage of being. 
 In Ps. 16:10, David, speaking of the result of phys- 
 ical dissolution to him, says, "Thou wilt not leave my soul 
 in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see 
 corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life, in thy 
 presence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand there are 
 pleasures forevermore," and in Ps. 17:15, "I shall be 
 satisfied when I awake with thy likeness." 
 
 To take, first, the testimony of Job. In the tenth 
 chapter of the book bearing his name, we find the pa- 
 triarch apparently less distressed by his bodily suffer- 
 ings, great as they were, than by his inability to under- 
 stand why God had sent them upon him; and the chap- 
 ter seems, more than anything else, like a communing 
 with himself, seeking some clue to lead him out of the 
 darkness. It cannot be, he says, that God is trying me, 
 to discover what may be hidden in my character, for 
 this is needless for him who himself made me in all my 
 parts, and has that perfect knowledge of me which the 
 maker must possess regarding the work of his own 
 hands, which same thought David very beautifully ex- 
 presses in the one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm. His 
 meditations seem to bring him no light, and the gloom 
 deepens around him, as he concludes that God sees sins 
 in him of which he is unconscious, and for these is cut- 
 ting short his days. He is sure that if this is so, and he 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 51 
 
 dies under the displeasure of God, that he could hope 
 for nothing afterward but the reward of the wicked. 
 That he understood this to be extinction, or destruc- 
 tion, is plain from the feelings expressed in verses 18 
 to 20, and in other passages; for had Job expected an 
 eternal existence beyond the grave in the enjoyment of 
 God's favor, he could not have indulged in such a hope- 
 less train of thought, nor have given way to such des- 
 perate suggestions on account of the short period of suf- 
 fering he had to endure, bitter though it was. 
 
 Others, since his day, have suffered all of physical 
 pain that could be inflicted through the ingenuity of 
 man, prompted by the powers of darkness, and been 
 upheld by the thought that the way through the flames 
 was short, and the end perfect and enduring peace and 
 blessedness. Nor had the friends of Job expected for 
 him eternal bliss beyond the grave, can it be imagined 
 that they would not have pointed it out to him, as the 
 chief source of his hope and support? But nowhere 
 do they allude to it. On the other hand, had Job sup- 
 posed sheol was the ante-chamber to an. eternity of mis- 
 ery, he would not have been so ready to pass within its 
 portals. The fool, who says there is no God nor here- 
 after, may, by his own rash act, terminate his earthly ex- 
 istence; but not so he who anticipates unending, insup- 
 portable anguish. Job, thinking that his hope of accept- 
 ance with God as righteous was cut off, and judgment 
 given against him as a sinner for some reason unper- 
 ceived by himself, earnestly desires cessation of his pres- 
 ent misery, not in the still greater misery of the unend- 
 ing fires of God's punitive wrath, but in the silence and 
 
52 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 darkness of extinction in sJieol. " Cease, then, and let 
 me alone, that I may take comfort a little before I go 
 whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness 
 and the shadow of death." Verses 20 and 21 could not 
 have been spoken by one looking forward to the future 
 life as one of supreme, unending felicity, neither are they 
 the utterances of one who, beyond the grave, expected to 
 enter upon a state of unending suffering; but only of a 
 man who, possessed of the idea contained in the eight- 
 eenth and nineteenth verses, expected in the grave to 
 find only a negative good; release in utter extinction 
 from both present suffering and future misery. The 
 fourteenth chapter affords further proof respecting the 
 belief of Job in relation to a future state. In verses 7 
 and 9, he says: For a tree that is cut down there is hope 
 that under favorable circumstances it may sprout again 
 and grow, and in verses loand I2*speaks of the dead in 
 contrast with this as without any such hope. " Man 
 giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" plainly implying 
 that he is not. " Till the heavens be no more they .shall 
 not awake out of their sleep." Most read this verse,. 
 " Man lieth down and riseth not till the heavens be no 
 more, when he shall awake," as if Job had been famil- 
 iar with the third chapter of 2 Peter, and was looking 
 for the second coming of our Lord without sin unto 
 salvation, to destroy the world and create a new heavens 
 and a new earth wherein should dwell righteousness, 
 Very far from this appears to me the thought of Job, 
 To him and his contemporaries, the visible heavens were 
 the types of permanence and immutability. 
 
 Year after year, generation after generation had 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 53 
 
 come and gone since the heavens first told of the 
 glory of God, and the firmament showed his handy- 
 work, and still they remained unchanged, the evi- 
 dence of the wisdom and power of their Creator, the 
 symbol of his own eternity; and to endure as long as 
 the sun and moon, or the heavens, is, in the sacred 
 writings, equivalent to an endless duration. The psalm- 
 ist says in Ps. 72:17: "His name shall endure forever, 
 his name shall continue as long as the sun." And 
 in Ps. 89:29: " His seed will I make to endure forever, 
 and his throne as the days of heaven;" and in verses 36 
 and 37: " His seed shall endure forever, and his throne 
 as the sun before me. It shall be established forever, as 
 the moon, and as a faithful witness in heaven." From 
 these examples it seems clear that Job, instead of antici- 
 pating the time when the heavens should be no more, 
 and simultaneous with this dissolution the dead should 
 be raised, had the very contrary idea in his mind, viz.: 
 that the heavens would continue forever, as would the 
 state of the unforgiven dead, as described in verse 12. 
 It is not of all men that Job says this, for in verse 13 he 
 asks God to exempt him from the fate of such, and that 
 to him might be allotted a temporary abode in the 
 grave, and a time fixed by God for his redemption from 
 its power. This entire book of Job, attentively studied, 
 conveys the idea that all the speakers, while they ex- 
 pected a life beyond the grave for those who left this 
 world in the favor of God, assume that for all of the oppo- 
 site class there was reserved only complete extinction. 
 In the sixth psalm and fifth verse, David echoes 
 the thoughts of Job which we have been considering. 
 
54 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 David had been brought very low by sickness, which he 
 looked upon as sent by God in token of his displeasure, 
 which is evident from the first verse; and the teach- 
 ings of Moses in the twenty-eighth and thirtieth chap- 
 ters of Deuteronomy, fully warranted him in so inter- 
 preting the infliction. His prayer is that the sin for 
 which the punishment is sent may be forgiven, and that 
 in token of this forgiveness, his disease may be healed; 
 otherwise, should he remain unpardoned, and his death 
 result as a mark of the divine displeasure, he would ex- 
 perience the award of all who depart this life under the 
 wrath of God; and this was extinction. Upon no other 
 explanation can we account for such sentiments as are 
 found in the fifth verse. To the righteous dead, David 
 well knew that beyond the grave there was a future 
 wholly at variance with the darkness, and silence, and 
 forgetfulness of God depicted here. In Psalm 17:15, 
 when the cloud had been withdrawn, and the light of 
 God's favor shone upon him, he says, : ' I shall be satis- 
 fied when I awake in thy likeness;" and in Ps ; 23:4, 
 " Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of 
 death I will fear no evil." When David wrote this he 
 did not expect to remain forever in the silence, and 
 darkness, and inaction of the grave; he expected to go 
 through the valley, and emerge in green pastures on the 
 other side. But the Lord is his shepherd now, and his 
 favor is resting upon him; and in the one hundred and 
 third psalm he apostrophizes his soul as having its life 
 redeemed from destruction by the goodness of God. 
 The condition of mind in which this sixth psalm was 
 written, seems referred to in the eighth and ninth verses 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 55 
 
 of the thirtieth psalm, and the result of God's forgive- 
 ness and restoring him to health, was that he might sing 
 praises, and not be silent. Psalm 1 19:175 says: " Let my 
 soul live, and it shall praise thee." 
 
 In addition to the testimony of Job and David 
 upon this point, we have, also, that of Hezekiah, in the 
 38th chapter of Isaiah. The king had been so sick 
 that he expected to die, and in the tenth verse he says, 
 " In the cutting off of my days I shall go to the gates of 
 sheol; I am deprived of the residue of my years." His 
 thoughts seem to have been, In my prime I am con- 
 signed to the grave, and am not permitted to attain to 
 the long life promised those who enjoy the favor of God. 
 This is conclusive proof that God is angry with me, for 
 his promise to those who fear him, is, that their days 
 shall be prolonged. Psalm 91:16 says of such, "with 
 long life will I satisfy him," and Prov. 10:27, "The fear 
 of the Lord prolongeth days, but the years of the 
 wicked shall be shortened. Job 15:20 reads: "The 
 wicked man travaileth with pain all his days, and to 
 the oppressor the number of his years are hidden," 
 i. ., he has no security regarding his life, it is likely to be 
 cut off at any moment, and in verse 32, "he shall come 
 to an end before his time, and his branch shall not be 
 green," i. e., it shall wither. The whole teaching of 
 Deuteronomy is that if the people feared and obeyed 
 God, he would be gracious and bless them in all ways, 
 and especially with length of days. " I call heaven and 
 earth to witness," says Moses, "that I have set before 
 you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose 
 life that both thou and thy seed may live. That thou 
 
56 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 mayest love the Lord thy God and that thou mayest 
 cleave unto him, for he is thy life, and the length of thy 
 days." Deut 30:19, 20. With such a record of God's 
 attitude toward the transgressor, and with the conscious- 
 ness of his own short comings as these appear in 2 
 Chron. 32:25, Hezekiah drew the legitimate conclusion 
 that he was being cut off in judgment, which would con- 
 sign him to sheol as an eternal prison-house. Not only 
 would his eyes close upon the inhabitants of this world, 
 but they would never open in that deathless world, that 
 true land of the living where he had hoped to see the 
 King in his beauty. 
 
 If Job, David, and Hezekiah are to be taken as ex- 
 ponents of the belief of their times regarding the future 
 state, we must conclude that the generally accepted 
 doctrine was that the favor of God insured a prolonged 
 life, and that to be cut off in one's prime was a mark 
 of God's displeasure, which left no place for repentance, 
 but was only the prelude to death in its radical sense. 
 Job 7:21; Eze. 33:10. 
 
 We cannot leave this part of our field without con- 
 sidering the eighty-eighth psalm, which in sentiment is 
 closely related to the passage from Isaiah just before us, 
 and to the sixth psalm. The writer, in verse 5, speaks of 
 the wicked cut off for their sins as no more remembered 
 by God; and in verses 10, n, 12, says, "Wilt thou show 
 wonders to the dead? shall the dead arise and praise 
 thee? shall thy loving kindness be declared in the grave, 
 or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thy wonders 
 be known in the dark ? and thy righteousness in the land 
 of forget fulness? " We cannot think that Job, David, 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 57 
 
 and Hezekiah meant to convey the idea that a man en- 
 joying the favor of God, and so undergoing physical 
 dissolution, lost all memory of God or ceased to praise 
 him, or passed into any state in the least analogous to 
 this; for this is contrary to the whole teaching of the 
 Bible, not only of the New Testament, but of the Old 
 as well. Such as felt conscious of the approval of God, 
 looked for anything rather than forgetfulness of him, or 
 silence as regarded his praise, at the termination of this 
 mortal life. 
 
 How then are we to understand these passages from 
 these writers which we have been examining, and espe- 
 cially this eighty-eighth psalm ? The only explanation 
 satisfactory to my mind is, that the accepted doctrine of 
 those ages was that temporal death experienced by the 
 wicked, handed them over hopelessly to the power of 
 the second death, which, being the termination of con- 
 scious existence, would make perfectly applicable all the 
 foregoing quotations, and many other passages not 
 quoted, which upon any other ground seem wholly un- 
 intelligible. 
 
 We must not forget that while our Lord, as re- 
 corded in Mark 12:26, 27, found the doctrine of a future 
 life for the pious dead* in Ex. 3:6, he deduces from the 
 passage nothing respecting the future of the wicked, 
 leaving this question untouched. As regards this, our 
 knowledge is derived from sources to which Old Testa- 
 ment believers had no access; and their belief, it seems 
 
 * Because Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were living, it cannot be 
 asserted that Cain, Korah, and Ahab, id genus omne, also were living. 
 
58 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 certain to me, was, that while beyond the grave there 
 was a future for the friends of God; for his enemies, 
 sheol was a place of inaction and unconsciousness; a land 
 of darkness (Job 10: 21), of silence (Ps. 115 : 17), of for- 
 getfulness (Ps. 88 : \2}J forgotten even of God (Ps. 88 : 5). 
 Can language convey the idea of utter destruction and 
 extinction, if this fails to do so? 
 
 The forty-ninth psalm is so confirmatory of the 
 above conclusion, and shows so clearly the difference 
 between the future of the righteous and the wicked, that 
 I wish to call attention to it in this place. Verses 6 and 9 
 show that no possible influence of man can preserve one 
 of the race from death, or redeem him from its power 
 when once within its dominions. With all his honor 
 resting upon him as the head of the earthly creation, 
 man " abideth not," does not continue, but, like the 
 beasts his inferiors and subjects perishes. " Like 
 sheep they are laid in the grave," it being the habitation 
 of them all. 
 
 For the wicked there is no redemption they perish 
 like the beast. But note the difference in the case of 
 the righteous: " God sJiall redeem my soul from the power 
 of the grave." This is his only hope of escape from the 
 grasp of death. If not rescued by God he expected to 
 perish. Now for the wicked there was no such hope; 
 the redemption of their souls had forever ceased when 
 in impiety and unreconciled to God they had gone 
 down into the dominions of death; and as none but God 
 could redeem them, and as they, being his enemies, could 
 not expect his interposition, there was no possibility of 
 their redemption. " They shall go to the generation of 
 their fathers; they shall never see light." 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 59 
 
 I do not see how the truth that a wicked man dying 
 in his sins ultimately perishes as completely as does the 
 beast, can be expressed in language plainer or less liable 
 to misunderstanding than in the twentieth verse. To 
 use more words would to me appear as mere verbiage. 
 " Man that is in honor and understandeth not, is like the 
 beasts that cease to be."* With a very brief considera- 
 tion of Eze. 33 : 10, we will leave this part of our investiga- 
 tion. "If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and 
 we pine away in them, how should we then live." 
 
 In the twenty-third verse of chapter 4, the prophet 
 had told them that the judgments of God should be 
 visited upon them, and "they should pine away for their 
 iniquities;" and when later he seeks to encourage them 
 to walk in better paths, they reply in effect, "Why should 
 we attempt it ? you say that we are doomed to pine away 
 under the displeasure of God, and if this is so, we can 
 have no hope of a future life." That the life referred 
 to is that of the world to come, and not this mortal life, 
 is plainly seen by the verses before and following. The 
 very fact of physical death, sent upon them in such a 
 way, was to them conclusive that once in skeol God 
 would no more remember them; and their hope of es- 
 cape from that land of silence and darkness where are 
 the slain whom God had erased from the tablets of his 
 memory, was utterly cut off. 
 
