Ex Libns C. K. OGDEN THE ] [BRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES ETERNAL HOPE. PREACHED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY, NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER, 1877 REV. FREDERIC W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S., Canon of Westminster, Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen, te Rlaiiir cf M ' arlbormigh College, Hulsean Lecturer, and Fellow o/ Trinity College, Cambridge " Pleriqua dum plus nos diligunt quam meremur, haec jactant et loquuntur. senuones nostros doctrinanique laudantes, quae conscientia nostra non recipit. Alii vero tractatus nostros calumnumtes ea sentire nos criminantur quae nunquam sensisse nos novimus. " OKIGEN, Homil. xxv. in Luc. SECOND EDITION. Bonbon MACMILLAN AND CO. 1878 [T/'i c Kigh! of Translation and Reproduction is LONDON : E. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOK, BHEAD STREET HILL, E.C. BT TO THE REV. E. H. PLUMPTRE, D.D., Professor of the / xegesis of the New Testament at King's College, London, Vicar of B:ckley t Prebendary of St. Paul's, &"c., &"c. Ijjest Sermons, Not as claiming for them the sanction of his high authority, but as a small expression of gratitude for the unvarying help and kindness which from youth upwards I have received from his friendship ; and to record my sense of the high services which he has rendered to Biblical Literature by his constant labours, his keen insight, and his large-hearted charity. " Oh remember how short my time is : Wherefore hast thou made all men for nought ? " Ps. Ixxxix. 48. " rojoCSe n6x6ov Ttpfia fiij n irpoffSoKa, irplv ffuv itoviav Qavfi, 0\r)'(TTj T' eis dvavyrjrov fj.o\eiv "AiSrji/ KVKpcud T' a.n\ Taprdpov ftddrj. irpbs raCra Bou\fu'." l. Prom. v. 1026. oj 6 Kiifj.LKoi ToiaOra TIVO. iriol TT)S >(j'.s SiaAe^erai, ol yelp naff" AiSriv Svo roiBovs vou.i^oju.ti' niav SiKaliav xdffpay dfff@ dtiov * * * d Se rovrots j rpayaiSia, . tirciv 5" ap' (K\iiry r~t> irav . iii. 6 ; and for altev Deut. xiii. 16, xv. 17 ; Eccl. xii. 5 ; MX. xxxii. 13; 2 Kings v. 27, xxi. 7; I Chron. xxviii. 4 ; Rom. xvi. 25; 2 Tim. i. 9 ; Tit. i. 2 ; &c. &c. It is remarkable further that the expressions of the duration of good are far stronger than any that are applied to evil (Is. li. 6 8; Ps. cxlv. 13; Eph. iii. 21) ; also that the expression " eternal death " occurs nowhere in Scripture. He who said Aitaviov vvp used the word, a few hours after, in a sense that had nothing whatever to do with time. J. xvii. 3 (see Dr. Plumptre in Bp. Ellicott's Commentary, ad loc,). PREFACE. xxxv ignorance can dispute, it cannot be right to read that meaning into the word, because of any a priori bias, in other passages. All scholars alike admit that in many places cuwV can only mean "age" and ato/Vtos only age-long, or (in the classic. sense of the word) secular, which is often equivalent to " indefinite." l Many scholars who have a good right to be heard deny that it ever necessarily means " endless," though it is predicted of endless things. It therefore becomes a clear duty to keep the rendering " eternal," which is a neutral word, and does not mislead the ignorant into supposing that a doctrine has been revealed, which, if revealed at all which we show good grounds for denying is most certainly not revealed by the use of that single disputed adjective, or any of its cognate expressions. 2 1 I have further examined these words in a subsequent Excursus. i i . " Dpy and D7117 seem to be much more used for an indefinite than for an infinite time." Parkhurst. Prof. Bartlett, arguing for the so- called "orthodox" view, uses more than once the phrase "infinite, or at least indefinite " but what very different words ! Seventy times out of ninety the word cannot mean endless. 2 All this and my Excursus on the word were written before C 2 xxxvi PREFACE. I will only add that avfitorov irvp, " unquenchable fire," an expression which no one dreams of taking with slavish literalness when found in other con- nections, is mistranslated " fire which never shall be quenched ; " and that even if this translation were tenable it would not necessarily imply that all who suffer from it should remain for ever in it. But how untenable the translation is cannot be more Mr. Clemance sent me his little book on Future Punishment, and he exactly expresses the facts when he says that tuwv and altavios are " words which shine only by a reflected light," i.e. that their mean- ing depends entirely on the words with which they are joined, so that it is quite false to say that alwvios joined with a>?f must mean the same as altaviot joined with tcSXams. The word means endless in neither clause (see Excursus, p. 199), but, just as in Rom. xvi. 25, 26, there is no reason why it might not mean endless in one, yet have no such meaning in the other. " If good ever should come to an end, that would come to an end which Christ died to bring in ; but if evil comes to an end that comes to an end which Pie died to destroy. So that the two stand by no means on the same footing," p. 65. " An izon may have an end. ^ons of seons may have an end. Only that which lasts though all the seons is without an end ; and Scripture affirms this only of the kingdom of God, and of the glory of God in the Church. The absolute eternity of evil is no- where affirmed," p. 86. Very much indeed the reverse is affirmed in the many passages which speak of the Final Restitution. PREFACE xxxvii simply and decisively proved than by the fact that in these passages our Lord is quoting, and in a milder form, the oriental and poetic hyperbole of Isaiah, 1 who, though he uses a stronger form of expression, is speaking of a purely earthly and entirely transient flame. And, I would ask, if the literal meaning of one or two passages in our Lord's parables is to be pressed to conclusions which even the literal meaning 01 figurative expressions will not bear, why is no account to be made of the fact that even the unmerciful debtor is only handed over to the tormentors until the debt shall have been paid? I will only add for in the , brief space and time at my disposal it is impossible for me to enter exhaustively into the discussion, though otherwise I would gladly show text by text that there is no real Scriptural authority for the popular view, and a vast mass of Scriptural evidence against it that there are three passages of our Lord's teaching which, though they may be perhaps urged against Universalism, tell most strongly in favour of the views 1 Is. Ixvi. 24. xxxviii PREFACE. here maintained. One of these is the judgment pro- nounced on Judas (Matt. xxvi. 24), " It had been good U-a\oV) for that man if he had not been born ; " another is the warning to fear him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna (Matt. x. 28) ; a third is the sin which (according to our version) " shall not be forgiven either in this world or that which is to come." (Matt, xii. 32). i. Now it seems to me that these passages strongly support the ancient against the common view. Judas committed the most awful of human crimes : whatever happened to him hereafter it might well be said it would have been good (Ka\6v is untranslatable) for him if he had never been born. 1 Yet how infinitely milder is this form of speech than any which we could have expected, had the common view be true ! How abso- lutely silent is it about torments or their endlessness ! 1 Plato speaks in the voice of simple human reason when he describes some sins as !aT}Tov, still ws (TtpoKivrjroi ffdj^ovrai (see Prof. Mayor, Contemp. Rev., May, 1876.) PREFACE. xxxix How strongly does it suggest the conclusion that, for all except those who have been guilty of the most enormous crimes, even "aeonian punishment" maybe more blessed than never to have been ! .How utterly do they dis- countenance the common view that it would have been better for most of our race to have been un- born ! It is most erroneously supposed that those who believe in the possible restoration of many of the lost imply that they will ultimately be admitted into per- fect bliss. They hold no such view. The poena damni the loss and partial loss of all that "might have been " may continue long after the pocna sensus has ended. A man's sin may be ultimately for- given him; he may even attain to a certain degree of peace; and yet, while the memory of his sin remains, he may be the first to acquiesce in the sorrowful decision that it had been well for him if he had not been born. A cessation of agonising remorse is not the same thing as perfect peace, nor are the alleviations of deserved punishment identical with the beatific vision. All the trite rhetoric which from Tertullian downwards has talked of the impossibility of supposing that xl PREFACE. ultimately there will be no difference between a John and a Judas, a Jezebel and a Virgin Mary, may be dismissed as entirely futile and beside the mark. 2. The second passage merely attributes to God a power which we know the Omnipotent must possess. He can destroy the soul, but it says not that He will. If any think that this is implied, it seems to me that no logical choice is open to them but to embrace the theory of Conditional Immortality. 3. The third passage has only a disputed bearing on the subject at all. If aiuv be rightly rendered, as in nearly every passage where it occurs it may be rightly rendered by "age," our Lord only says that there is one particular sin and what sin this is, no one has ever known which is so heinous as not to be pardonable either in this (the Jewish) or the coming (the Christian) dispensation. Nothing therefore is of necessity implied respecting the world beyond the grave. But if it be, how overwhelming is the argument with which I am supplied ! Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven, our Lord says, without further limitation and with no shadow of a hint that He refers to this life only a gloss PREFACE. xli which indeed His words directly exclude ; every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven here or hereafter except one ! " If one sin only is excluded from forgiveness in that coming age, other sins cannot stand on the same level, and the dimness behind the veil is lit up with at least a gleam of hope." Further than this, consider how large a sanction is added to all that I have urged by our Lord's saying that some will be punished with few and some with many stripes. Is any conceivable explanation of those words consistent with various degrees of endlessness in torture ? Consider lastly the whole tenor of His life and teaching, and the statement that, even after death, He " went and preached to the spirits in prison." To the word and to the testimony : if they speak not according to the whole revelation of God'o nature and His dealings with man, are we to follow the whole tenor of the revelation, or a few isolated and disputable texts ? And here let those who think that the voice of Scripture is decisive for "endless torments," simply because they confuse the voice of Scripture with the necessarily imperfect interpretations of many passages xlii PREFACE of it which from age to age are being gradually removed, let them meditate on this fact. Their view, if they will scarchingly examine the grounds of it, depends mainly on two or three scattered texts in the Synoptic Gospels; texts chiefly aimed, not at the ordinary sinners of the world, but at Pharisees and their disciples; texts of which in several instances the true reading is highly dubious ; texts of which the English translation has been proved to be erroneous ; texts of which the current exegesis is in the highest degree uncertain ; texts which learned and competent critics understand on critical and his- torical grounds in a sense almost opposite to that in which they are usually taken; texts so little decisive that the Church has never built any dogma upon them ; texts which did not prevent the most eloquent, the most learned, and the most orthodox of Fathers from holding a view which is falsely asserted to contradict them ; texts which depend for their supposed meaning on a rigid literalism, the possibility of which is utterly overthrown by the circumstance that they are absolutely contradicted by other texts far more numerous, if these latter be inter- preted on the same principles; texts of which the PREFACE. xliii other clause is, in almost every instance, confessedly metaphorical; texts finally, which, if thus understood, rob the Gospel of its most precious elements and run counter to the repeated expressions of Scripture respecting Christ's plenteous redemption and God's fatherly tenderness and everlasting mercy ; texts therefore which we could not but hesitate to interpret in accordance with the popular view, even if we had not the plainest proofs that even if these passages were not limited by others the popular view of them is historically and logically inadmissible. Now turn from the first three Gospels to the fourth, and what do we find ? Passages not a few which bear on the Gospel of Hope : not one so far as I can see which gives any sanction whatever to the notion of endless torments. Now turn to the Epistles of the three greatest Apostles. Uo we find the popular doctrine in them ? We find mul- titudes of passages especially in St. Paul's later epistles which speak without limit of a final restoration ; but " that the doctrinal writings of these three chief teachers of the Gospel are wholly destitute of any assertions of xliv PREFACE. the endless misery of sinners in the literal sense of the word, can be verified by every reader." l Had the doc- trine been true, would it have been left to a very few expressions, opposed in their literal meaning to so many others, and in themselves so metaphorical, so shadowy, so uncertain, so more than disputable? Turning now from the subject of revealed to natural religion, those who uphold the possibility, for many at any rate, of a gradual amelioration beyond the grave, are constantly confronted with the name, the authority, the arguments of Bishop Butler, and with those passages especially in which he warns us that we must not construct after our own fashion an ideal universe, or judge of the arm of God by the finger of man. I have known the writings of Butler for many years, and I entirely accept the cogency of his reasoning. Against the doctrine of those, if such there be, who deny the 1 Rev. E. White, Life in Christ, p. 348. "The Bible," says this devout and deeply reverent writer, "has fallen much into the hands of those who imagine that a few favourite ' texts ' will suffice to prove that Omniscience is on the side of even the most extravagant theologies." (See Excursus I. p. 185.) PREFACE. xiv existence of punishment beyond the grave, possibly even against Universalism as an a priori doctrine they are irresistible. But beyond this they do not and cannot go. Into the question of " endless torments " Butler does not enter at all; nor does he use one single argument which in any way tells (for instance), against the doctrine of Purgatory. 