 * The Hebrew damah, translated "perish" inverse 20, means "to 
 cease," "to be cut off." 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 (HE figurative and metaphorical expressions of the 
 sacred writers all agree with the foregoing defini- 
 tion of death, and with no other. The simile more 
 generally used than any other to illustrate the deal- 
 ings of God with the wicked, is the action of fire upon 
 material objects. In Deut. 4 : 24 Moses tells the people 
 that the Lord is a "consuming fire." The only other 
 relation he is represented as holding, to men, under this 
 figure is this of a refiner's fire, and this is only towards 
 his redeemed ones. Mai. 3:2, 3. Nowhere is he repre- 
 sented as a withering, scorching fire, inflicting pain while 
 leaving the object of its assault intact and in being, 
 though damaged and disfigured. The invariable an- 
 nouncement is that he will consume his enemies. As 
 the fat of rams, when subjected to the action of material 
 fire, becomes dissipated in smoke and passes away, so 
 in the day of the revelation of the wrath of God against 
 all unrighteousness the wicked shall perish and be no 
 more. This is the purport of Ps. 37:20. Malachi is 
 still more explicit, and says the coming of the Lord 
 shall burn up the wicked root and branch. It seems 
 strange to me that any one should claim that the con- 
 suming fires of the divine presence here spoken of will 
 merely affect the happiness of those who come under 
 (60) 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 61 
 
 their power. If words can be made to convey the idea 
 of entire, irretrievable consumption and extinction, then 
 these certainly do. To take a field filled with bushes 
 and stubble, and subject it to the action of material fire 
 till every vestige of vegetation is destroyed root and 
 branch, can be used as an illustration of nothing less 
 than the utter extinction of the wicked, who stand in 
 the same relation to the fires of God's holiness that the 
 stubble does to the fires of earth. If this merely plays 
 about the bushes, scorching and defacing the freshness 
 and beauty of their appearance, but leaving them still 
 possessed of life and being, then may the fires of the 
 
 The Hebrew word here in Ps. 37:20, translated perish, is abad, and 
 primarily means to be lost, and is sometimes so translated, for instance, in 
 I Sam. 9:3, 20, and in two or three other places, but in the great major- 
 ity of instances the connection will not permit of this rendering, the idea 
 from the context being that the being or thing alluded to is killed or de- 
 stroyed. Num. 16:33 savs tnat Korah and his company were swallowed 
 up in the earth and perished. Job 3:3, "Let the day perish wherein I 
 was born." Ps. 37:20, "The wicked shall perish, and the enemies of 
 the Lord shall be like the fat of rams." Ps. 102:26, "They shall perish, 
 but Thoushalt endure." Jonah 4:10, it "came in a night, and perished in 
 a night." These are a few out of nearly 100 texts where the Hebrew word 
 abad cannot be translated by the English word "lost," and preserve the 
 meaning of the passage, the English word "destroyed" or "perished" 
 being the nearest eqiiivalent that can be found, and in something like sixty 
 places it is translated "destroyed," as in Lev. 23:30, Num. 33:52, 2 Kings 
 i i:i, Esther 9:6, Ps. 5:6, 9:5, Jer. 12:17. Once in Psalm 49, in verse ie, 
 we have abad translated "perish," but in verses 12 and 20 "perish" is repre- 
 sented in the original by the Hebrew word damah, meaning "to be cut 
 off," "to cease." The Hebrew word kalah, translated "consumed" in 
 the 2Oth verse of the 37th Psalm, is very strong, and means "to be fin- 
 ished" or "brought to an end." I Sam. 3:12, "make an end," 2 Chr. 
 20, 23, and many others. It also is translated consume about forty 
 times, as in Ex. 32:10, Num. 16:21, 2 Kings 13:19, Eze. 20:13. 
 
62 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 Judgment similarly affect the finally impenitent But if, 
 on the contrary, the literal fire when most intense follows 
 the roots beneath the surface, and destroys the very 
 sources of life, so the eternal fires of God's holiness 
 and hatred of sin shall feed upon and consume all those 
 who at the day of trial are not partakers of eternal, in- 
 destructible life, through the acceptance of the offices 
 of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Referring to the quality ascribed to God by Moses at 
 the beginning of this chapter, we find that the Hebrew 
 word translated "consume" in this verse (Deut. 4:24) is 
 akal; and the same word is found in Judges 6:21; I Kings 
 18 : 38; 2 Kings I : 10, 12; Job 31:12. In all these 
 places it can mean only the devouring or obliterating of 
 the object affected. The same word akal is used in 
 Isaiah 5 : 24, and is translated devoureth, and again in 
 Joel 2 : 5, also 2 Kings 1:14, where Elijah called for fire 
 from heaven and it burned up the men sent to take him, 
 akal is the original of " burned up." In more than one 
 hundred and fifty places, this word occurs in the Old 
 Testament, and in but two or three can it mean any- 
 thing else than the devouring or obliterating of the ob- 
 ject acted upon. There are a variety of words in the 
 Hebrew vocabulary to express prolonged suffering, crush- 
 ing sorrow, trouble, and wasting away, had the Holy Spirit 
 intended to teach that misery or suffering were to be the 
 portion of the wicked, instead of destruction, as, for in- 
 stance, the following: ed.kid, mehuma,mechitta,pid,shad, 
 ashem, shoa, shamem, meaning, respectively, in the order 
 named, " calamity," " misfortune," " trouble," " downfall," 
 " ruin," " spoiling," " to make desolate." None of these, 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 63 
 
 however, so far as I can find, are used in connection 
 with the final doom of the enemies of God. Neither 
 pain, suffering, distress, anguish, sorrow, misfortune, 
 misery, or affliction, though often used in the Old Testa- 
 ment in relation to other things, are any of them, 
 so far as I can learn, ever applied to the condition 
 of the finally condemned; but the idea of their condi- 
 tion is sought to be conveyed by such words as akal, to 
 devour (see previous reference), kalah, to be consumed, 
 Ps. 37 : 20 (see note, page 61), abad, to perish or to be 
 destroyed (see same reference), and shatkatk, destruction, 
 Ps. 55 : 23; 103 14. 
 
 To turn now from the Old Testament to the New, 
 from the last chapter of the last book of the former to 
 the third of the first of the latter, we find in Matt. 3:11, 
 12, a repetition of the thought we have just had before 
 us. John the Baptist says of Jesus Christ that " he shall 
 baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire," that " he 
 will thoroughly purge his floor and gather the wheat 
 into his garner, but will burn up the chaff with un- 
 quenchable fire." I understand that here, as in Malachi 
 3 : 2, 3 and 4:1, there are two distinct offices attached 
 to the person of the Messiah. Mai. 3:3, he sits as 
 a refiner of silver to purge away all the dross 
 from his chosen ones, and in 4 : I as a consuming fire to 
 consume and exterminate! all who oppose themselves. 
 Here in Matthew the baptism of the Holy Ghost cor- 
 responds with Mai. 3 : 3, and the baptism of fire with 
 Mai. 4:1. The effect in both Malachi and Mat- 
 thew is the same, the sanctification of his people, 
 the consumption of his enemies. I am aware that the 
 
64 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 baptism of fire, Matt. 3 : 1 1, is generally referred to Acts 
 2 ; 3 as its fulfillment, but this appears unwarranted and 
 foreign to the meaning. 
 
 Mark and John, though both speak of the baptism 
 of the Holy Ghost, say nothing about that of fire; but 
 Matthew and Luke speak of both, and alike connect 
 with the prediction the separation of the wheat from 
 the chaff f and the burning up of the latter. There was 
 no such separation and burning up at Pentecost; and it 
 should be observed that the prediction is that Jesus shall 
 baptize with fire, while Acts 2 : 3 says that the pente- 
 costal baptism was of "cloven tongues like as of fire," 
 i. e., the tongues representing the miraculous gift of 
 speaking in languages never learned, were cloven, like the 
 forked, darting flame, typical of the multiplicity of 
 languages those thus endowed should be able to speak. 
 As the flame at its base is one, but as it ascends divides 
 into several parts, so these symbolic tongues given to 
 the apostles by which they were to witness for Jesus, 
 were, towards their ends, divided like flames of fire. 
 Matt. 3:11 says he shall baptize you with fire, not with 
 something like as to fire. It is worthy of note just here 
 that the apostles do not refer this gift of tongues to the 
 predicted baptism of fire, but to that of the Holy Ghost 
 promised in Joel 2: 29; and this was to precede and is en- 
 tirely distinct from that great and terrible day spoken of 
 by the Baptist in verse 12, when the Son of man shall 
 come in power to gather in his elect and consign his 
 enemies to the consuming effects of everlasting fire. 
 The fact that Peter in his sermon made no reference to 
 Matt. 3:12, but passed over that in silence, and found 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 65 
 
 in Joel the prediction that was then being fulfilled, is suf- 
 ficient to show that in the mind of these inspired 
 apostles there was no connection between the baptism 
 of fire of Matt. 3:11 and the tongues like as of fire that 
 sat upon them at Pentecost. In Acts 10 : 44, 46 the gift 
 of tongues to the believers of the household of Cor- 
 nelius was recognized by Peter, in chapter 1 1 : 16, as the 
 baptism of the Holy Ghost predicted by John the 
 Baptist, and he says it was the same that they received 
 " at the beginning," which must mean at Pentecost. 
 
 The baptism of fire as it affects the wicked can be 
 seen in the parable of the tares and the wheat (Matt. 13-. 
 24, 40), and from the explanation which our Lord him- 
 self gives to it, there does not seem any room for 
 misapprehension regarding the language here used by 
 him. He says in the parable, in the thirtieth verse, that 
 at the harvest he will instruct the reapers to gather the 
 tares in bundles and burn them; and in verse 40, in ex- 
 plaining the parable to the twelve in private, says, " As 
 therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, 
 so shall it be with the wicked at the termination of this 
 dispensation; they shall be separated from the righteous 
 and consigned to the flames." When a gardener has 
 gathered from his ground a quantity of noxious weeds, 
 and as the most effectual mode pf destroying them, and 
 leaving no germ for their reproduction, kindles a fire 
 and burns them up, what is his purpose in the act? 
 Surely his purpose is to destroy them utterly, and this is 
 what our Lord says shall be done to the finally impeni- 
 tent. At one time the Canada thistle caused great an- 
 noyance in my garden; even when pulled up by the 
 5 
 
66 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 roots, if allowed to remain on the ground, the seed 
 would mature and perpetuate the plant, so that later I 
 had them pulled up by the roots, and at once put in the 
 fire. Did they remain intact though a little scorched 
 and shriveled ? Did I expect this would be the case ? 
 Most certainly not. I expected they would be burned 
 up root and seed, and I was not disappointed. This is 
 just what any one would look for under the circum- 
 stances; and when our Lord told his disciples that as 
 the fires of earth consumed and burned up the tares, so 
 the fires of the Judgment day should affect the wicked, 
 he must have intended them to understand that this was 
 to be the end of them; not instantaneous, perhaps, for it 
 takes a little time to burn up green weeds, but ultimately 
 the effect of the fire would be to consume and destroy 
 those who were cast into it. 
 
 If it is permissible to say, " As therefore the tares 
 are consumed by the fire, so it shall not be with the 
 wicked at the end of the world, for they shall be cast into 
 the fire but shall not be consumed," then it would seem 
 as if one might, at his own pleasure or whim, prove any- 
 thing he chooses from the Bible. The Greek word trans- 
 lated " burn," both in verses 30 and 40, is katakaio 
 and means to burn down; we find it in Acts 19:19, where 
 the magicians "brought their books together and burned 
 them." It is also found in Rev. 18:8, where it is used 
 in relation to the mystical Babylon, and there is trans- 
 lated both in the authorized and revised versions as " ut- 
 terly burned," and any one who will read the full descrip- 
 tion cannot avoid the conclusion that the destruction is 
 to be complete and enduring, for verse 21 says, "She 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 67 
 
 shall be found no more at all." How can entire oblit- 
 eration be more emphatically expressed ? If katakaio 
 means this here, why should it not be taken to mean 
 the same in Matt. 3:12 and 13 : 30, 40 and Luke 3:17? 
 So far as I can find, there is in the Bible no allusion to 
 any custom among the Jews of the use of fire as a 
 means of inflicting torture upon enemies or criminals 
 condemned to punishment, neither did the nations about 
 them so employ it; and when, in their scriptures or 
 in the mouths of their prophets, the action of fire is 
 referred to in connection with the enemies of God, it 
 could in the mind of a Jew have had but one asso- 
 ciation, and that was with their utter, complete, irremedi- 
 able destruction. 
 
 We read in the third of Daniel that when the three 
 young men were, by order of the king, cast into the 
 furnace, it was not for the purpose of inflicting suffer- 
 ing, but to put an end to their lives. And that this was 
 not the effect is ascribed by the king only to the inter- 
 position of a wonder-working God, who appeared for the 
 deliverance of his servants. Who, then, is to interpose 
 between the fires of the bottomless pit and those who 
 are exposed to their consuming flames ? Most surely 
 not he who walked amid the fires with Shadrach, Mes- 
 hach and Abednego, and " he i5 the only one who can 
 deliver after this sort." Mark 9 : 43, 48 is another pas- 
 sage direct* from the lips of our Lord, which, though 
 often quoted as an argument against the destruction of 
 the wicked, appears to me entirely misapplied. The 
 illustration is taken from the Valley of Hinnom, where 
 all the refuse from the temple was taken and burned, 
 
68 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 and anything that by chance escaped the fire fell a prey 
 to the worms that were bred in the filth and pollution 
 of the place. Our Lord appears to quote from, or at 
 least refer to, Isaiah 65 : 24 where the prophet says, 
 " They shall . . . look upon the carcasses of the 
 transgressors, for their worm shall not die, neither shall 
 their fire be quenched." These are the carcasses of men > 
 not living, sentient beings. It appears to me that 
 .Gehenna, typified by the Valley of Hinnom, and to 
 which our Lord here assigns the transgressors, offers ab- 
 solutely no hope for its inmates. There might be a 
 bare possibility that, through the neglect of the watch- 
 ers the material fires in the Valley of Hinnom would go 
 out from lack of fuel; through some possible chance, 
 the worms that fed upon its festering heaps might be- 
 come extinct; but the fires of God's holiness, their con- 
 suming effect upon everything sinful when brought 
 under their influence, could never cease to operate, for 
 they are as eternal and unchangeable as himself. Where,, 
 then, is there the least possibility of escape for -those ex- 
 posed to their power ? 
 
 This passage, it seems to me, is often, in fact gener- 
 ally, misinterpreted by those who quote it in support of 
 the doctrine of the endless misery and suffering of the 
 wicked. They explain and enforce it as if our Lord had 
 said, " Those who are consigned to this fearful place 
 shall never die; their vital forces shall never suffer dim- 
 inution, but, as exhausted by the fire and worm, shall be 
 constantly renewed, thai they may be capable of resist- 
 ing still further drains;" whereas, he says no such thing. 
 And the undying qualities spoken of have no reference 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 69 
 
 to the wicked themselves, but apply wholly to those 
 forces which are at work for their destruction. Jude 7 
 is a parallel passage. The cities of the plain are said 
 to be " suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." The 
 forces employed by God for the destruction of these 
 cities are eternal, but it does not follow that the cities 
 were able to resist the destructive effects of these eternal 
 forces; the exact contrary was the case, and they suc- 
 cumbed at once. The instrumentalities employed by 
 God may be eternal, but the material which came under 
 their operation was perishable. So the typical fire and 
 worm of Gehenna are eternal, but the wicked who shall be 
 handed over to their assaults are perishable. 
 
 In Matt. 10: 28 our Lord says that God is able to 
 destroy both soul and body in Gehenna, for this is the 
 word translated hell, in both places. This is fully in ac- 
 cord with his word in Mark 9 : 43, 48 which we have 
 just been studying. The true scope of this language, 
 it seems to me, is lost sight of, and an erroneous conclusion 
 drawn from this passage quite as often, and with a result 
 equally far from the truth. Our Lord does not say that God 
 is able to destroy the happiness, or symmetry, or moral 
 beauty of the soul in Gehenna; he does not mention these 
 or any other attribute or quality pertaining to the soul of 
 man that he is able to destroy, t*ut the entire man, body 
 and soul, with all that pertains to them. When our relig- 
 ious teachers tell us that the language used by the Great 
 Teacher is not to be understood in its plain, most ap- 
 parent meaning, they should be able to show us from 
 some authority equal with his, that he is speaking figur- 
 atively or enigmatically, in neither of which senses can his 
 
70 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 language here or in Luke 12:5 or 21 : 14, 18 be taken; 
 for in all these places he is using the simplest, most direct 
 form of speech to impress upon his disciples the duty 
 and privilege of committing themselves to the care of 
 God, whose purposes of love no power of earth or hell 
 could frustrate. 
 
 Instead of finding in the Scriptures anything 
 to warrant us in attaching to these teachings of 
 our Lord any meaning other than that most appar- 
 ent upon thejr surface, the whole tenor of the Bible is 
 just to the contrary. 2 Thess. I : 9 is one instance of 
 this. Speaking of those who are transgressors of God's 
 law, Paul says, " They shall be punished with everlast- 
 ing destruction from the presence of the Lord and from 
 the glory of his power." The New Version reads, " Who 
 shall suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from 
 the face of the Lord." The writer says the cause of this 
 destruction is "the presence of the Lord." Mai. 3 : 2 
 asks: "Who may abide the day of his coming? and who 
 shall stand when he appeareth ? for he is like a re- 
 finer's fire. Ex. 24:17 says, "And the sight of 
 the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire. J> 
 Deut. 9:3: "The Lord thy God is he that goeth 
 over before thee; as a consuming fire shall he destroy. 
 Ps. 97 : 3: "A fire goeth before him and burneth up his 
 enemies." Isa. 10:17: "And the light of Israel shall 
 be for a fire, and his Holy One for a flame." Isa. 66: 
 15: "For behold the Lord will come with fire . . . 
 to render his anger with fury and his rebukes with 
 flames of fire, for by fire and by his sword will the Lord 
 plead with all flesh." The consuming, destroying effect 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 71 
 
 of the presence of God upon all sin, is everywhere taught 
 in the Bible, of which the foregoing are a few examples. 
 Nowhere is his presence represented as producing pro- 
 tracted suffering, but invariably destruction. (See Gen. 
 32:30; Ex. 33:20; Deut. 5:25; Judges 13:22.) 
 
 The context in this first chapter of 2 Thessalonians 
 teaches that the same glorious presence which causes 
 the destruction of his enemies, brings " rest " and " ad- 
 miring joy" to his redeemed ones. This agrees with 
 Isa. 33 : 14, 15: "Only he that \valketh righteously and 
 speaketh uprightly, he that despiseth the gain of oppres- 
 sion, that shaketh his hand from holding of bribes, and 
 shutteth his eyes from seeing evil," can hope to dwell 
 amid the fires of God's holy presence. In Acts 3:19 
 we find this same expression, " from the presence of the 
 Lord," and there Peter speaks of it as bringing times of 
 refreshing," which corresponds to the rest and abound- 
 ing joy of 2 Thessalonians, which is the result of his 
 presence to his people, though in the twenty-third verse 
 Peter says all of the opposite class shall be destroyed. 
 In 2 Thessalonians Paul does not say they shall be de- 
 stroyed with eternal punishment through banishment 
 from the presence of the Lord, though the verse is 
 often, if not generally quote^l and used as if he 
 did. The Greek apo here rendered "from " also means 
 "with." (See Luke 14:8-15; 16:16, 21.) It is also trans- 
 lated " by," in Matthew 7:16; Acts 9:13; 12:20; 2 
 Cor. 3:18; 7 : 13; Heb. 5 : 8; and in Acts 3 : 19, quoted 
 above, it seems as if it can mean nothing else. For 
 some reason, probably sufficient to themselves, the au- 
 thors of the New Version have departed from their rule 
 
72 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 of rendering the same word in Greek by the same word in 
 English, and in Acts 3 : 19 translate prosopon, "presence;" 
 while in 2 Thess. I : 19 they translate it "face." The 
 plain assertion of the passage in Thessalonians, taken in 
 its unity, is that the finally impenitent, in that day 
 which Paul speaks of (Acts 17 : 31), shall be eternally de- 
 stroyed, not punished with banishment from God and 
 the glorious perfections of his character, and the at- 
 tendant purity and beauty of his surroundings. This 
 would be no punishment either in anticipation or reality. 
 They see nothing to admire or emulate in his perfections, 
 and have no desire for purity in themselves or holiness 
 in their associates. 
 
 The eighth verse of the second chapter of this 
 epistle confirms our interpretation of the passage under 
 consideration. We are there told that the lawless shall 
 be consumed by the brightness or, as the New Version 
 says, " the manifestation " of the coming of the Lord 
 Jesus. The New Version adopts the text of the three 
 most authoritative manuscripts, and reads " slay " in- 
 stead of u consume." This lawless one shall be slain or 
 killed by the same coming of the Lord spoken of in 
 chapter I, which coming was to bring similar destruc- 
 tion to the incorrigibly wicked. It appears like a waste 
 of time and space to reinforce such plain truths as the 
 above with other scriptures; but as this is not written 
 for those who are convinced that destruction is to come 
 upon the wicked, but for those who think they are not 
 to be destroyed, but to be preserved and made eternally 
 miserable, one or two more of the many texts containing 
 the same truths may not be superfluous. Ps. 92 : 7 says, 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 73 
 
 "When all the workers of iniquity do flourish it is that 
 they shall be destroyed forever." Num. 24 : 20 says: 
 "Amalek was the first of the nations, but his latter end 
 shall be that he perish forever." Is eternal suffering in 
 the remotest degree intimated in the case of Amalek ? 
 By no means, but an endless destruction or extinction, 
 without the possibility of a revival. So when it says 
 the wicked " shall be destroyed forever," it does not 
 mean that they shall be tormented forever, but that their 
 destruction or extinction shall be so complete that there 
 shall be no possibility of a revival. Again, Ps. 145 : 20: 
 " The Lord preserveth all them that love him, but all 
 the wicked will he destroy." Does this refer merely to 
 the preservation of the righteous from the calamities 
 incident to this stage of being and the disappointment 
 of the plans and expectations of the wicked ? There 
 is nothing said about happiness or prosperity as either 
 preserved or destroyed; it is the two classes of men that 
 are thus treated; the one is preserved from destruction, 
 the other given over to its power; and this, not as re- 
 lates to this present stage of being, but as the ultimate, 
 unchangeable award. When God says he will destroy 
 a man, who has the right to say he will not do it, but 
 only so change the conditions toy which the man is sur- 
 rounded as to impair or destroy his comfort or happi- 
 ness ? To destroy a man's happiness is one thing, and 
 may be done in many ways, for he is the creature of 
 circumstances; but to destroy the man himself is some- 
 thing very different, for he is the creature of God, and 
 can only be destroyed by the same power that gave him 
 being. 
 
74 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 Let me ask our religious teachers, in all earnest- 
 ness, this question: When God says over and over again in 
 language as explicit as can be found, that he will destroy 
 a man or a class of men, and you teach that he will not 
 do this but will do something else, is it not likely that 
 thinking men and women will come to doubt either the 
 teachings of the Bible or your interpretations of them ? 
 If, when God speaks of the destruction of the wicked, 
 the original means that it is their happiness or well- 
 being only that he refers to, then let our version so read, 
 and then your teachings and God's word will be in har- 
 mony, but if the original will not allow of such render- 
 ing consistently with its spirit, then should not your 
 teachings be brought into line with its assertions, and in 
 this way harmony between the two be established ? 
 
 Another term constantly used both in the Old Testa- 
 ment andthe New,in'application to the wicked, is "perish." 
 This is a word of great significance. A being or thing is 
 destroyed^ a force or influence outside of itself; it per- 
 ishes through its own inherent weakness. Worcester 
 says, " To perish expresses more than to die; whatever 
 dies perishes to a certain extent; every temporal thing 
 that has life must die; all things decay, dead bodies per- 
 ish." This word is one that is constantly employed to 
 define the final state of the unpardoned sinner against 
 God. In John 3:15 our Lord says: "The Son of man 
 must be lifted up that whosoever believeth in him 
 should not perish but have eternal life." 
 
 In John 16: 10 he says: "I give to them eternal 
 life, and they shall never perish." The clear alternative 
 presented in the above-quoted verses is, that those who 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 75 
 
 do not believe on Jesu*, and to whom he does not give 
 eternal life, shall perish. What is it that shall perish ? 
 Is it their " spiritual life," so called, with its aspirations 
 after holiness, its faith towards God, and love for his 
 children for his sake? with its outward manifestation 
 in gentleness, goodness, meekness, temperance, patience? 
 It cannot be this, for never having possessed it, they can- 
 not have it perish. Where the Bible says a man shall 
 perish, to assert that it means anything else than just 
 what it says seems to me like entering a labyrinth, from 
 which there is no hope of our escape. 
 
 By accepting the language of the Bible to mean 
 what it would mean if found in any other book, all dif- 
 ficulty vanishes at once. " Eternal life " means just that 
 and nothing else, and "to perish " means just that and 
 nothing else. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 IMAGINE that the question has more than once 
 been thought, if not spoken, What does the writer do 
 with Matt. 25:46, where the explicit declaration of the 
 Lord is, " These shall go away into everlasting punish- 
 ment"? In the first place the Greek -kolasis, here trans- 
 lated punishment, has not connected with it the idea of 
 the infliction of positive pain or suffering; it means " re- 
 straint," and the thought expressed by it appears to me 
 the same as that entertained by Job, David, and Heze- 
 kiah, whose recorded utterances on the subject we con- 
 sidered in chapter 5. There I endeavored to show 
 that the belief of these men and of their times was that 
 the wicked once committed to sheol were cut off from all 
 activity of conscious existence and given over to silence, 
 darkness and forgetfulness; in fact, that all conscious 
 being ceased. The meaning of kolasis, so far as I have 
 the ability and opportunity of ascertaining, is fully in 
 accord with this, and not necessarily associated with pain, 
 suffering, misery, anguish, despair, and torment. All 
 these experiences are expressed in the original of the 
 New Testament by other and entirely different words 
 having no analogy with the one here used. 
 
 Indeed, were this one utterance of our Lord all that is 
 said in the Bible concerning the future of the condemned* 
 (76) 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 77 
 
 the most that could be asserted upon its authority, re- 
 garding them, would be that they should be cut off from 
 all the activities of being. Whether this should be 
 effected by continuing their existence and prohibiting 
 the exercise of their powers by the controlling will of the 
 Creator, or by his withdrawing from them his supporting 
 power, and permitting them to perish through their own 
 inherent tendencies, no man, from the light afforded by 
 this single passage, could definitely affirm. Instead, 
 therefore, of taking this one verse as the sum of all Bible 
 truth in relation to the subject, and seeking to make all 
 other Scripture conform to it at any expense, is it not 
 better and wiser, and less liable to result in error, to take 
 these words as in themselves indefinite, as they really 
 are, and define them by the help of the many explan- 
 atory and qualifying teachings of our Lord himself, and 
 other clear and explicit declarations of the word of 
 God ? It seems to me that the opposite course has led 
 to the mystifying of much that is plain, the encumber- 
 ing of much that is simple, and to the substitution for 
 the truth of God of the traditions of men, giving the enemy 
 an advantage over us, facilitating his attacks, and weaken- 
 ing our defenses. 
 
 So far as I can ascertain, this word kolasis means 
 nothing akin to the signification generally attached to 
 it, and by any unprejudiced mind, it must be admitted 
 that there is at least a possibility that its meaning has 
 not been rightly interpreted. Why then insist that all 
 the teachings of the Bible relating to the doom of the 
 wicked, be bent and twisted so as to conform to this, 
 instead of taking the entire testimony of God's word, 
 
78 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 and letting this without any enlargement or diminution 
 fit in as it most perfectly will with all that the Bible 
 elsewhere reveals concerning the utter consumption, 
 complete destruction, and final eternal death of such as 
 at the last shall be judged by Him to whom all judgment 
 is committed as unworthy of eternal life ? We have the 
 same word kolasis in i John 4:18, where in the author- 
 ized version it is translated " torment," because I sup- 
 pose the translators of that day, being fallible men, 
 allowed their conception of the truth to influence their 
 decision in regard to the meaning of the language in 
 which the truth was embodied. The revisers have, in 
 the New Version, rendered the word in the two places by 
 the same English equivalent, " punishment," though it 
 seems to me, as a plain, unlearned man, that in this latter 
 place the English word is very far from giving the idea 
 of the writer, and that " restraint " would have fully done 
 so. 
 
 This epistle seems to have been written to assure 
 believers in Jesus as the Christ, that they are the chil- 
 dren of God, and that they might, because of this, have 
 free access to, and fellowship with him, and with his Son, 
 Jesus Christ (chapters 1:3, and 3 : 12); and to impress 
 upon them the blessedness and responsibilities growing 
 out of this relation. First among these blessings is 
 God's love for us, and first among the responsibilities is 
 to manifest our love, not only toward him, but toward 
 all whom he loves. The gift of his Son is a demonstra- 
 tion of his love to us, and should so stimulate our love 
 and faith that they should never waver, but always be 
 sure of his paternal response to every outreach of filial 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 79 
 
 affection on our part. But if this relation is to be what 
 God intends it to be, it must be divested of fear (not 
 reverential but slavish), because this imposes restraint, 
 kolasis. We all know the effect of fear in this direction; 
 it embarrasses, puts one under restraint; he cannot act, or 
 speak, or even think as when free from its control. This 
 feeling of restraint is the natural accompaniment of fear, 
 and to obviate and overcome it is that to which the line 
 of thought penned by the apostle seems intended to 
 lead. 
 
 Does not the postulate of the apostle that " perfect 
 love casteth out fear," make it a necessity to translate 
 kolasis by restraint, if the sequence is logical ? Fear, he 
 goes on to say, hath kolasis, which is translated punish- 
 ment; but fear and punishment do not necessarily stand 
 related in the slightest degree. Matt. 7 : 6, 7 tells us 
 that the three disciples on the mount of transfiguration 
 were sore afraid. In Rev. 1:17, the beloved disciple 
 was prostrated at the sight of his glorified Lord, and it 
 must have been fear which was the dominant emotion 
 in his case, for it was to this sentiment that the Lord, who 
 needs not to be told what is in the mind of man, addressed 
 his words of encouragement, " Fear not." In neither of 
 these instances, and there are other similar ones, was any 
 punishment intended or apprehended, but there was 
 naturally very great embarrassment and restraint. 
 