1 Further than this, I may mention the curious fact that it was a sentence in Bishop Butler's Analogy which first set me seriously thinking on this question while I was still a boy, and which seemed to me to have an unanswerable weight in favour of the view which is here advocated. That sentence is as follows : " Our whole nature leads us to ascribe moral perfection to God, and to deny all imperfection of Him. And this will for ever be a practical proof of His moral character, to such as will 1 " All which can be positively asserted to be matter of mere revelation with regard to this doctrine, seems to be that the great distinction between the righteous and the wicked shall be made at the end of this world ; that each shall then receive according to his deserts." Analogy, i. 2, note. There is not a word about end- lessness here. " As regards duration," says Mr. Clemance, "revela- tion is relative not absolute." (See Excursus I. p. 185.) xlvi PREFACE. consider what a. practical proof is ; because it is the voice of God speaking in us. And from hence we conclude that virtue must be the happiness, and vice the misery of every creature ; and that regularity, and order, and right cannot but prevail finally in a universe under His government." Opposite to the word " finally " I see written in my edition, the words "and in- variably ? " and although I was well aware that Bishop Butler might have explained the final prevalence of right in a manner different from the general cessation of evil, yet it was the consideration involved in the only complete acceptance of the words which he there actually uses, which ultimately deepened in my mind the impression which I drew from conscience, from reason, and from God's Holy Word. What remains to say is merely personal. Knowing how wide is the range, and how infinite the importance of those beliefs respecting which all Christians are agreed, I have always desired to avoid controversy. It is with no fondness for controversy that I publish these sermons, or that I originally preached them. Wishing. in such humble manner as I could, to make the PREFACE. xlvii sermons at the Abbey bear on those thoughts, which, since they are so prominent in literature, must also be prominent in the minds of many of those miscel- laneous hundreds who there compose our ordinary congregations, I first preached on the subject of Heaven, because the Christian conception of Heaven had been so roughly, and as I thought, mistakenly assailed. Between that day and the next on which it became my turn to preach, circumstances had strongly turned my thoughts towards the future life, and my attention was naturally attracted by the question discussed in one of our reviews, "Is life worth living?" Having answered that question in what seemed to me to be the Christian sense, I was of course immediately faced by the question, " How can life be regarded as worth living by the majority of mankind, if, as is taught by the current religious teaching, they are doomed to everlasting damnation?" Now as to the common opinions respecting " Hell," it was impossible to be mistaken, and I had myself been trained in them. In these days, indeed, they are seldom stated in all their breadth and all their xlviii PREFACE. horror. Most religious teachers profess to hold them, but content themselves with a few vague and stray allusions ; and if pressed on the subject manage in a thousand ways to get rid of them. They envelop them in a cloud of modifications and exceptions, and thus evacuate them of all real significance ; or they so inde- finitely extend the conception of repentance, and admit the validity of a repentance so purely hasty and super- ficial, as to leave their doctrine in the condition of a mere dangerous formula without any real bearing on the ordinary lives of men. There are hundreds of volumes of modern sermons by clergymen of all schools in which you either do not find the word " Hell " at all, or only in the form of some dim, verbal, and half apologetic phrase. Now this common doctrine should either be held or not held. If it be indeed a tenet of our faith, it is one so appalling that it cannot be ob- truded too incessantly, or too vividly pourtrayed. But if, as I believe, the current opinions about Hell are not tenets of our faith, they cannot be too honestly or too distinctly repudiated. Clergymen of all denominations bewail their utter PREFACE. xlix inability to prevent the spread of materialism and infidelity. I, for my part, cannot be surprised at this when I feel within me the revolt of an indignant con- science against much which is taught as an essential part of a Gospel of salvation. It \vas the doctrine of endless torments which made an infidel of the elder Mill. 1 Does the reader suppose that in this respect he stood alone ? Those who work among our London artisans know well the effect that the doctrine has on them. Nevti was there a wilder and more monstrous delusion than that it is efficacious in deterring them from sin ! " I am but thirty-two : I am a coke-burner, which has injured my lungs. I have worked seven days and seven nights, on and off. You see I havn't had my chance," said a poor man to Mrs. Marie Hilton. "Do you really think, master, that God Almighty will put me in fire for ever and ever, after putting me in this here mud all my lifetime ? " asked a rough navvy 1 Mill's Autobiography, p. 41. TJiree Essays, p. 114. "Com- pared with this, every other objection to Christianity sinks into insignificance." It was this, too, that chiefly made Theodore Parker a Unitarian. See p. 204. d 1 PREFACE. of a city missionary not long ago. 1 People who sit in their armchairs may show that his theology was very wicked ; but are such minds likely to be restrained by preaching endless torments? That has been done very amply in all ages; with what effect? Sixteen centuries intervened between the time when the first and second of the following passages were penned : " Quse tune spectaculi latitudo ! quid admirer ? quid rideam? ubi gaudeam, ubi exsultem, spectans tot et tantos reges .... in imis tenebris congemiscentes ? item presides, persecutores dominici nominis sagvio- ribus flammis quam ipsi ssevierunt insultantibus contra Christianos, liquescentes ? prasterea sapientes illos phi- losophos coram discipulis suis una conflagrantibus eru- bescentes . . . ? etiam poetas non ad Rhadamanthi nee ad Minois, sed ad inopinati Christi tribunal palpitantes ? . . . tune histriones cognoscendi solutiores multo per ignem; tune spectandus auriga in flammea rota totus rubens ; tune xystici non in gymnasiis sed in igne jaculati." De Spectac, 30. So wrote Tertullian centuries ago, and I quote the 1 "White, Life in Christ, p. 490 (third ed.). PREFACE. li passage not for its hard savagery though there certainly are natures in which such savagery is heightened by this belief but for its ghastly ingenuity. It was in a far more pitying and Christian spirit, but with equal vividness in the imagination of the horrible, that Mr. Spurgeon has written thus : "Thou wilt look up there on the throne of God and it shall be written, ' For ever ! ' When the damned jingle the burning irons of their torment they shall say, ' For ever ! ' When they howl, echo cries, ' For ever.' " " 'For ever' is written on their racks, ' For ever' on their chains ; ' For ever ' burneth in the fire, ' For ever,' ever reigns." Can those who dwell on such ghastly imaginations try to realise the significance of these expressions ? Such oratory has been heard for many centuries ; and although those who have used it may often have done a very blessed work by virtue of their other doctrines, there is overwhelming evidence to show that the outcome of such delineations taken alone were they not rejected as they are by the d 2 lii PREFACE. instinctive faith of man could only be hysteria, terror, and religious madness in the weak; indignant infidelity or incredulous abhorrence in the strong. " From the fear of hell," says the Rev. Robert Suffield, after twenty years' experience as confessor to thousands while working as "Apostolic Missionary" in most of the large towns of England, in many por- tions of Ireland, in part of Scotland, and also in France " we never expected virtue or high motives or a noble life ; but we practically found it useless as a deterrent. It always influenced the wrong people and in a wrong way. It caused infidelity to some, temptation to others, and misery without virtue to most. It appealed to the lowest motives and the lowest characters; not however to deter from vice, but to make them the willing subjects of sad and often puerile superstitions." 