 Mark 9:6 says that Peter " wist not what to say for 
 they were sore afraid," and Luke 9 133 reports Peter as 
 not knowing what he was saying. In this instance we 
 see that fear, although it was not associated with any 
 thought of punishment, did produce very great restraint, 
 
8o THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 It seems as if there can be no doubt that restraint is the 
 word that should be used to translate kolasis in I John 
 4: 1 8, and if so there, why not in Matt. 25 146? That 
 verse then would read, "And these shall go awayintoever- 
 lasting (kolasis] inaction, and the righteous into everlast- 
 ing (zoe,} activity." This it seems to me is the real sig- 
 nificance of the language used by our Lord. Neither 
 the nature of the restraint or the activity are there de- 
 fined, but the Bible is so clear and explicit respecting 
 both the one and the other, that it would seem as if there 
 need be no doubt regarding them. But there is another 
 good reason why Matt. 25 -.46 should not be assumed to 
 be the whole sum of Bible truth regarding the doom of 
 the wicked. The Greek word aionios, translated " ever- 
 lasting/' is asserted by men of the most unquestioned 
 piety and learning to have no reference to duration, but 
 only to the dispensation or age in which the event al- 
 luded to should transpire, and it is claimed by them that 
 Matt. 25:46 should read: "These shall go away into 
 the punishment of the world to come, and the righteous 
 into the life of the world to come." 
 
 I do not pretend to judge between the two opinions, 
 or even to surmise which may be correct; all that I 
 contend for is that, with a fair showing, kolasis would 
 be more nearly rendered by the English "restraint," and 
 with the meaning of aionios, to say the least in dispute, 
 there is no such unequivocal, unmistakable authority to 
 this verse as to warrant us in claiming that the entire 
 Bible shall be interpreted by its uncertain light. Buteven 
 admitting that aionios does mean " everlasting," and that 
 kolasis does mean " punishment," then the verse as it 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 81 
 
 stands in our versions is very far from overthrowing or 
 even conflicting with the doctrine of the ultimate de- 
 struction of the wicked. Our Lord here only says they 
 " shall go away into everlasting punishment." He gives 
 no intimation regarding the nature of that punishment, 
 but 2 Thess. I : 9 does define the nature of it very clearly. 
 It says "they shall be punished with everlasting destruc- 
 tion." And in Matt. 13:40, 42, our Lord himself no less 
 clearly defines it, saying that " they shall be burned up." 
 I cannot see that there is any conflict between the word of 
 our Lord and the writings of Paul in 2 Thess. I : 9, or that 
 the views of the writer are at variance with either. But 
 says one, "At Luke 16:23, Jesus Christ certainly says of 
 the rich man that in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in 
 torments; there surely can be no misapprehension in re- 
 lation to this." One would think there should not be 
 any, but the very manner in which the passage is referred 
 to, shows that the most radical misapprehension does 
 exist regarding this very simple parable. In the first 
 place, the word "hell," which in the Greek is hades, the 
 equivalent of the Hebrew sJieol, means simply the un- 
 seen state, and has no analogy with Gehenna, translated 
 "hell" in Mark 9 : 43, 45, 47. Lazarus was as much in hell 
 as the rich man, but the one lifted up his eyes in torment, 
 and the other his from the bosom of Abraham. The 
 effect of confounding hades, or the unseen state upon 
 which the soul enters at death, with Gehenna, the place 
 of final punishment, has been to lead many to think this 
 parable conclusive as to the eternal torment of the 
 wicked, while all that can be learned from it concerning 
 their condition after leaving this world is, that between 
 6 
 
82 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 death and the Judgment they are in a state of intense 
 suffering. It gives no intimation regarding the effect 
 upon them of the lake of fire, when at the final award 
 they shall be consigned to its abyss. 
 
 But ii hades proved a place of misery for the rich man, 
 it was one of unspeakable rest and comfort and bliss to 
 Lazarus, and in this direction there is not so much ten- 
 dency to misapprehension; and the consolation derived 
 from the record of his experience has helped to bear 
 many a burden, dried many a tear, and comforted many 
 a bereaved and sorrowing heart. 
 
 "Yes, the delightful" day will come, 
 When my dear Lord will call me home, 
 And I shall see his face," 
 
 Is the sustaining refrain of many a weary sojourner, in 
 this, the house of his pilgrimage. It is to be borne in 
 mind that the Greek basanos, rendered ''torment" (Luke 
 1 6 123), has not the slightestanalogy with kolasis, rendered 
 "torment" (i John 4: 18), which claimed our attention 
 a few pages back. If you ask me how I explain Rev. 
 14:11,1 frankly answer that I make no attempt at ex- 
 planation. To myself I say, this is a single sentence in a 
 book filled with the sublimest imagery portrayed in the 
 most highly figurative language, the interpretation of 
 which has caused the widest divergence on the part of the 
 many writers who have attempted to unfold its meaning. 
 Under such circumstances it does not seem as if this 
 one verse should make even a ripple on the current of 
 God's truth, as it is gathered in a mighty stream from 
 every portion of his holy word. It should also be noted 
 that this verse refers in any case only to a single class 
 of the wicked, and not to universal humanity. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 ;N chapter 2, commenting upon the eighteenth chapter 
 of Ezekiel, I had occasion to say that when God 
 threatened the sinner with death, there was no force in 
 the threat unless death meant the cessation of life. The 
 same holds true with reference to the following texts, and 
 all others of a like import. In John 8 : 24 our Lord 
 tells his hearers that " they shall die in their sins;" and in 
 Rom. 8:13 Paul writes, " If ye live after the flesh ye 
 shall die'' In neither of these places can so-called 
 "spiritual death" be meant, for this was the very condi- 
 tion which those addressed were then in, and for being 
 in which they were to die. In John, our Lord tells his 
 hearers that in rejecting him they lost their only chances 
 of escape from the penalty denounced against sin, viz., 
 death; and in Romans, Paul says that natural, psychical 
 life aside from the life imparted in the begetting from 
 above, had no continuance, but must come to an end. 
 
 With our definition of " life " and " death " all these 
 passages and such as these are plain, and, so far as I 
 know, so is every other in the entire Bible relating to 
 the subject, except that one in Rev. 14: u. With any 
 other definition not only are they not plain, but, as it ap- 
 pears to me, they cannot be made so. But I am some- 
 
 (83) 
 
84 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 times asked, '' Will not the adoption of such views as 
 you advocate destroy the belief of men in the immor- 
 tality of the soul, and lead to evil ?" As to the immortal- 
 ity of the soul, it will be overthrown only so far as it 
 conflicts with the teachings of the Bible, and to this ex- 
 tent this, and every other doctrine, deserves overthrow. 
 The Bible nowhere says that the soul is immortal, but 
 everywhere, from first to last, asserts over and over, both 
 directly and by implication, the contrary. When, at the 
 first, man was put upon probation, he was assured by 
 God that if he transgressed he should surely die. This 
 very threat asserts his mortality. How can death be 
 visited upon an immortal being? The very term immortal 
 signifies not mortal, not subject to death. It becomes 
 us with all reverence to say it, but even the Almighty 
 One cannot visit death upon an immortal being. Every 
 verse that asserts the destruction and death of the 
 wicked, is an assertion of man's mortality. 
 
 Ps. 66 : 9 says, " O, bless our God . . . which 
 holdeth our soul in life." If the soul is deathless by its 
 constitution, can it with any propriety be said to be held 
 in life by a power outside of itself? The admission 
 that it needed such extraneous support for the continu- 
 ance of its life, implies that if from any cause that sup- 
 port should be withheld, it would die. Ps. 103 : 4 is an- 
 other instance of a similar character: " Who redeemcth 
 thy life from destruction." In this psalm David clearly 
 recognizes the two-fold nature of man, the material, 
 physical organization, and the nobler, immaterial part, 
 the soul. He addresses his soul as if it were a being 
 independent of himself,and calls upon it torencleruntothe 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 85 
 
 Lord the homage and praise his great name and many 
 mercies deserved. It is the iniquity of his soul, not his 
 iniquity, that is forgiven. The life of his soul, not his 
 life, that is redeemed from destruction. It is not ma- 
 terial good and physical life that engage his thoughts, 
 but the exceeding mercy of God towards his sinful soul, 
 sick beyond the help of any human remedies, exposed 
 to destruction which no human power could avert. That 
 this is so appears from the contrast he draws between 
 this mortal life, verses 14 and 16, and the everlasting 
 mercy of God towards those who keep his covenant, 
 verses 17 and 18. If David inherited from Adam a 
 soul whose life was indestructible, where was the need 
 for any one to interpose to redeem it from that to which 
 from its nature it could not be exposed ? I cannot find 
 any intimation that David thought his soul exposed to 
 endless suffering, or he would have said, " Who redeem- 
 th thee from eternal misery," if he was seeking to ex- 
 press what was really in his mind. He evidently con- 
 sidered the life of his soul exposed to destruction; not 
 its happiness nor the beauty or innocence of its life, but 
 the very life itself. And this comes out more fully 
 when we consider the latter clause of the fourth verse 
 in connection with the fifth, " Who crowneth thee," i. e., 
 his soul, "with loving kindness and tender mercies, who 
 satisfieth thy mouth with good things." These varied 
 blessings which he enumerates as cause for praise, it should 
 be observed, are not merged in the life of the soul as if 
 they formed a part of it. The life of the soul redeemed 
 from destruction is one thing by itself; these favors 
 from God by which its life is blessed and made beatific 
 
86 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 are distinct from the life, and call for special mention 
 and separate acknowledgment and gratitude. In I 
 Tim. 6 : 16 Paul says of the King of kings that " He 
 only hath immortality," and in I Cor. 15:53, "This 
 mortal must put on immortality," and in the next verse, 
 " when this mortal shall have put on immortality." If 
 man by virtue of his original creation is immortal, how 
 is he by and by to put on that which inheres in the con- 
 stitution of his being and which has always attached to 
 him ? But Paul does not leave this matter of man's 
 entire mortality to be merely inferred, but asserts it 
 plainly in saying, " This mortal must put on immortal- 
 ity." 
 
 Is it said that he is speaking of man's material 
 part, which every one admits to be mortal ? I answer, 
 There is no evidence of this, but very much to the con- 
 trary. In the forty-second verse he says, speaking of 
 the bodies of the dead, "They are sown in corruption r 
 they are raised in incorruption." But besides the con- 
 ferring of incorruption upon their corruptible bodies, 
 there is the bestowal of immortality upon something 
 which, up to this time, had been mortal. What is this 
 something ? Is it the body ? No, he has done for that 
 all he purposes and all it needs, when it is raised from 
 the dead incorruptible, a spiritual body. If not the 
 body, what can it be but the soul ? The soul, which, by 
 reason of sin, had come under sentence of death? Un- 
 less it is the soul that is referred to as mortal, it has no 
 part in this event so inspiriting to the apostle, for unless- 
 alluded to as " this mortal," it is not alluded to at all. 
 Twice Paul uses the same formula, once in the fifty-third 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 87 
 
 and again in the fifty-fourth verse, preserving in both 
 instances the relative contrast between the corruptible 
 and the incorruptible, the mortal and the immortal, and 
 unless the redemption of the soul as well as the body 
 was included in his anticipations, the exultant shout of 
 triumph with which he closes the consideration of the 
 subject seems scarcely justified, I do not see how we 
 can escape the conclusion that Paul here refers to the 
 soul as mortal, just as plainly as he does to the body as 
 corruptible. 
 
 I do not feel called upon to meet any arguments 
 for the immortality of the soul, based upon human 
 reasoning and universal instinct, as all speculations and 
 theories of men are without the scope of this undertak- 
 ing, which is simply by comparing scripture with script- 
 ure, as any man may do, to ascertain what the Bible 
 teaches concerning these great problems affecting our 
 highest interests. I will, however, a little further on try 
 to allay the fears of those who think that the general 
 adoption of such views would be to throw down all 
 barriers between wicked men and the gratification of 
 their sinful propensities. At present I wish to ask if 
 there is anything in the Bible that conflicts with the 
 idea of the complete and final destruction of the wicked, 
 when, at the consummation of the age, God shall have 
 accomplished all his purposes connected with the pres- 
 ence of evil in the world, I do not think that any 
 unbiased search can discover such conflicting teachings; 
 on the contrary, all that the Bible tells us upon the sub- 
 ject harmonizes with the doctrine. 
 
 Man is a creature of God. ' It is he who has made 
 
88 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 us, and not we who have made ourselves." Man pos- 
 sesses absolutely nothing of his own (Dan. 5 : 23): " The 
 God in whose hand thy breath is and whose are all thy 
 ways." Job 12 : 10, "In whose hand is the life of every- 
 thing, and the breath of all mankind." Acts 17:25, 
 " Seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things." 
 Man, then, created by God, was without any inherent 
 power to continue the existence so conferred, and the 
 above quotations teach that the same Power that cre- 
 ated must be relied on to sustain. I do not say that 
 God may not create beings self-sustained and independ- 
 ent of his volition for their continued existence; but, as 
 regards our race, the Bible, as I read it, asserts that it 
 was not so created. What, then, is the immortality or 
 deathless nature claimed by so many as attaching to the 
 soul of man ? So far as I understand, it resolves itself 
 into this: The soul is immortal, i. e., it cannot die un- 
 less he whose creative power at the first caused it to be, 
 and whose preserving power alone continues it in being, 
 withdraws his sustaining hand, when, from its original 
 constitution, it ceases to be. If any claim more than 
 this for the soul of man, it is incumbent upon them to 
 bring some strong assurance from the word of God to 
 warrant the setting aside all the plain and oft-repeated 
 assertions of the Bible to the effect that the soul is sub- 
 ject to death, to everlasting destruction, and shall, under 
 certain named conditions, perish, be consumed, and ut- 
 terly destroyed. 
 
 The most constantly used of all sensible things to 
 symbolize this destruction is fire, which, invariably, when 
 applied in its intensest form to material objects, dissi- 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 pates into nothingness whatever is subjected to its ac- 
 tion. In Matt. 10 : 28 our Lord says, "Fear not them 
 which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul; but 
 rather fear him who ; s able to destroy both soul and 
 body in Gehenna, and the parallel passage, Luke 12:5, 
 says, " Fear him who after he hath killed hath power to 
 cast into Gehenna'' (Rev. 9 : 5 shows that to kill is not 
 to torment.) It is asserted by our Lord that he who 
 made the soul is able to destroy it, and this he effects by 
 giving it over to the fires of the final Judgment. It 
 seems to me that an unprejudiced interpretation of the 
 above verses, independent of any preconceived opinion 
 of what they should mean, will warrant only the fore- 
 going views. We see, then, that the soul of man equally 
 with the body is, according to the Bible, continued in be- 
 ing only at the will and by the power of God; that he 
 has the power to destroy it, and that he will in some 
 specified cases exert that power. What, then, becomes of 
 the claim made for the immortality or deathlessness of 
 the soul ? 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 . 
 
 HE man who with no ulterior intentions for good tears 
 
 downthat whichservesauseful purposeeither in phys- 
 ics, intellect, or morals, is a public enemy; but he who 
 destroys that he may reconstruct to better ends, deserves 
 the approval of his kind. Convinced as I am upon the 
 word of God that the soul of man is mortal, I would 
 not say a word to disturb the belief of those who find 
 comfort and strength and gladness in believing the con- 
 trary, unless I felt sure of being able to offer them some- 
 thing better than that which is taken away. I am no 
 theologian, but if the foregoing pages contain the truth 
 as God has revealed it, and wishes us to understand it y 
 there must be entire harmony between these views and 
 all else that is revealed in connection with the subject 
 considered. God is one, and in all his plans and pur- 
 poses there must be unity of design and operation; and 
 whatever claims to be a revelation of these plans must 
 be in harmony with itself and susceptible of an intelli- 
 gent unfolding to the extent of the revelation intended. 
 Is there then any conflict between the views herein ad- 
 vocated, and any revelation which God has made either 
 in his word or works ? Is there not on the contrary the 
 most perfect accord such as does not exist between 
 revelation and any other doctrine concerning the 
 (90) 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 91 
 
 future ? Those who assert that there is no hereafter, but 
 that to all, irrespective of their attitude toward God, 
 physical dissolution is the end of being, come into direct 
 antagonism to the Bible. Nor less in opposition to its 
 teachings are such as claim that for all, whether good or 
 bad, there is beyond the grave an eternity of bliss. And 
 they who stand by the evangelical doctrine of the im- 
 mortality of the soul and the endless misery of the 
 wicked, certainly must find that it requires a good deal 
 of shaping and trimming to make their doctrine fit in 
 with the other utterances of God's word. The essential 
 oneness of God seems to make our interpretation of the 
 language of the Bible regarding the final doom of the 
 wicked, a necessity. 
 
 In Deut. 6 : 4 Moses calls the attention of the 
 chosen people to the fact that their God, Jehovah, was 
 one. The gods of the nations about them were many. 
 One of them was the god of the hills, another of the 
 plains; one was god of the air, one of the sea, one of war, 
 one of justice, and so on through all the economies of 
 the material universe, and all the attributes of moral 
 character. But the God of Israel was not to be thought 
 of in any such way. He held in his hand all the forces 
 of nature; and in an unific condition, and in an infinite 
 degree, was possessed of every moral attribute. " Hear, O 
 Israel ! Jehovah our God is one, Jehovah." This 
 punctuation seems necessary from the connection, and 
 in its quotation by our Lord in Mark 12 : 30, as given in 
 the revision, its correctness is certainly made probable 
 if it is not fully established. This quality in the char- 
 acter of God insures unity of design and action in the 
 
92 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 realms of nature and providence, and equally so in his 
 moral government, and forbids our thinking or speaking 
 of his attributes as we think and speak of the qualities 
 possessed by our fellow-men. We say of a man he is 
 honest, but niggardly; of another, he is just, but doesn't 
 know what mercy means; of a third, he is affectionate, 
 but stern. But with God it is not so. In the glorious 
 perfections of his infinitude, every attribute of his moral 
 nature must be exercised equally with every other in 
 each act relating to his moral government. We cannot 
 say of him he is just in this act, and righteous in this, 
 and merciful in this, and faithful in this; but his justice, 
 mercy, righteousness, and truth all unite in every order- 
 ing of his holy will. If this be so (and in the nature of 
 the case can it be otherwise ?) where can be seen the exhi- 
 bition of God's love and mercy to the condemned sinner, 
 in prolonging his existence which is hopelessly miserable 
 because irreclaimably sinful ? 
 
 In view of such an award, it may be that the assem- 
 bled universe should unite in saying: "Even so, Lord 
 God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments;" 
 but could they find any place for his loving kindness 
 and tender mercies? If on the other hand, when he has 
 accomplished all his purposes in permitting the intro- 
 duction of sin into his moral government, and allowed it 
 to work out to demonstration its own inherent tendencies, 
 culminating in complete ruin and misery, and made this 
 manifest to the universe, he deprives the guilty ones of 
 the being which they had employed so far as they were 
 able to frustrate his plans and subvert his authority; he 
 is no more just than merciful, no more severe than com- 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 passionate, no more holy than loving. God makes no- 
 partial exhibition of his perfection in depriving the sin- 
 ful soul of that which if prolonged would be only a con- 
 tinued rebellion against himself, and consequent con- 
 tinued misery, thus extirpating the sin while minimizing 
 the loss to the sinner. Does any other disposition of the 
 finally condemned disclose God so in harmony with all 
 that he has revealed of himself in the Bible? As this 
 doctrine manifests the unity of God in the final punish- 
 ment for transgression, it makes it no less apparent in 
 the precaution taken to lessen, as far as possible, the 
 evils of the first transgression. From this point of ob- 
 servation the cherubim and flaming sword guarding the 
 way to the tree of life, are no longer an enigma. Man 
 was now a transgressor; a sense of guilt was upon him; 
 the faith which had turned lovingly to God and rested 
 implicitly in him had been supplanted by unbelief; fear 
 had taken the place of love, the penalty affixed to dis- 
 obedience had been incurred, and all the perfections of 
 God, his wisdom, justice, truth and power which before 
 had been pledged for the preservation and well-being of 
 man now only made more certain the execution of the 
 sentence pronounced against sin. 
 
 Adam heard the voice of God and hid himself. To 
 bestow eternal life on such a one would be in opposition 
 to all that God has revealed concerning himself. "God 
 is love/' and no creature by any act he can perform is 
 capable of changing, in the least degree, the perfection 
 of his character. The truth, holiness, and justice of 
 God were to be manifested in the infliction of the threat- 
 ened penalty, but no less his love. The tree of life is 
 
94 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 not plucked up, nor cut down, only the way to it is 
 guarded. Man may yet gather of its fruit, and eat, and 
 live forever; but first there must be sorrow and repent- 
 ance for sin; perfect love must cast out fear, and unwav- 
 ering faith be ready to respond to the faintest call of 
 God " my Father." The assurance of God's word is, 
 that "without faith it is impossible to please him;" and 
 just as plainly, though not so succinctly, that without 
 it the complete and permanent well being of the creat- 
 ure is also impossible. From the highest archangel 
 before the throne, to the weakest moral nature in the 
 universe, faith in God must be implicit, or there can be 
 no safety against temptation, no security for continued 
 innocence, no equanimity to rest upon when the opera- 
 tions of the All-Wise and Eternal, who giveth not ac- 
 count of any of his matters, outreach the stretch of the 
 finite intellect, and all that can be known of his ways is 
 mysterious and perplexed. So, though to the natural 
 man it may appear an arbitrary requirement on the part 
 of God, when he makes faith in him the ground of jus- 
 tification, and the condition of eternal life; such is not 
 the case, but the possession and exercise of this grace is 
 no more for the honor of the Creator than for the bless- 
 ing of the creature. As I read the Bible, the whole rec- 
 ord of God's dealings with the race shows this one pur- 
 pose, to re-establish in the nature of man that faith 
 which had been lost, and without which his claims upon 
 man never could be met, nor his love be satisfied in the 
 possession by man of complete felicity beyond the pos- 
 sibility of forfeiture. The means employed by God to 
 effect this restoration have been varied, but the end in 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 95 
 
 view has been the same. I know that the churches 
 teach that the faith of Old Testament believers was in a 
 Saviour to come, and that it rested upon Jesus Christ by 
 anticipation, as ours does on him as a Saviour revealed. 
 I think this is not only contrary to the Bible, but to 
 sound policy as well. We make an advance into the 
 enemies' country and take up a position which we can- 
 not hold and from which any well ordered attack forces 
 us to retreat. 
 
 In all the enumeration of Old Testament believers 
 in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, not one of 
 them is named as having any reference to a crucified, 
 risen Saviour as the object of his faith.* In all these in- 
 stances the object of faith was God. The faith of 
 Abram, which was counted to him for righteousness, was 
 in the promise of God concerning a progeny which to 
 men appeared impossible of fulfillment. Gen. 15:56; 
 
 *The case of Moses in the twenty-sixth verse appears to be an excep- 
 tion, but I think it is only in appearance, not in reality. The twenty-fifth 
 and twenty-sixth verses read: " Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the 
 people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin fora season; esteeming the 
 reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt." Christ, in 
 Greek, means "anointed," and in I Samuel God speaks of the chosen people 
 as his anointed, and in I Chron. 16:22, speaking of the providence of God 
 over his people, David says, " He reproved kings for their sakes, saying, 
 Touch not mine anointed." Again, in Hab. 3:13, the prophet says: "Thou 
 wentest forth for the salvation of thy people, even for salvation with thine 
 anointed." Itmaybe because of my ignorance of the language, but it appears 
 to me that there is no impropriety in translating "jpZO'TO?" anointed, 
 especially as the context seems to require it. The preceding verse says 
 he chose to suffer affliction with the people of God, and goes on to say that 
 the motive for this was to be found in his esteeming reproach with this 
 anointed people superior to all earthly good. 
 
96 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 Rom. 4:3, 20, 22. As regards Enoch, the writer appears 
 to have had no specific act of faith in his mind, but as- 
 sumes that he exercised and made manifest this grace, 
 from the recorded fact that he pleased God (Gen. 5:24), 
 and as this was impossible without faith, it must have 
 been possessed by Enoch. So of Noah. He became 
 heir of the righteousness which is by faith, through 
 his implicit faith in God specifically shown in 
 building the ark. So of Gideon (Judges 6:i I, 40). All 
 this condescension on the part of God, that the faith of 
 Gideon might be strengthened and perfected, had no 
 reference to Jesus Christ, but only to God himself, 
 whether Gideon could or would confide unhesitatingly 
 in his wisdom to plan, in his faithfulness to his word, 
 and in his power to accomplish his purposes. It seems 
 clear that God alone was the object of faith to Abram, 
 Enoch, Moses, Gideon, and the others referred to in this 
 eleventh chapter of Hebrews; and in Rom. 4:24 it is 
 said that he must be the object of our faith. " Now, it 
 was net written for his sake alone that it was imputed 
 to him, but for us also to whom it shall be imputed, if 
 we believe on him that raised up Jesus, our Lord, from the 
 dead!' Also in I Peter 1 :2O, 2 1 the apostle says, speak- 
 ing of our Lord, " but was manifest in these last times 
 for you, who by him do believe in God, that raised him 
 from the dead." 
 
 The acceptance of, and belief in Jesus Christ, in 
 his nature as divine as well as human; in his office as 
 redeemer, and in his teachings as truth, is the corner- 
 stone upon which Christians build their structure of 
 faith in God, without which it is impossible to please 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 97 
 
 him. On his divine side belief in Jesus Christ is faith in 
 God, but on his human side, as the man Christ Jesus, 
 belief in him is the ladder by which we ascend to faith 
 in God. With this view it is not necessary for us, in 
 order to show that God's plan of salvation has been the 
 same in all ages (viz. by faith), to prove that Noah, 
 Abram, and others of the Old Testament dispensation, 
 had faith in Jesus Christ, but only that they had faith 
 in God, induced, sustained, and strengthened by such 
 means as he saw best suited to this end. 
 
 It seems presumption to say that God is restricted 
 to only one medium in awakening and developing faith, 
 and that, the acceptance of Jesus Christ; for the holy 
 angels exercise faith in God, and have done so ever 
 since their creation, and from I Peter i:ii, 12, they 
 knew nothing clearly of the character the Son of God 
 was to assume as a suffering, dying Saviour. Neither 
 do the words of our Lord in John 8:56, "Abraham re- 
 joiced to see my day," etc., imply that his faith realized 
 an incarnate, suffering, dying, risen God, for I Peter 
 1:10, 12 says expressly that even the prophets, who fore- 
 told this of our Lord, did not understand the import of 
 their prediction, but it was revealed to them that their 
 ministry in this respect was not for themselves but for 
 those of a later generation. Nor does this conflict with 
 Acts 4:12: " For there is none other name under heaven 
 given among men whereby we must be saved." 
 
 It was to the people of Israel that this language 
 was addressed. Acts 3:12. "To those who had partici- 
 pated in the death of Jesus (verses 14, 15), to the chil- 
 dren of the covenant made by God with Abraham 
 7 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 (verse 25), and especially to the members of the Sanhe- 
 drim, who had personally and actively engaged 'in his 
 crucifixion. Acts 4 : 8. To these and all such as these, 
 who have had Jesus preached unto them ineffectually 
 there are no other means that can avail; but to those 
 who never have heard of the gospel of God's grace 
 through him, God may, and I think the Bible teaches 
 that he does, impart such and so much knowledge of 
 himself as suffices for the springing up and keeping 
 alive that faith which he requires. That God was the 
 object of faith to Old Testament believers is also evi- 
 dent from psalm 78. The psalmist recites the wonder- 
 ful and repeated interpositions on the part of God for 
 his people, and verse 21 says: The Lord was wroth; " and 
 anger came up against Israel because they believed not 
 in God." But it is needless to multiply proofs of the 
 position that belief in Jesus Christ was not required, 
 nor possible under the Mosaic dispensation. How could 
 they believe in him of whom they had not heard ? 
 
 As said before, it is impolitic as well as unscript- 
 ural to claim that faith in Jesus Christ was the ground 
 of justification for Old Testament believers. The 
 passages quoted, I think, show that it is unscript- 
 ural; if not, many others might be added; and it is im- 
 politic, because it puts us upon the defensive when the 
 position is attacked by unbelievers. The taking upon 
 himself by the Second Person in the Godhead, of the 
 office of man's Redeemer, and of satisfying the require- 
 ments of the broken law, by himself bearing the pen- 
 alty, made it possible for God, consistently with his 
 justice, to bestow eternal life upon any of the race whom 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 99 
 
 he, in his omniscience, saw were fitted to receive it. No 
 truth is more plainly taught in the Bible than that 
 eternal life is a free gift from God, wholly irrespective of 
 any merit on the part of the recipient. Faith in God is 
 the only condition, and this not that man may make a 
 return to God for the gift, but that he may stand in 
 such a relation toward God that his infinite love and 
 wisdom may be satisfied that the gift shall prove a 
 blessing and not a curse. (His justice has already been 
 satisfied by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.) If there is 
 in any soul that faith in God which, of his free grace, he 
 reckons for righteousness, and which he in his omnis- 
 cience sees will make eternal life a blessing, even though 
 it reach out toward him in darkness and ignorance and 
 weakness, who is to limit his grace and prescribe for 
 him the measure of that faith, the possession of which 
 shall permit him, in accordance with his own infinite 
 perfections, and the greatest good of the individual, to 
 bestow upon the possessor eternal life ? 
 