1 But if we believe not the doctrine of future retribu- tion, but the popular teaching about Hell, with all its parasitic accretions, to be utterly false to be an utterly untenable forcing of the metaphoric language of 1 Rev. E. White's Life in Christ, p. viii. (third ed.). PREFACE. liii a misinterpreted parable into frightful literalism and intolerable doctrine can it be wondered if I strive to set it aside with an energy which has been called violence? I have seen a pamphlet of extracts from Pinamonti and Father Furniss (permtssu superiorum) containing passages so unutterably revolting, illustrated by woodcuts of such abhorrent atrocity, that even to look at them seemed to involve guilt which called for the performance of a lustration. In reading such pas- sages involving as they do our entire conception of the character of our Father in Heaven must not the heart burn with a natural and surely excusable indig- nation, not against the speakers, but against the things they have said ? For, I would ask the reader kindly to bear in mind that the following sermons were not condones ad clerum, or elaborate theological essays, but as it were sparks from the anvil of a busy life. Under different circumstances I might have given more measured and elaborate utterance to the same convictions ; but the necessarily frequent sermons of one who is not blessed with quiet, or leisure, or time to study, can never liv PREFACE. resemble the rarer sermons of those to whom it is " given to contemplate the bright countenance of truth in the mild and dewy air of delightful studies." They can only be written roughly and hastily, currente calamo, amid occupations, interruptions, and anxieties of every kind. 1 Precisely the same doctrines have been preached, even during the few past months, by learned and most honoured divines who have, from whatever cause, escaped the antagonism which I have encountered. Eut I shall not for one moment regret that opposition if I may once more turn the serious thoughts of earnest and holy men to truths which have been displaced by groundless opinions, and which are necessary for the purity, almost for the very existence, of that faith which is the one sole hope of the suffering world, but which 1 I may perhaps be allowed to mention one single fact. From the day on which I came to London in September, 1876, till the day on which I left it for a brief summer holiday, I was not able to add one word or line to a work on which I have long been engaged. I mention this not on any personal grounds, but because I would humbly suggest that the original meaning and object of canonries is destroyed when they are tied by Act of Parliament to London livings. PREFACE. li- ia many thousands of hearts and minds has been utterly shipwrecked upon the reef of this merely human opinion about "endless torments for the vast majority, as a doom passed irreversibly at death." And now, in all humility, I submit to the judgment of all wise and good men in the Church of God the views which I have thus suddenly been called upon to advocate. I sincerely ask pardon if any of my ex- pressions cause an unintended irritation ; I beg a kindly consideration for any error which may be due to the haste in which I have been forced to prepare this volume ; I pray God that whether by the confirmation, or by the refutation, of what I have urged, this truth may be elicited ; I assure all good people who may be unable to accept these views that they are due at the worst to an error in intellectu, not to any contumada in voluntate ; and I feel assured of this at any rate, that no true Christian even if he be unable to adept my conclusions will cherish any anger or hatred against a doctrine which alone can stem the spread of infidelity; which is maintained in a spirit of perfect loyalty to the Church, and of reverence for her most holy faith ; Ivi PREFACE. which is supported on strong Scriptural authority; which is sincerely believed to be a truer explanation of the words of our Lord and Master than that by which it has too often been superseded ; and which seems to those who hold it to be impregnably built upon the rock of an entire belief in Christ's infinite Redemption and of the mercy " from everlasting to everlasting " of Him whose name is Love. "Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last far off at last, to all, And every winter change to spring. " So runs my dream : but what am I ? An infant crying in the night : An infant crying for the light : And with no language but a cry.'* CHRISTMAS EVE, 1877. CONTENTS. SERMON I. PAGE WHAT HEAVEN IS I SERMON II. IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 26 SERMON III. "HELL" WHAT IT is NOT 49 SERMON IV. ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED ? 90 SERMON V. EARTHLY AND FUTURE CONSEQUENCES OF SIN IlS Iviii CONTENTS. OPINIONS OF THE CHURCH 155 EXCURSUS I. THE TEACHING OF BISHOP BUTLER ON THE FUTURE LIFE 185 EXCURSUS II. ON THE TRANSLATIONS OF Kpiveiv AND "AtSijs, &C. . 193 EXCURSUS III. ON THE WORD alavios 197 EXCURSUS IV. HOW THE OPINION OF ENDLESS TORMENT FOR ALL WHO DIE UNCONVERTED IS REGARDED BY SOME OF THE BEST OF THOSE WHO HAVE ACCEPTED IT . 203 EXCURSUS V. THE VOICE OF SCRIPTURE RESPECTING ETERNAL HOPE 205 TEXTS 219 ETERNAL HOPE. " The wish, that of the living whole No life may fail beyond the grave, Derives it not from what we have The likest God within the soul ? " TENNYSON, In Memoriam, SERMONS. ERRATA. Pa ge 57. last line, DELETE " See Excursus I.," &c. ,, 59, line three of poetry, for "pearly," read " penal." 62, first line, for " Platonist," read " Preacher." ,, 62, third line of note, add " ( " between " who " and " as. " ,, 71, last two lines read " Excursus II., not that of those referred to in the text and in previous notes." 78, note, for " V." read " II. and III." ,, 79, note i, for "VI." read "III." ,, 85, note i, read " See Brief Sketch," &c., and add "PP- '55 Se 9?-" [Delete Excursus III.]. would, twenty years ago, have been received with 1 Preached in Westminster Abbey, Oct. 14, 1877. 8 The Nineteenth Century. S B SERMONS. SERMON I. WHAT HEAVEN IS. 1 HEB. iv it. " Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest." IN one of our ablest Reviews, 2 a discussion has been going on for some time on the soul and future life ; and it is a sign of the large toleration of the times that some of the writers not only glory in expressing a belief that, apart from his body, man has no soul, and no life beyond the grave an opinion, the open expression of which would, twenty years ago, have been received with 1 Preached in Westminster Abbey, Oct. 14, 1877. * The Nineteenth Century. ft B ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. outbursts of indignation ; but have even arrived at the point of treating with compassionate disdain those who still cling to the traditional belief. Now I do not think it needful, brethren, in this nine- teenth century after Christ, to argue with you that you have souls, and that your life is not as the life of the beasts that perish. To the end of time the human race will believe this, though from the dawn of History there have been a few philosophers who disputed it. Securus jiidicat orbis terrarum. These .speculations have never shaken, will never shake, the fixed convictions of mankind. Those convictions might have been expressed from very early ages in the simple verse of the poet " Life is real, life is earnest, And the grave is not its goal ; "Dust thou art, to dust returnest,' Was not spoken of the soul." We may freely concede that, of the separate existence of the immaterial soul, and our survival I.] WHAT HEAVEN IS. 3 beyond "the intolerable indignities of dust to dust," we have no mathematical demonstration to offer. But this fact does not in the slightest degree trouble us, because