 That Jesus Christ, by his own death, has redeemed 
 the entire race from the penalty of the broken law, which 
 is death, and purchased eternal life for all, is seen from 
 the following passages: " Behold the Lamb of God 
 which taketh away the sins of the world" (John I : 29); 
 " And he is the propitiation . . . for the sins of the 
 whole world" (i John 2:2); " The Father sent the Son 
 to be the Saviour of the world" (i John 4: 14). This be- 
 ing the case, we may be sure that Jesus Christ will never 
 let one soul, for whose redemption he has paid the pur- 
 chase price in full, go down to eternal death, if the re- 
 lation of that soul toward God is such as to make eternal 
 
ioo THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 life a blessing. All that our blessed Lord has revealed of 
 himself forbids the idea, and he it is who is to decideatlast 
 who is fit and who unfit to receive the gift; for John 5 : 
 22 says: " The Father judgeth no man, but has com- 
 mitted all judgment unto the Son." Understanding 
 " eternal life " to be as defined in these pages, the above 
 view is entirely scriptural, the limits wherein the grace of 
 God may be exercised is exceedingly broadened, and 
 the mouths of cavilers completely stopped , who 
 deny the Bible to be a revelation from God because, as 
 they say, it represents him as creating a race of which 
 he knew a large majority would be eternally miserable; 
 for, on the contrary, he does not permit a single one to 
 be so, but ends their rebellion, their misery, and their 
 being, just as soon as his all-wise purposes in allowing sin 
 to come into the world, are accomplished. Not only does 
 God not create men to make them eternally miserable, but 
 he gives to all so much knowledge of himself, either 
 through his word, his works, or the promptings of his 
 Spirit, as that they may manifest their tendencies and 
 reach out after him in faith, even though it be but blindly, 
 (as in Acts 17 : 27), if they desire a knowledge of his 
 ways. I know that in Rom. 10 : 13 Paul, quoting from 
 Joel 2 : 32, says: "Whosoever shall call upon the name 
 of Jehovah shall be saved;" and proceeds to say that 
 they must hear of him before they can call upon him; 
 but in verse 18 he asserts that all men have heard of him 
 through his works, which in chapter I : 19, 20 he declares 
 so far reveal him that men are without excuse if they 
 do not glorify him as God. But if any refuse to walk 
 by the light they have, either with the knowledge of 
 
THE WORLD TO COM3. 101 
 
 Jesus Christ, or in ignorance of his salvation, they shall be 
 destroyed; and in thus dealing with them, God is as 
 benificent as he is just, in depriving them of the ex- 
 istence which through their alienation from him, if pro- 
 longed, could only be to his dishonor, and their own 
 unspeakable loss. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 'HE writer has made these thoughts public in the 
 hope of removing, or at least lessening some of the 
 obstacles to the progress of the kingdom of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ There is no denying that in lands 
 nominally Christian, great numbers of the moral and 
 intelligent are out of practical sympathy with the aims 
 and interests of the church, and it seems to him that one 
 prominent reason is that the church teaches doctrines 
 that do not commend themselves to the reason of think- 
 ing men, and which are not so plainly announced in the 
 Bible as to demand acceptance as the word of God. 
 Multitudes, I believe, in Christian lands are prevented 
 from accepting the offer of God's grace, because it is 
 presented to them as a remedy for an ill from which they 
 cannot be made to believe themselves suffering; a way 
 of escape from a danger which they feel is not impend- 
 ing; a redemption from a penalty they have not incurred. 
 Never in the history of the Christian world has intelli- 
 gence been so general among men as now, and this in- 
 telligence is brought to bear upon religious as well as 
 secular matters. The assertion is doubtless true that 
 never were there half the number of persons studying 
 the Bible as at the present day. The more critical ren- 
 dering of God's word out of the languages in which it 
 
 (102) 
 
/ THE WORLD TO COMK. 103 
 
 was originally written, and the many helps provided for 
 its study by those who can read neither Hebrew or 
 Greek, are factors in the problem that must be taken 
 into the account. One can hardly attend any church a 
 few months without listening to sermons from texts 
 which any careful reader of the Bible knows are no 
 foundation for the teachings built upon them, and though 
 the truth inculcated might be found in some other part 
 of the Bible, because it is not in the passage under con- 
 sideration, the listener silently protests during the whole 
 sermon, and goes away inclined to doubt the entire Bible, 
 when it was only the human infirmity of the preacher 
 that was at fault. At the last prayer-meeting I attended 
 the passage of Scripture selected was I John 3 : 14, 24, 
 and the subject, "American Indians Our Brothers." Our 
 pastor included not only the Indians, but the hetero- 
 geneous crowd of immigrants thatis flocking to our shores, 
 not omitting those from the Flowery Kingdom, and 
 pressed upon us all our duties to them as brethren, as 
 taught in this chapter. Another clergyman, a D. D., 
 who was present, in his prayer asked that professing 
 Christians " might be made sensible that unless they 
 cherished the love here mentioned towards the Indians 
 the love of God was not in them." It is so plain that 
 the apostle is not writing regarding the duty of man to 
 man, but of the relation existing between Christians 
 growing out of their union with Jesus Christ, that it ap- 
 peared to me a perversion of Scripture to attempt to teach 
 from it that a Christian should cherish the same love 
 and tenderness for a murdering Apache that he does for 
 his fellow Christians with whom he has a common faith, 
 
104 T HE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 a common Lord, and a common life. And how could 
 one join in the prayer that the " Holy Spirit would make 
 him sensible that, unless such were his feelings, he was 
 abiding in death, and without evidence that the love of 
 God dwelt in him?" I have heard more than one ser- 
 mon preached from Prov. 1:24, 26: "Because I have 
 called and ye have refused, I. have stretched out my hand 
 and no man regarded . . . . I also will laugh at 
 your calamity and mock when your fear cometh." The 
 speakers uniformly put these words in the mouth of 
 God, and based their teachings upon them as his utter- 
 ances. The most superficial student can see that it is 
 wisdom personified who is speaking, and not the Lord, 
 and anyone conversant with the Bible should know that 
 the idea of God's laughing at the distress of his creatures, 
 wicked and rebellious though they be, or of adding to 
 their misery by mocking taunts, is utterly at variance 
 with all which he has said in relation to the subject. 
 Our divine Master wept over the calamities which he 
 foresaw about to fall upon his persecutors and murderers, 
 but no word of mockery or laugh of anticipated satis- 
 faction over their coming overthrow was ever heard from 
 him. It is true that in Ps. 2:4 God is represented as 
 deriding the futile attempts of men to frustrate his 
 eternal purposes, but this is a very different matter from 
 that referred to above. Another similar perversion of 
 Scripture is illustrated by Prov. 8:17. There is hardly 
 a Sunday-school in the land that has not upon its walls: 
 "They that seek me early shall find me," and the chil- 
 dren are taught that these are the words of God, ex- 
 pressing the relation in which they stand towards him. 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 105 
 
 If the child is ever led to study the Bible, or even to read 
 it attentively, he finds that it is wisdom which he is ad- 
 monished to strive to gain; redemption from ignorance, 
 not redemption from sin as he has been taught; and 
 also that " early " has no reference to the tender years 
 of the seeker, but only to the diligence with which he is 
 to seek, and he feels, to put it in plain English, that he 
 has been deceived, and whether he concludes that his 
 teachers did it intentionally or in ignorance, the result to 
 him is the same in lessening the value and authority of 
 everything else they have taught him. 
 
 In i Tim. i :8 Paul says: "The law is good if one 
 use it lawfully " (what a pity that it is not so used to a 
 greater degree), and the same may be said of the entire 
 word of God; and for a minister, set to watch for souls, 
 to take any single verse or passage of Scripture, and use 
 it out of the connection in which God put it. seems to 
 me a crime to be taken note of by all who have the over- 
 sight of the church of Jesus Christ The passages quoted 
 are only illustrations of the evil referred to; and such 
 perversions, as I call them, every one can recall, and it is 
 needless to multiply examples. 
 
 The teaching by the church of the inherent immor- 
 tality of the soul, and its destiny unless reconciled to 
 God, to endless misery, is another stumbling-block to 
 some who are seeking to know the truth. As said at 
 the opening of this chapter, men neglect or refuse to 
 avail themselves of the offer of God's grace, because they 
 are urged to accept it as a way of escape from a penalty 
 which they feel they have not incurred. The doctrine 
 of the endless suffering of the wicked is so at variance 
 
106 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 with what the Bible reveals as the character of God, that 
 the reason rebels against it; and it is because the church 
 generally insists that this doctrine and the entire Bible 
 stand or fall together, that so many say, " Then let the 
 Bible go." But it is asked, " Is the Bible to be submitted 
 to the test of human reason, and all that proves unsatis- 
 factory to it to be set aside ? " By no means. All that 
 I claim is that when God appeals to our reason he makes 
 full provision for satisfying all its reasonable demands; 
 and when he requires faith concerning matters above, or 
 without the scope of our reason, he gives us his sure word 
 for faith to rest upon. 
 
 When our religious teachers come to us with " Thus 
 saitli the Lord," the only province of reason is to ascer- 
 tain the fact of his having sent the message, and this 
 assured, reverently and implicitly to abide by its teach- 
 ings. But when any man or any number of men come 
 to their fellow-men as teachers of religious truth, and 
 bring no "Thus saith the Lord," but only their own in- 
 terpretation of what he has said, then reason asserts 
 the right and duty of trying in her court the correctness 
 of their conclusions; and the acceptance of religious 
 teachings upon the authority of men, unless enforced by 
 " Thus saith the Lord," or the sanction of our own 
 reason, appears to me not faith but credulity. But re- 
 turning from our digression, let us examine a little more 
 in detail the position occupied by the objectors to the 
 Bible as a revelation from God, on the ground stated, 
 which was touched upon in the last chapter. These 
 objectors argue, with a great deal of plausibility, that 
 the Bible cannot be a revelation from God for it 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 107 
 
 teaches (so its advocates claim) that the Creator has 
 brought into being a race that he knew would transgress 
 his laws, and in numberless instances would refuse to 
 return to their allegiance upon the offer of mercy being 
 extended to them, and that in his creative act they are 
 so constituted that they must be eternally sinful and 
 intolerably miserable. If, say they, the Bible teaches 
 this, we do not believe it ever came from God. If it 
 docs not teach it, then its expounders are either igno- 
 rant of its true meaning, or they are willfully misleading 
 men in preaching what they do not themselves believe, 
 and so prove themselves hypocrites. This is their case, 
 as they put it. 
 
 Now, if the clear, undisputed declaration of the 
 Bible were that man was so created, and so destined, we 
 might, according to our light and ability, seek to refute 
 their arguments, oppose their designs, and calmly wait 
 for God to vindicate his ways in his own good time. 
 But, if, in the absence of this distinct utterance of God's 
 word, and with so much to the contrary in its teachings, 
 we admit that the Bible teaches that eternal life was 
 only a possibility for man, as originally created, to be 
 conferred as the reward of obedience during his proba- 
 tionary term, and that having, through transgression, 
 forfeited all right to this, his Creator, in purest mercy, 
 renewed the offer, not upon condition of perfect obedience, 
 which man could not now render, but upon the condi- 
 tion of faith, which, with the proffered help of the Holy 
 Spirit, he could exercise, we deprive such cavilers of 
 any ground to base such an argument upon; for the 
 Bible shows God to be infinite in mercy in postponing 
 
io8 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 the infliction of the penalty incurred, and in providing 
 another way in which the obtaining of the blessing was 
 made possible to all. If, however, any fail to avail 
 themselves of this second opportunity, they shall be 
 destroyed, and in their destruction, the hatred of God for 
 sin, and his justice in destroying the sinner, are no more 
 apparent than are his love and mercy, as has before been 
 shown. 
 
 The final death of the wicked cannot be made the 
 basis for charging God with cruelty, for, though the 
 language of the Bible would imply that their destruction 
 is accomplished by an absolute act of God, no such act 
 is necessary on his part; for the soul, being in its nature 
 subject to death, and sustained in life only by the will 
 and power of its Creator, the moment these are withheld 
 it perishes because of its inability to preserve its own 
 life, for " none can keep alive his own soul." Ps. 22 : 29. 
 
 There is, it appears to me, another error through 
 which our religious teachers confuse themselves, mislead 
 those who wait upon their ministry, and invalidate the 
 teachings of the Bible upon this subject, in not distinctly 
 separating, in their minds, as also in the minds of their 
 people, the penalty affixed by God to sin, from the con- 
 sequences, or results, of sin. We see in the world 
 around us that the transgression of God's laws in the 
 realm of physics, entails temporal loss and suffering, and 
 so, easily and without much reflection, accept the doc- 
 trine that eternal suffering is the punishment for trans- 
 gressing his moral laws. This, however, is not the teach- 
 ing of the Bible, but rather of that wonderful creation of 
 man's genius, " Paradise Lost," which grand and perhaps 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 109 
 
 unequalled as it is as a poetic conception, has, I think, 
 done incalculable harm as a basis of religious belief. 
 Because of this confounding of penalty affixed to trans- 
 gression, with the consequences resulting from it, many 
 sincere Christians think the truth of God's word is assailed 
 when anything else than eternal, insupportable anguish 
 is allotted to the wicked as their portion. When God 
 created man, and established him upon this earth, and 
 gave him dominion over the lower order of creation, he 
 laid upon him one interdict, and affixed to its disregard 
 a specific penalty. The prohibition related to the tree 
 of knowledge of good and evil; the penalty for disobedi- 
 ence was death, nothing more, nothing less, and nothing 
 else. But it is asked, Does not the Bible say that sin 
 brought death into the world and a 1 I our woes? A great 
 many think it does, but of all I have asked to do so, 
 none have been able to refer me to the verse, and with 
 hardly an exception people are surprised to learn that 
 Milton, and not Paul is the author of the sentiment. 
 What Paul does say is, " By one man sin entered into the 
 world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all 
 men.'' Rom. 5:12. 
 