neither is there any such proof of the existence of a God. It is perfectly easy for a man to say, if he will, ' I do not believe in a God.' I do not care to offer up any worship, even of the silent sort, even at the altar of " the unknown and the unknowable." I do not even think it worth while to pray that wild prayer once uttered by a criminal upon the scaffold, " O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul." A man may say all this, and plume himself on this melancholy abnegation of man's fairest hopes ; on this deliberate suicide of the spiritual faculty ; and if he considers such opinions to be a sign of intellectual emancipation, we can offer to him no proof that will necessarily convince him. When Vanini l lay in prison on a charge of atheism, he touched with his foot 1 The story is also told of Galileo. B 2 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. a straw which lay on his dungeon-floor, and said, "that from that straw he could prove the existence of God." We can pluck the meanest flower of the hedgerow, and point to the exquisite perfection of its structure, the tender delicacy of its loveliness ; we may pick up the tiniest shell out of myriads upon the shore, so delicate that a touch would crush it, and yet a miracle of rose and pearl, of lustrous iridescence and fairy arabesque, and ask the atheist if he feels seriously certain that these things are but the accidental outcome of self-evolving laws. We can take him under the canopy of night, and show him the stars of heaven, and ask him whether he really holds them to be nothing more than " shining illu- sions of the night, eternal images of deception in an imaginary heaven, golden lies in dark-blue nothingness." 1 Or we may bid him watch with us the flow of the vast stream of history, and see how the great laws of it are as mighty currents 1 Heine, Confessions (Stigand's Life of Heine, \. 50). WHAT HEAVEN IS. " that make for righteousness." Or we may appeal to the inner voices of his being, and ask whether they have indeed no message to tell him. But if he deny or reject such arguments as these ; if he treat with arrogant scorn that evidence of the things unseen which has been enough in all ages for the millions of humanity which was enough in past times for Dante and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Newton which was enough till yester- day for Brewster, and Whewell, and Herschel, and Faraday : if he demand a kind of proof which is impossible, and which God has withheld, seeing that it is a law that spiritual things can only be spiri- tually discerned, and that we walk by faith and not by sight, if, in short, a man will not see God because clouds and darkness are round about Him, although righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat : then we can do no more. He must believe or not believe he must bear or must forbear, as seems him best We cannot argue about colour to the blind. We cannot prove 6 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. the glory of music to the deaf. If a man shuts his eyes hard, we cannot make him see the sun. " That the blush of morning- is fair, that the quietude of grief is sacred, that the heroism of conscience is noble, who will undertake to prove to one who does not see it ? So wisdom, beauty, holiness, are immeasurable things, appreciable by pure perception, but which no rule can gauge, no argument demonstrate." l My brethren, if you know God, or rather are known of Him, you will need no proof that He is, and that He is the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him ; and you will not be much troubled by the scepticism of philosophers. Oh, let us get near to God by faith and prayer, and we shall break with one of our fingers through the brain-spun meshes of these impotent negations. Prove to us that by the word " God" we ought only to mean " vortices of atoms," or " streams of tendency," and at the end of such triumphant demonstrations, we shall but kneel 1 Martineau, Hours of Thought. I.] WHAT HEAVEN IS. down before Him who made us, and not we our- selves, and with bowed head, and sad yet kindling heart, shall pray, if possible, with yet deeper con- viction, " Our Father which art in Heaven." And when we thus believe in Him whom we have not seen, all else follows. We believe that He did not befool with irresistible longings, that He did not deceive with imaginary hopes, the man whom He had made. We believe that the breath of life which came from Him shall not pass away. We believe that He sent His Son to die for us and to save us. We believe that because He lives we shall live also. We believe; we are content; we do not even ask for further proof. In this belief, which we believe that He inspireth, we shall con- sole ourselves amid all the emptiness and sorrow of life ; we shall advance, calm and happy, to the very grave and gate of death. 2. I speak to Christians ; to Christians who hope not only to live, but to live in heaven hereafter ; and I want this morning to fix your 8 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. contemplation upon that heaven, and to ask what are our thoughts of it, and why. And I do this partly because one of the ablest and most eloquent of the writers to whom I have alluded has spoken with passionate scorn of what he supposes to be our anticipations of heaven, and of what he is pleased to represent as the necessary result of such anticipations. He says that we are looking for a " vacuous eternity ; " "a future of ceaseless psalmody," "an eternity of the tabor," "so gross, so sensual, so indolent, so selfish," that the belief in it " paralyses practical life, and throws it into discord." "A life of vanity in a vale of tears, followed by an infinity of celestial rapture," is, he says, " necessarily a life of infinitesimal importance," making men "dull to the moral responsibility which, in its awfulness, begins only at the grave," and " little influenced by the futurity which will judge them." " And why," he asks, " should this great end, staring at all of us along the vista of each i.l WHAT HEAVEN IS. 9 human life, be for ever a matter of dithyrambic hypotheses and evasive tropes ? " l Now I shall offer you no " dithyrambic hy- potheses," or "evasive tropes," but, eloquent as all this is, I am sure that the most thoughtful of you must have listened to it with amused bewilderment. It must have been just a little in- congruous and unreal to you to hear the Christian's hope of heaven described as though it were some Mohammedan paradise, as being not only gross, selfish, and sensual, but also as paralysing and immoral, when you know what lives it has in- fluenced, what deeds it has inspired. Were the hopes of St. Stephen, think you, dull and im- moral, when, with face radiant as the face of an angel, he gazed into the opening heavens ? Was it a dull selfishness which inspired the martyrs as they bathed their hands in the torturing flame, or which nerved the Christian maiden as she knelt awaiting with a smile the 1 Mr. Frederic Harrison, Nineteenth Century, i. 834, &c. ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. tiger's spring ? Was it a paralysing superstition which fills with "tempestuous glory" the suffer- ings of the good ; which breathed through the calm last words of Richard Hooker ; which made Addison tell the young Earl of Warwick to see how a Christian could die ; which inspired the eager " Lord, open to me, open to me," of the dying Lacordaire; or which has enabled so many thousands of Christians, in every age and every country, to become lovelier in spirit during each hour of life's waning lustre, showing ever "a sublimer faith, a brighter hope, a kinder sympathy, a gentler resignation ? " Ah no ! my brethren, " the rattling tongue of saucy and audacious eloquence " will never persuade you of this ; and you will only listen with a smile when you are assured that the hopes which up- lifted such lives, and glorified such ends, were but the confusing fumes of a puerile illusion. We know not indeed ; but we believe. We walk by faith, though we cannot walk by sight But WHAT HEAVEN IS. 1 1 were the arguments of these philosophers ten thousand times more cogent than they are, " What can we do, o'er whom the unbeholden Hangs in a night wherewith we dare not cope ? What but look sunward, and with faces golden Speak to each other softly of hope ? " It will take many a ream of agonistic and nihilistic literature to rob us of the conviction with which we say, " I believe in God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost; I believe in the Communion of Saints, in the for- giveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and the Life Everlasting. Amen." 3. Well then, my brethren, we believe in Heaven : but what is Heaven ? Our friends die men die by myriads ; at every ticking of the clock some fifty souls have passed away ; yet not a breath of sound shakes the curtain of impenetrable dark- ness which hangs between us and the unseen world. A fair child sighs away his innocent soul, and in a moment, perhaps, ETERNAL HOPE. [SIP. "lie hath learnt the secret hid Under either pyramid ; " but to his parents, in their agony, comes no faintest whisper from the intervital gloom. Not to one of all the unnumbered generations whose dust is blown upon the desert winds has it been per- mitted to breathe one syllable or letter of the dim and awful secret beyond the grave. And yet the faith of man has not been shaken, nor, for all this deep, unbroken silence, has he ever ceased to believe that He who called us into being will bless, will save, will cherish the souls which He hath made. We feel sure He did not mean us merely "to be born weeping, to live complaining, and to die disappointed," and so cease to be, but that He has a new home for us in other worlds. It is the fact which we believe ; the details are not revealed to us. And hence each race has fancied its own ideal of heaven. "Lo ! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind, I.] WHAT HEAVEN IS. 13 His soul proud science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk and milky way, Yet simple nature to his hope has given Behind the cloud-capt hills a humbler heaven. * * * * To be content 's his natural desire, He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire, But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company." The Greek had his Elysian plains, where the Eiddla the shadowy images of the dead moved in a world of shadows ; and his Islands of the Blest, where Achilles and Tydides unlaced the helmets from their flowing hair. 1 The Scan- dinavian dreamed of his green Paradise hereafter amid the waste. Few indeed have been the na- tions who have not imagined that there remains for holy souls beyond the grave some "Island valley of Avilion, Where falls not hail or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly." 1 V(KIJUIV dfifvr\va Kaprjj'o, Od, x. 521 J iv. 53- ?5aiAa Kap.6vTov, Od. xi. 476. nuKapuv VT)?, vincu- him nodosum). " Induite, ut amictus humilitatis nulla vi vobis detrahi possit." BENGEL. 2 This is one of the finest sayings of Confucius. SERMON II. IS LIFE WORTH LIVING ? l Ps. Ixxix. 14. " So we that are Thy people, and sheep of Thy pasture, will give Thee thanks for ever ; and will always be shewing forth Thy praise, from generation to generation." As the first day of this month was the grand festival of All Saints, so in past centuries the second of November was set apart in honour of "All Souls." The motives which led to its abolition were doubtless adequate at the time, but yet we may be allowed to regret its abandonment. Un- doubtedly there was a certain grandeur, a certain catholicity, a certain triumphant faith, a certain 1 Preached at Westminster Abbey, Nov. 4, 1877. SER. n.J IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 27 indomitable hope in that ancient commemoration of the departed. 1 It was the feast of All Souls. It is true that it was originally intended only for the faithful departed ; for the souls in purgatory. But in the title of the day at any rate there was no exception made. On that day men might think, if they would, of all the souls, of all the innocent little ones that have passed away like a breath of vernal air since time began ; of all the souls which the great, and the wise, and the aged, have sighed forth in pain and weariness after long and noble lives ; of all the souls of the wild races of hunters and fishermen in the boundless prairies or the icy floes ; of all the souls that have passed, worn and heavy- laden, from the roaring city-streets ; of all the souls of those whose life has ebbed away in the red tide of unnumbered battles, or whose bodies have been dropped into the troubled waves unknelled, uncoffined, and, save to their God, unknown ; of all 1 It is said to have been founded in the ninth century by Odilon, abbot of Cluny. 2 8 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. the souls even of the guilty, and of the foolish, and of the miserable, and of those who have rushed by wild self-murder into their Maker's presence. All Souls' Day was a day of supplication for, of com- memoration of, all these. For these too are souls that He created ; into these too He breathed the breath of life ; and all these lie in the hollow of His hand as the snows of the countless water lilies whether white and immaculate, or torn and stained lie all on the silver bosom of the lake. Yes, there is a grandeur and sublimity in the thought of all human souls, as one by one they have passed away and been taken to the mercy of the Merciful ; and a day might well have been set apart to commemorate, in all humble reverence, their av:ful immortality. Our finite imaginations may grow dizzy at the thought of these infinite multitudes, these who at each ticking of the clock pass from the one thousand millions of the living ; the tribes, the generations, the centuries, the millenniums, the aeons of the dead ; all of which are but the leaves II.] IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 29 green or fallen of the mighty Tree of Existence ; the wave after wave of its illimitable tide. As we think of all these souls, we recall the imagination of the great poet of the Inferno, and seem to be gazing on a white, rushing, indistinguishable whirl of life, sweeping on and on and on, from horizon to horizon, in ever-lengthening cycles and infinite processions, endless, multitudinous, innumerable, as the motes that people the sun's beam. 1 To us, inevitably, in this infinitude, all individuality is lost ; human numeration reels at it. But it is not so with Him to whom is known the number of the stars of heaven, and the sands of the sea, and by whom " Every leaf in every nook, Every wave in every brook," 1 " E dietro la venia si lunga tratta Di gente, ch' io non avrei mai creduto Che morte tanta n' avesse disfatta." DANTE, Inferno, iii. 55. ' ' La bufera infernal, che mai non resta, Mena gli spirti con la sua rapina." I!>iJ, v. 31. ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. are heard as they sing forth their unending Paean all day long. And knowing this, we are not appalled at the thought of these vast multi- tudes, whose bodies are now the dust of the solid earth, even though so many millions of them have passed away in sin and sorrow, because we can say with the Holy Psalmist of Israel, " O let the sorrow- ful sighing of the prisoners come before Thee, according to the greatness of Thy power, save Thou those that are appointed to die : so we, that are Thy people and sheep of Thy pasture, shall give Thee thanks for ever, and shall alway be shewing forth Thy praise from generation to generation." 