 In human laws the same difference is often to be 
 seen between the penalty for transgression and the results 
 of transgression. For instance, a man is engaged in 
 business as a merchant, he has the confidence of the 
 community in which he lives, his business is fairly pros- 
 perous and enables him to support in comfort and hap- 
 piness the wife and family that bless and brighten his 
 home. In an evil hour temptation assails and overcomes 
 him, and he fraudulently signs the name of another. 
 
i io THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 His crime is discovered and fastened upon him, and the 
 penalty for forgery, which is confinement in the State 
 Prison, is inflicted upon him; and this is as far as the 
 penalty for his crime reaches. But its consequences do 
 not end here. His business, which, under his watchful 
 eye and careful hand, yielded a fair return, in the care 
 of mercenary or incompetent agents, is conducted at a 
 loss; and soon poverty succeeds to competence, and want 
 takes the place of plenty in that once happy home, and 
 the wife and little ones are introduced to a life of hard- 
 ship and privation The law took no cognizance of all 
 their sufferings in affixing the penalty of imprisonment 
 to the crime of forgery; these are no part of the legal 
 penalty, neither are the grief and remorse which wring 
 the heart of the criminal when he learns that those he 
 loves so well are exposed to these bitter experiences 
 which are the consequences of his wrong doing, but are 
 no part of the penalty contemplated by the law. One 
 point to be kept in mind during all the investigation of 
 this subject, I think, is that God has not permitted any 
 vagueness or uncertainty to exist regarding the penalty 
 which he has affixed to sin. In the very beginning of 
 the race he made it clearly known to our first parents, 
 ** In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." 
 Gen: 2:17. Further on in the history of the race he 
 reiterates in most unmistakable language, " The soul 
 that sinneth it shall die." Eze. 18:4. And in Rom. 
 6 : 23 Paul says, " The wages of sin is death." We see, 
 therefore, that the full penalty denounced by God against 
 the sinner is inflicted when he passes under the power of 
 the second death, even though that experience should 
 be a release from suffering, rather than its infliction. 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 1 1 1 
 
 Suppose, in the instance above cited, that the con- 
 demned, instead of being so pleasantly situated as 
 regards worldly surroundings, had been an outcast, with- 
 out home or friends, with no means of support, aban- 
 doned and vile. The change to inside the prison walls, 
 in his case, is all for the better. He has clean, com- 
 fortable clothes in place of his dilapidated ones; whole- 
 some and nutritious food, which, though coarse, is 
 abundant; he is taught some useful trade, and made ca- 
 pable of earning an honest living. All this is a real 
 blessing to him, but, nevertheless, the requirements of 
 justice are as fully met in the infliction of the penalty 
 affixed to the crime as in the former case. Therefore, I 
 do not see that we need exercise ourselves over the ob- 
 jection that is urged against the doctrine of the eternal 
 death of the wicked, that instead of being an infliction 
 upon them of suffering, it is an escape from it; for God 
 nowhere in his word attaches suffering to sin as its pen- 
 alty, but always death, and if his holy law is satisfied 
 when the denounced penalty is inflicted, why should we 
 as less tolerant of sin than God, insist upon a more ter- 
 rible expiation ? David understood human nature well 
 when he chose to fall into the hand of God rather than 
 into the hands of men, for, said he, " his mercies are 
 great." 2 Sam. 24:10, 14. Another objection raised 
 against the doctrine of the final destruction of the 
 wicked is that, should it prevail, it would induce men to 
 continue in sin, inasmuch as present gratification would 
 be considered more than an equivalent for ultimate de- 
 struction, and if men understood that no suffering was 
 attached to sin, a very great inducement, which is now 
 held out to them to turn to God, would be taken away. 
 
ii2 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 In the first place, if this doctrine is in accord with 
 what God has revealed in the Bible, we have nothing to 
 do with the possible effects of teaching it. Our only 
 concern should be to know what God says, being satis- 
 fied that his word will not return to him void, but will 
 accomplish that which he purposes. In the sec- 
 ond place, the Bible does not say that suffering does not 
 result from sin, but, on the contrary, plainly says in the 
 parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16), that 
 after death, and before the Judgment, the wicked shall 
 suffer intense anguish. The expression, " The wrath of 
 the Lamb," in Rev. 6:16, suggests in its single line more 
 of terror, anguish, and despair, than the farthest reach 
 of our imagination can attain to, or language express; 
 and if terror is the element to be employed in bringing 
 men back to repentance, faith, and love, there is enough 
 in these few words when brought home to an awakened 
 conscience, to make the stoutest-hearted sinner cry for 
 mercy. 
 
 But is it true that the teaching of this doctrine will 
 encourage men in sin ? In Job 2:4 we read: " All that 
 a man hath will he give for his life," and though this is 
 the assertion of the father of lies, God acted upon it as 
 if true, and human experience through all time shows 
 that, to the great mass of humanity, even this mortal 
 life, with all its discomforts and uncertainties, is more 
 precious than any other possession. If this is so in re- 
 lation to this brief, unsatisfactory stage of being, is it 
 reasonable to say that the possibility of an endless life, 
 freed from the surroundings that so try and grieve us 
 here, and with our natures brought into perfect harmony 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 1 1 3 
 
 with God, presents no inducement, or, at most, a very 
 slight one, to turn to God ? Some, it is too probable 
 that many, will go on in sin regardless of the crown of 
 life held out as the prize to him that overcometh. But 
 this tells nothing for or against the tendency of this 
 teaching, for multitudes reject the offers of God's grace, 
 even though enforced with all the alternative terrors of 
 an eternity of sin, constantly increasing in sinfulness, 
 accompanied, step by step, with an accumulating misery, 
 till, in the cycles of eternity, the sin of each condemned 
 soul shall exceed the aggregate sins of the whole race, 
 and his sufferings because of his sin shall outweigh the 
 accumulated misery of the entire race throughout all 
 time; and then his sin, his suffering, and his capacity for 
 sinning and suffering shall be only in the infantile stage 
 of their development. 
 
 Multitudes, I say, have rejected the offer of mercy, 
 even when taught from the pulpit that this was the pun- 
 ishment for unforgiven sin. Multitudes, to-day, with 
 these teachings sounding in their ears, and under the 
 full light of the gospel, turn away from the salvation it 
 offers, and probably multitudes would continue to reject 
 God's mercy should the church teach the eternal destruc- 
 tion of the wicked, instead of their eternal misery. But, 
 as said before, that proves nothing as to the truth or 
 falsity of the doctrine. Although a cense of loss or dan- 
 ger must precede any appreciation of the need and im- 
 portance of a Saviour, terror induced by representations 
 such as above described is no necessary element in bring- 
 ing men to a sense of their danger, and their need of the 
 salvation offered through Jesus Christ. Indeed, the dom- 
 8 
 
ii4 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 mating influence of such a dread in the heart, it seems 
 to me, must hinder one from coming to God with that 
 disposition which is pleasing to him. The love of men 
 is what he asks for, and on this foundation the Holy 
 Spirit builds up the structure of faith and works; 
 but slavish fear and filial love cannot exist to- 
 gether, and the heart that will not yield its su- 
 preme faith and love to God under the clear presenta- 
 tion of the ruin wrought by sin, the infinite love and 
 compassion of Jesus Christ in working out, through his 
 own humiliation and sacrifice, a complete salvation from 
 that ruin, and through his own death offering to the 
 condemned sinner eternal life, made glorious by being 
 clothed upon with the robe of his righteousness, and 
 beatific in conformity to his will and the enjoyment of 
 hi"> favor, would hardly be prompted to the exercise of 
 that faith, and the yielding that love through fear of 
 punishment, even should a lost soul return from hades 
 and emphasize, out of his own fearful experience, the 
 destructive tendencies of sin, and the terrible character 
 of its retribution. 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 'HERE does not appear to me any valid objection 
 either in revelation, reason, or experience to the 
 plain preaching of this doctrine of the destruction 
 of the finally impenitent at the day of Judgment; and 
 all its collateral truths, one of which, and not the least 
 important, is that while eternal life is wholly of grace 
 and a free gift through Jesus Christ, the conditions per- 
 taining to that life, though all flowing from the favor of 
 God, and partaking of the blessedness resulting from 
 conformity to his will and harmony with his purposes 
 may be diverse in different individuals within the widest 
 conceivable limits, according as the acts and motives 
 during this probationary state have been loyal and lov- 
 ing toward our Lord, or careless of his honor, and in- 
 different to the interests of his kingdom. When the 
 church teaches that eternal life means all of unending 
 felicity that God can bestow, there is nothing left of any 
 supplemental good to be obtained as a reward for the 
 aspiring, neither is there any loss to those who appar- 
 ently constituting the great mass of our churches, are 
 content with their present condition and prospects 
 Having been taught by their spiritual guides that by 
 eternal life is meant all of beatitude for which their 
 natures have capacity, and that this is the free gift of 
 (US) 
 
n6 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 God without merit on their part, they logically conclude 
 that nothing they can do or leave undone can augment 
 or diminish the measure of consummate bliss involved 
 in the gift of eternal life. 
 
 Let it be admitted that eternal life means the con- 
 ditions that pertain to life, and not the life itself, and 
 that these conditions are perfect holiness and supreme 
 felicity to the fullest capacity of the recipient, and it 
 seems to me that you have discovered one of the rea- 
 sons of the great, and to many inexplicable apathy re- 
 garding spiritual attainments, which pervades so largely 
 our churches of all denominations, and renders their 
 members content to remain on so low a plane as regards 
 religious duties and knowledge. Our Creator has made 
 us with natures powerfully susceptible to the influence 
 of prospective reward consequent upon certain actions,, 
 and himself appeals to this quality constantly in his 
 dealings with men, as shown in the Scriptures. Abram 
 was stimulated to leave his early home and kindred by 
 the promise of God that he would make of him a great 
 nation. Gen. 12 : 1, 2. Moses, in casting in his lot with 
 God's anointed people, " had respect unto the recompense 
 of the reward" (Heb. 11 126), and in dealing with his 
 chosen people God always coupled reward with obedi- 
 ence. Our Lord when on earth constantly appealed to 
 this sentiment in encouraging his disciples. (See Matt 
 10 : 40, 42, and 19 : 28, 29.) In Heb. 12:2 we learn that 
 our Lord himself was not insensible to its power, for it 
 there says that he " for the 'joy set before him endured 
 the cross despising the shame," and in Isa. 53:11, " He 
 shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied." 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 117 
 
 The very closing of Revelation says: " I come, quickly 
 and rny reward is with me to give to every man accord- 
 ing as his work shall be." Rev. 22: 12. If this quality 
 in our natures is so constantly and effectively used by 
 God in influencing men for good, why should those who 
 are seeking to win men to God ignore it in their efforts ? 
 The church of Rome is wiser than we in this respect, 
 for the rewards for certain deeds and alms are fully set 
 forth by her teachers, though the objects which can be 
 gained by them are falsely stated. 
 
 No man can by any work or merit of his own ob- 
 tain the pardon of one sin, or stand justified before God. 
 "" The soul that sinneth it shall die," " for whosoever shall 
 keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is 
 guilty of all." Jas. 2 : 10. But the penalty of death 
 once remitted through faith, and eternal life accepted as 
 a free gift, from that moment the stimulus of rewards 
 is legitimately employed. I say legitimately, for our 
 blessed Lord himself employs it when he says, Whoso 
 giveth a cup of water to one of mine for my sake shall 
 in no wise lose his reward. It is said that this is a low 
 Jevel to work upon, and that our service for the Master 
 .should spring from love and gratitude, and not from 
 hope of reward, and this probably is true; but our Father 
 in Heaven takes us as we are, and purifies what in us is 
 impure, cleanses what is defiled, elevates what is debased, 
 and spiritualizes what is material, " howbeit that is not 
 first which is spiritual but that which is natural and after- 
 ward that which is spiritual.*' While we are in the flesh 
 if we can judge from revelation and observation, God 
 has made our very being to depend upon a certain amount 
 
n8 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 of self-love, which induces us to care for ourselves and 
 anticipate and provide for our welfare; and this he has 
 made perfectly compatible with our love for him and our 
 fellow-men; and if he holds out rewards as an induce- 
 ment to effort, should his servants seek to be wiser than 
 he? 
 
 I have within a few months listened to an influential, 
 aggressive, hardworking, orthodox minister, as he sought 
 to fire his people with greater zeal in active Christian 
 work, and to higher attainment in Christian character, 
 in order that their condition in Heaven might be one of 
 greater honor and brighter effulgence. But as his hearers 
 had all their lives been taught that eternal life was per- 
 fect holiness and complete, unending felicity, and as this 
 was secured to them through Jesus Christ as a free gift, 
 independent of any merit in them, they could hardly be 
 made to understand how anything could be added to 
 this as a reward for anything they might do, unless in 
 some mysterious way a vessel could be filled to its ut- 
 most capacity and then made a little fuller. The church 
 deprives herself and her Lord of one of the very strongest 
 arguments for active Christian work and giving on the 
 part of its members, when she teaches that eternal life 
 means not the life itself secured eternally, but the con- 
 ditions pertaining to it; for the Bible asserts repeatedly 
 and emphatically that eternal life is God's free gift, and 
 in the obtaining of it, nothing that a man can do can have 
 the least effect. Now if eternal life means the moral re- 
 lations a man sustains toward God, and the conditions 
 under which he exists in the world to come, then noth- 
 ing that he can do, having once secured this gift, can in 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 119 
 
 any way affect these relations or conditions. But if it 
 means, as I define it, then having through faith and re- 
 pentance received the gift, a man may, by loving service 
 for Jesus through the help of the Holy Spirit, cultivate 
 and strengthen those relations, and enrich and adorn and 
 beautify those conditions, and lay up for himself treasure 
 in Heaven that shall immeasurably affect the happiness 
 of that eternal life. 
 
 It seems to me that the plain teaching of the 
 Bible is that the Holy Spirit, in the begetting from 
 above, imparts to the believer a life which partakes 
 of his own divine nature, and, as in the natural birth, 
 the life derived from our parents partakes of their nat- 
 ure and limitations, so in the new birth, the life de- 
 rived from the begetting of the Holy Spirit partakes 
 of the nature of the divine parentage, and, consequently, 
 must be not only eternal in duration, but holy in char- 
 acter, although not necessarily consummate in blessed- 
 ness. It may be objected that if this position is correct, 
 the believer must also be omniscient and omnipotent, 
 and possessed of perfect beatitude, as all these attributes 
 pertain to God. All that I can answer to this is, that 
 nowhere have we the promise of any such participation 
 in the perfections of the All-perfect One, but we have the 
 assurance of an endless duration (John 10 : 28; I John 
 2:17), and of perfect holiness (Heb.- 12 : 10), and the 
 word of God is a sure foundation to rest upon. I do 
 not find anywhere in the Bible the assurance that the 
 portion of the redeemed from among men shall be the 
 satisfaction of every wish, or that this is the portion of 
 the pure and holy who have never sinned. 
 
120 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 I know that the received definition of " eternal life " 
 has carried with it an implication of this, and our hymn 
 speaks of having ' every longing satisfied, with full fru- 
 ition blessed," but I do not find it in the Bible even by 
 implication. We read in Rev. 7 : 17 and 21 14, that 
 " God shall wipe away all tears," and that there shall be 
 "no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, nor any more 
 pain." These experiences are the penalty and result 
 of broken law, and cannot be known there, as all will 
 be at one with the will of God, and obedience to his laws 
 can never bring anything but good. But all the above as- 
 surances may be realized, and the redeemed fall far short 
 of that beatitude in which, in connection with holiness, we 
 arc taught eternal life is to consist. It does not appear to 
 me that any such beatific condition is promised or even 
 to be desired. Without new revelations of the Infinite 
 One to be received, new service for him to be rendered, 
 present mysteries to be solved, and desires gratified. 
 an intelligent being would sink into apathy and indif- 
 ference. In i Peter I : 12 we are told that the angels de- 
 sired to investigate the great mystery of the incarnation ; 
 and the inference is that they vvere not permitted to do so. 
 Although every will, whether of holy angel or redeemed 
 sinner, will be in harmony with the will of God, and 
 perfectly and cheerfully subordinate thereto, both revela- 
 tion and reason, I think, teach that there will always be 
 something in the future to be gained, some wish un- 
 grati.i2d in the present, and while this is the case, one 
 cannot be said to bs in the realization of perfect bliss.* 
 
 *Since the above was written, the writer has listened to an able and 
 successful orthodox minister, who, preaching from Luke 15:7, showed con- 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 121 
 
 These, however, are, to a certain extent, speculations in 
 which I have no wish to indulge further than to allay 
 the fears of some who may think the tendency of this 
 book is to divest Heaven of all its attractions, and leave 
 it hardly worth striving for. 
 