2. But if we cannot say this at all, if we have lost all faith in God, how does life appear to us then ? There are, alas ! many who have lost their faith in God. My brethren, it is not for us to judge them or to blame them; nay, we most heartily pity them ; not believe me, with any supercilious sense of superiority ; not with any Pharisaic taint of pride, but for their own sakes, TI.] IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 31 and in sincere and humble brotherhood of sym- pathy, even if they reject or despise such sympathy. Knowing how terrible, how irreparable, would be the loss of such faith to us, we regret their loss ; and we pray that they, no less than we, may be folded at last in the arms of God's infinite mercy, and led into the radiance of His Eternal Light. But seeing that the faith of their childhood and of their fathers has suffered shipwreck ; seeing that they think, or think that they think, that there is no God, and that we die as the beasts of the field, we cannot wonder that they ask themselves whether life be at all worth the living. Nay, we are glad that they should discuss such questions ; because the deeper their bark sinks, the more sure we are that they must at last reach that bed on which the ocean rests, that God, whose offspring we all are, and in whom, whether we deny Him or have faith in Him, we all live and move, and have our being. 3. But since this question is now being deli- 32 ETERNAL HOPE. [SKR. berately discussed, " Is life worth living ? " ought we not, as Christians, to face it, quite fearlessly and quite faithfully ? It is not desirable surely that we should separate the pulpit from the thoughts of the week-day world, or avoid the questions which those who reject and those who scorn religion discuss among themselves. I do not believe, my brethren, in the faith which can ' only be sheltered by an effeminate clericalism, or a professional con- ventionality. For myself, I desire that the creed of a Christian clergyman should be a manly creed, not afraid to be assaulted not anxious to be spoken of with bated breath. I wish that it should be no mere exotic, which must be kept under glass lest any wind of heaven should visit it too roughly ; but that it should be rather like the green blade of the corn, which every rain- storm may drench, and on which the snow may lie, and over which the scorching heat may burn and the chill wind blow, but which, because God's sunlight falls on it, and it has a principle of life II.] IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 33 within, in spite of, nay because of, every freezing or blighting influence, grows up from the tender blade to the green ear, and from the green ear to the rich and ripened corn. 4. Is then life worth living ? Life, I mean, regarded by itself; life on this earth; life apart from God ; your life, my life, human life in general, considered under its purely earthly aspects and relationships ? Let us glance at this ques- tion, it must be inadequately; it may be mis- takenly ; it may be quite superficially, but yet (which God grant us!) with the one merit of a humble endeavour after perfect honesty. 5. And, in answering the question, let us, my brethren, in no wise exaggerate. Let no personal circumstances, let no melancholy temperament, let no pressure of immediate, 1 and it may be passing, trials bias our verdict. Let us, so far as may be, look at life steadily and whole. It 1 Frater unicus aljiit ad plurcs. Prii. NJH. Nov. Pater oplimus. F/. A'al. JuL MDCCCI.XXVII. D ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. is not all darkness ; it has its crimson dawns, its rosy sunsets. It is not all clouds ; it has its silver embroideries, its radiant glimpses of heaven's blue. It is not all winter; it has its summer days on which "it is a luxury to breathe the breath of life." " Life hath its May, and all is joyous then ; The woods are vocal, and the winds breathe music, The very breeze has mirth in it" Ask the happy little child with its round cheeks, and bright eyes, and flaxen curls, and pure sweet face, and the tender, tender love and care that enfold, and encircle, and treasure it, and smooth its path the whole day long ; ask the happy boy, tingling with life to the finger-tips, making the fields ring with his glad voice on summer holidays, happy in unselfish friendships, in generous im- pulses, in strong health, in the freedom from all care, in the confidence of all hopes, when "the boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long ; " ask happy lovers, when they IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? know the joy of being all in all to each other, and to their glad gaze " A livelier emerald twinkles in the grass, A deeper sapphire melts into the sea ! " Ask soldiers in the hour of victory; ask great thinkers when some immortal truth bursts upon them ; ask the happy band who gather in the yet unbroken circle round the Christmas hearth : or, take less thrilling moments, and ask fathers and mothers when cares do not press, and the little ones are gone to bed, and they sit together by the fireside through the quiet winter eve : at such times, per- haps, all these will be inclined to tell you that life is worth the living. And though such hours come not to all, and come not alike to the good and evil, to the wise and foolish, yet we all do have peaceful periods of our lives ; quiet intervals at least between storm and storm ; interspaces of sunlight between the breadths of gloom ; until over every one of us the night at last sweeps down. D 2 3 6 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. 5. Yes, my brethren, let us acknowledge let us cherish, let us be grateful for, let us, as far as we may without selfishness, multiply these natural pleasures, these simple, or innocent, or holy joys. Let us admit, too, that God is very, very good to us, and that the worst evils of our lives are often in anticipation only, and of our own making, not of God's. The Christian is no pessi- mist to encourage in himself a view of life needlessly discouraging; he is no ascetic, thinking that God cares for pain or sorrow for pain and sorrow's sake ; he is no cynic, who walks of choice in avenues of cypress. And yet if I ask you honestly whether these golden threads of happi- ness are many enough, or strong enough, to weave either the warp or woof of life, I think I know what your answer must be. Let us grant that childhood at least keen as are its little trials is yet rarely otherwise than happy, and that its tears are dried as swiftly as the dew upon the rose. Let us grant, too, that boyhood, though St. II.] IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 37 Augustine truly says that the boy's sufferings are as great while they last as those of a man, is generally happy ; happier since the day when Arnold raised the whole tone of our public schools, happier since the day when Shelley abhorred the petty tyrannies of Eton, and the life of a shrinking, sensitive boy whose name was William Cowper was darkened here at Westminster. And yet not always happy, I think ; and sometimes the source, through life, of the saddest memories and consequences ; and forgetful, too often, of the "inevitable congruity between seed and fruit." But when swiftly, imper- ceptibly, boyhood and youth are over, and man- hood with all its cares is upon us ; when the golden gates close for ever behind us, and we step forth into the thorny wilderness ; when the splendid vision fades into the light of common day ; when the brilliant ideals and innocent enthusiasms of early years have been smirched, and vulgarised, and dimmed ; when not one single ray of illusion or of enchantment rests, were it but for one 3 3 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. instant, over the bleak hills and barren wilder- ness of life ; worn men and weary women ye who must work, and ye who must weep how is it with us then ? 