 An admission into the family of God's dear chil- 
 dren, gifted with powers that never weary, and with 
 companionship of the pure and holy to stimulate us to 
 the exercise of those powers, with the presence and ap- 
 proval of our divine Lord as the reward for achieve- 
 ment, these are the conditions attaching to the life 
 which Jesus Christ gives to all who will accept it at his 
 hand and upon his terms. They are not the life, but 
 are its concomitants; and this life, under these condi- 
 tions, is not for an age, or a century, but is as endless in 
 duration as he from whom it is derived: " Because I 
 live, ye shall live also." Does this conception of Heaven 
 make it appear unattractive, and the crown of life an 
 undesirable prize to strive for, even with consum- 
 mate bliss left out ? The consideration of a few more 
 points will close my undertaking. In i John 2:17 it 
 is said, "And the world passeth away . . . but he 
 that doeth the will of God abideth forever." Here, to 
 pass away, or come to an end, is set over against abiding 
 forever. In John 12 : 34 the Jews say to our Lord, "We 
 have read out of the law that Christ abideth forever." 
 This in opposition to his saying that if he was lifted 
 
 clusively that the holy angels have their causes for sorrow and rejoicing, 
 and that even God is no stranger to these emotions. This being so, the 
 redeemed from among men have no reason to expect that consummate 
 bliss is to be their portion. 
 
122 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 up from the earth he would draw all men unto him; and 
 in i Cor. 13:13, the graces that shall abide are put in 
 sharp contrast with those that shall come to an end. 
 The meaning of " abide " is to continue in being, as is 
 perhaps more clearly seen in Heb. 7 : 23, 25, where the 
 Greek word translated "continue" is the same as is trans- 
 lated : ' abide" in i John 2 : 17. Now if only those who 
 do the will of God abide or are continued in being, what 
 becomes of those who refuse or neglect to do his will ? 
 Here is no question of happiness or misery, no allusion 
 to the conditions under which the existence is main- 
 tained in either case. The one class "abides," is sus- 
 tained in continued being, and the plain inference is that 
 the opposite class, like the world, which it chooses for a 
 portion, passes away. 
 
 In i Cor. 15:26 we read: " The- last enemy that 
 shall be destroyed is death." If death, which is the 
 penalty for transgression, is eternal alienation from God 
 and holiness, with consequent, constantly augmenting 
 suffering, how can this in any sense be said to be destroyed 
 so long as it exercises unlimited sway over such multi- 
 tudes, or even a single one of our race ? The penalty 
 for sin is death, and if this is a synonym for endless mis- 
 ery, then death never is destroyed or " made of none ef- 
 fect" (for this is the meaning of the Greek Katargeo, 
 translated "destroyed"); his reign is co-eternal with that of 
 God himself. But this cannot be, for "He must reign till 
 he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy 
 that shall be destroyed is death, for he hath put all things 
 under his feet." At the coming of our Lord to judgment, 
 every one of our race upon whom death has any claim 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 123 
 
 shall be destroyed with an eternal destruction; and he, 
 left without a single subject in existence over whom to 
 exercise his authority, shall " become of none effect" 
 Upon any other teaching respecting the final award to 
 the wicked, I cannot see how death can, with any pro- 
 priety, be said to be destroyed. The place given by our 
 Lord in his teachings, as well as by his apostles in theirs, 
 to his resurrection from the dead, is corroborative of the 
 definition herein given to "life" and "death." The 
 stress placed upon this event by our Lord himself, as 
 well as by his apostles, is easily understood if these 
 words are taken to mean as herein defined; but if they 
 mean the relation of our moral natures to God, I can see 
 no necessary connection between the two. Our Lord, 
 when in the flesh, predicted to his apostles events that 
 were in the future, with the announced purpose of con- 
 firming their belief in him when they saw the fulfillment 
 of these predictions. John 13:19, 14:29, 16:4 are in- 
 stances of this; and in John 2:22 we read that " when 
 he was risen from the dead his disciples remembered 
 that he had said this unto them," i. e., that he should 
 rise again, " and they believed the Scripture and the 
 word which Jesus had said unto them." In Acts 1:21,22 
 we see the eleven about to fill the place left vacant by 
 the death of the traitor, and the only requisite named, if 
 not the only one essential, was that he who took it 
 should have been the constant, personal attendant upon 
 the ministry of Jesus, from his first public appearance 
 till his final ascension, and the only declared object is 
 that he might, with the eleven, be an unimpeachable 
 witness, not to the teachings of Jesus, nor to his mira- 
 
124 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 cle.s, nor yet to his claims of the Messiahship, but " of 
 his resurrection from the dead." Also, in Acts 4:33, we 
 read: " And with great power gave the apostles witness 
 of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus;" and more than 
 thirty times the fact of his resurrection is mentioned by 
 the apostles as the ground for belief in him, and as the 
 confirmation of his claims. What was the distinctive 
 claim made by him? John 3:16 says he came that who- 
 soever believeth in him "should not perish but have 
 everlasting life." John 4:14 says, " The water that I 
 shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing 
 up into everlasting life." In John 5:21 we read: "As 
 the Father raiseth up the dead and giveth them life, so 
 the Son giveth life to whom he will;" and in the twenty- 
 fifth verse, "' the hour is coming and now is> when the 
 dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they 
 that hear shall live." (The son of the widow of Nain 
 (Luke 7:12), the ruler's daughter (Mark 5:41), and Laza- 
 rus (John 11:43), though four days in the grave, heard 
 that voice and lived again.) " For as the Father hath 
 iife in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life 
 in himself," and " the hour is coming when all that are 
 n their graves shall hear his voice and come forth." 
 And in John 6:33: "For the bread of God is he which 
 came down from heaven an^ giveth life unto the world; 
 verse 40: " And this is the will of him that sent 
 me, that every one that seeth the Son and believeth on 
 him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at 
 the last day;" verse 47: " He that believeth on me hath 
 everlasting life;" verse 51: "I am that living bread; if 
 any man eat of this bread he shall live forever;" John 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 125 
 
 8:51: "If a man keep my saying, he shall never see 
 death;" John 10:17, 1 8: "I lay down my life, that I may 
 take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it 
 down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have 
 power to take it again;" and John 1 1:25, 26: " I am the 
 resurrection, and the life; he that believeth in me, though 
 he were dead, yet shall he live."* 
 
 These quotations show the distinctive claim made 
 by Jesus was his supremacy over death, and his ability 
 not only to restore this mortal life when it has become 
 extinct, but to confer an endless life upon those who be- 
 lieved on him. With these assertions of his power over 
 death so plainly, repeatedly, and openly made, what would 
 have been the effect of his remaining permanently under 
 the power of death but a complete refutation of all his 
 claims in this respect, and the consequent overthrow of 
 his authority as the Son of God ? Supposing it had been 
 possible that Jesus could have been holden of death 
 (which in Acts 2:22, Peter says it was not), that pente- 
 costal sermon would never have been preached, nor the 
 scenes of that day witnessed; nor would the name of Jesus 
 ever have fallen upon our ears. His failure to rise from 
 the dead would have consigned his teaching, also, to the 
 grave. This it is which makes the establishing of his 
 resurrection so essential in the very beginning of the 
 apostolic ministry, and, once demonstrated, lays a foun- 
 dation upon which the religion of Jesus Christ can rest 
 as secure against all its enemies as the very throne of 
 God. But admit that the life and death of which he 
 
 * I Jno. 5 : IO, 12. 
 
126 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 speaks as being the sole arbiter are not actual life and 
 death, but the relations which we sustain toward God 
 as his rational, accountable creatures, and there does 
 not appear to be any necessary connection between his 
 resurrection from the grave, and the fulfillment to be- 
 lievers in him of all his promises to them. 
 
 If eternal life is a changed moral nature, and new 
 relations toward God on the part of those who are made 
 partakers of it, Jesus might as well have rested in the 
 grave with David, and no argument could have been 
 drawn from that fact against his power to give eternal 
 life, i. e. t forgiveness of sins, a renewed nature, and com- 
 plete happiness to his followers. But what says Paul 
 in I Cor. 15:17? "If Christ be not raised, your faith is 
 vain; ye are yet in your sins, then they also that are fallen 
 asleep in Christ are perished." With our definition of 
 "life" and "death" this conclusion is perfectly logical, 
 but, as I think, with no other. If eternal life means as 
 is herein claimed, a life principle over which death has 
 no power and which insures the possessor an endless ex- 
 istence, and Jesus claimed not only to possess this him- 
 self, but to be alone able to bestow it upon whomsoever he 
 would, and in his own person could not escape from the 
 dominion of death, there certainly could be no hope for 
 those who depended upon him to rescue them from its 
 power; but, as Paul says, all who had fallen asleep in this 
 hope, instead of ever having it realized, had perished. 
 Every one can see the correctness of the conclusion he 
 draws from his premise, and if the apostles were to go on 
 winning men to the acceptance of Jesus as a Saviour from 
 death, and the only source of eternal life, it was abso- 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 127 
 
 lutely essential for them to show that, having in his own 
 person laid down his life, he had the power to take it 
 again. If, on the other hand, eternal life means forgive- 
 ness of sins, a new heart and the heavenly felicity con- 
 sequent upon these changed relations toward God, where 
 is the logical necessity between his rising from the dead 
 and his ability to confer these benefits upon his followers? 
 
 I do not understand from his own teachings or from 
 that of his apostles that his rising from the dead was 
 needed to satisfy men of his power to perform these 
 offices for them. He proved his power to forgive sins 
 by healing of the palsy, and sending away whole the 
 man whose sins he had forgiven. Matt. 9 : 6. His power 
 through the work of the Holy Spirit to renew the heart 
 was proved in many instances, notably in the case of the 
 woman who was a sinner (Luke 7 140, 50), and so far as 
 I can see there was no such connection between his ris- 
 ing from the dead and his ability to perform these offices 
 for those who believed on him as to render his efforts on 
 their behalf absolutely ineffectual in case his body had 
 remained in the grave. " If he cannot deliver himself 
 from the power of death he certainly cannot be depended 
 upon to deliver others." This is logical, but it does not 
 necessarily follow because he cannot deliver himself from 
 the power of death that he cannot do something of an 
 entirely different character for those who believe on him. 
 
 There are, it seems to me, two points at which Jesus 
 Christ as a Saviour most vitally touches our humanity. 
 Man is under the power of sin and death, and utterly 
 helpless in himself to escape from either. Jesus Christ 
 in his own experience demonstrates to men his power 
 
128 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 over both before he asks men to rely upon him to un- 
 dertake for them. The wilderness of Judea, and the 
 tomb of Joseph, the beginning and the consummation 
 of his earthly ministry, demonstrate his power to save 
 from both sin and death; and the record of his daily life, 
 while for three years he walked this sin-stricken earth, 
 the healing, loving, sympathizing man of sorrows, equally 
 demonstrates his willingness to do so. There is one 
 other passage collaterally significant in i Cor. 15:50: 
 " Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot 
 inherit the kingdom of God." The term "flesh and 
 blood" I take to mean the life derived from Adam 
 through successive generations, with all its possibilities 
 and limitations; and this I gather from the connec- 
 tion in which it is used in the following places, which 
 are the only ones in which I find it used in the Bible. 
 In Matt. 16:17 our Lord tells Peter that his knowledge 
 of his divine nature and misson did not come, through 
 any human agency, either within or outside himself. 
 The language is, "Flesh and blood hath not revealed it 
 to thee, but my Father which is in Heaven." 
 
 When Paul was commissioned to preach the gospel 
 he did not take counsel with his fellow-men, or ask in- 
 struction from them regarding what he should teach. He 
 said, " I conferred not with flesh and blood." Gal. 1 : 16. 
 In chapter 6:12 he says, "We wrestle not with flesh and 
 blood," evidently referring to human agencies as con- 
 trasted with superhuman. And Heb. 2: 14 declares that 
 when the Son of God assumed the work of our redemption, 
 he took upon himself our humanity, or as it is in the text: 
 "Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh 
 
THE WORLD TO COME. 129 
 
 and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the 
 same." It seems certain from the connections in which 
 the above quoted verses are found, that the meaning of 
 flesh and blood is as above given, or, to state it more 
 concisely, "human nature." What then does Paul mean 
 when he says that human nature or flesh and blood can- 
 not inherit the kingdom of God? He is not referring 
 merely, nor as I think primarily, to man's moral nature 
 as unfitted for the place; but, to his organic being, which, 
 in its constitution, debars him from any participation in 
 this kingdom, which is an everlasting kingdom as well 
 as a righteous one. " But unto the Son he saith " not 
 only "a scepter of righteousness is the scepter of thy 
 kingdom," but, as well, " Thy throne, O God, is forever 
 and ever." Heb. I : 8. " And the kingdom and the 
 dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the 
 whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints 
 of the Most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting 
 kingdom." Dan. 7 : 27. " Thy kingdom is an everlast- 
 ing kingdom." Ps. 145 : 13. "And he shall reign over 
 the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there 
 shall be no end." Luke I 133. "For so an entrance 
 shall be ministered unto you abundantly unto the ever- 
 lasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." 
 2 Pet. I : 11. "The kingdoms of this world have be- 
 come the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ [his 
 anointed ones ?] and he shall reign forever and ever." 
 Rev. 11:15. 
 
 The above quotations are perhaps unnecessary as 
 warrant for the assertion that the kingdom of God 
 spoken of by Paul is unending in duration. Not only is 
 
130 THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 it unending, it is also supreme. No being can become 
 a citizen of this kingdom owing the slightest allegiance 
 to any besides its rightful Head. Not only must the 
 bond-servant of sin be freed from the rule of his master, 
 but the tyrant death also must relinquish all claims upon 
 his subjects before they can be translated into the king- 
 dom of God's dear Son. It is the subjection we are 
 under to death, I think, of which Paul is here speaking 
 as debarring us from entering into the kingdom of God. 
 The whole context warrants the belief that fhis is so. 
 Our human nature which, because of its subjection to 
 death, cannot inherit this everlasting kingdom, is to be 
 redeemed from the dominion of death by the begetting 
 which is from above, is to be endowed with eternal life, 
 and so capacitated for a citizenship in Heaven. This 
 throne which is forever and ever, shall extend the scepter 
 over no subject not as enduring as itself; and all the 
 citizens of this everlasting kingdom shall bs everlasting 
 also. 
 
 These imperfectly expressed thoughts and poorly 
 arranged arguments are given to the public in the hope 
 that trained minds, and able pens, may be enlisted for 
 the confirmation of the views herein advocated, or for 
 their complete refutation. All that the writer desires 
 is that their establishment or overthrow shall be by the 
 word of God, and not by the word of man. 
 
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