6. My brethren, I will not take any one of the great crimes of life, such as every now and then they are revealed to us, when the lurid gaze of pub- licity is cast upon the interior of some suburban villa or small farm. Clergymen and physicians know well that these are more common than are ever made known. I cannot doubt that among these hundreds gathered here in this Abbey there must be one or other on whose conscience there lies the burden of some deadly undiscovered sin. On all of us sin strives to creep with serpent rustlings, silent, gradual, stealthy ; or to bound from am- bush, sudden, irresistible, with tiger springs; and there must be some here who have been stricken with that poison or crushed beneath that wild beast's force. But I will take no such cases as that of the clever, handsome youth sinking ii.] IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 39 step by step into dissipation, into forgery, into shame unspeakable, and the felon's end ; or as that of one who had lived his life honourably before men, tempted by fatal money into crooked ways, and pleading, with tremulous voice, against a sentence which to him has the agony of death. I will not even take the too common case of the man who wakes suddenly to the horrible truth that he is a drunkard, or under the fatal spell of some craving appetite. Who shall say ' I am safe ' even from such falls ? Yet I will not take these great crimes of life ; nor yet will I take its great tragedies. Who has not known cases in which some man has been suddenly beaten down to earth, bruised, bleeding, under the shock of some wholly unexpected, some quite intolerable, cata- strophe ? Who has not seen families, bright and prosperous, the whole happiness of whose hearth has been shattered, in one moment, as by the crash of doom ? Who shall say ' I and mine are safe from these ' ? Yet I will not take these cases. ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. No, but I will take the common, common every- day cases of life ; life's daily fever ; life's necessary trials. My brethren, our sorrows are quite different sorrows; but which of all of us be he rich or poor, be he noble or insignificant, be he senator or shop-boy, is exempt from them ? Take pain : is there one of us who "has not known the throbbing head, the aching nerve, the sleepless night? Take health: are there none here who rarely know what perfect health is ? Take reputation : have we not been in anguish when cruel and false things or in yet deeper anguish when cruel things and true things have been said of us ? Take home : is there no household whose graves have been scattered far and wide ? No father who has seen the dust sprinkled over the golden head of his dear little child ? No mother whose heart has not ceased to ache since Death plucked her " wee white rose " ? No husband from whom the light of his eyes has been taken at a stroke ? No lonely IT/] IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 41 man, whose circle has ever narrowed and narrowed, and whose path in life has been marked by the gravestones of his early friends ? And, short of death, are there no parents whose sons have wrung their hearts by folly and ingratitude ; who have, in some far land, a prodigal who will come back no more ? And, of all the hundreds who are listening to the voice of a weak fellow-sinner like themselves, are there not some perhaps many whose hopes do but seem to dwindle and dwindle as life goes on ; on whom morning never dawns, but it dawns upon heavy cares, as they think with a sigh of the dreary routine before them ; of the insufficient means which hamper them ; of the debts that hang like a millstone about their necks ; of the chill discouragement of helpless and burdened poverty ? And are there not some who look forward, almost with agony to their day of death, and think how, mayhap, they must leave their dear ones loved wife, and little sons, and little daughters unprotected and 42 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. unprovided for, to the cold pity and grudging charity of a frosty world ? How many might almost sing with the poet as he sat in deep dejec- tion on the shore, " Alas ! I have nor hope, nor health, Nor peace within, nor calm around ; Nor that content, surpassing wealth, The sage in contemplation found ; ***** Others there are whom these surround, Smiling they live, and call life pleasure ; To me that cup hath been dealt in far other measure." 1 For, alas, my brethren, I have not yet told any- thing like the worst ! A man may bear up against sorrow. He may think it no great matter whether he be happy or unhappy. If life be not sweet to him, but bitter, he may yet think it to be borne. If he be a true Christian he may say, " I have re- ceived the cross, I have received it at Thy hands ; I will bear it, and bear it till death, as Thou hast laid it upon me." 2 But when to all this sin is 1 Shelley, " Lines Written in Deep Dejection on the Shore at Naples." 2 Imitatio Christi. II.] IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 43 added ; when " calamity meets an accusing con- science " ; when a man has the sense of wasted opportunities, the shame of forsaken ideals, the sting of evil memories, and the plague of polluted and polluting thoughts ; when, even at the best, he feels that, in this or that act or phase of his life he was unloving, ignoble, uncandid, not what he ought to have been, not what God would have had him be, ah ! to the noble heart is there not sorrow, is there not anguish here ? Apart from deeper and darker errors, is there not the sense we all must have of duties unfulfilled ; of holy things neglected ; " of days wasted for ever ; of affections in ourselves or others trifled with ; of light within turned to dark- ness " ? Ah ! when, with our souls, the treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously, yea, the treacherous dealers have dealt very treacherously, and we have been the worst treacherous dealers to ourselves, does life seem worth having then ? Should we not say, " Alas for man if this were all, And nought beyond, oh earth "? 44 ETERNAL HOPE. [SKR. 7. So that, when I look at life I say, " Lead, lead me on, my hopes ! " But if you ask me whether life without God in the world, and with no hope beyond, is worth having, I answer, No ! nor is it I only who say it, but all the best, and greatest, and wisest of mankind. Ask the kings and queens, ask the poets and scholars, ask the warriors and statesmen, whose dust lies buried here ! Was Elizabeth happy ? was Chatham happy ? was Spenser happy ? was even Newton happy ? Ah no ! Over the volumes of human history is written, " Vanity of vanities ! " and the volumes of Biography are full of lamentation and moaning and woe. Scripture itself is a record of human sorrow. I am well aware that they who would rob us of all our hopes ; who would take away our Lord out of the sepulchre, so that we know not where they have laid Him ; who would change our God into a struggle of careless forces or a complexity of impersonal laws ; who would turn all creation for us into a mask with no living II.] IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 45 face behind it, or a hollow eyesocket in which no eye of love or mercy ever shone I know that they tell us that all this makes no difference, and offer us, for God, I know not what goddess of humanity ; and I know not what " posthumous activity," for a life beyond the grave. My brethren, if they want to take our fine gold from us, we want no dross or tinfoil in its place ; nor for the diamonds of heaven will we take glass and paste. Some of us at least will cling to duty, though duty be robbed of all her sanctions, and to virtue, though virtue lose every shadow of her reward. We do no need these sham gods and mock eternities ; and as for the world, if religion fail to save it from wickedness, God only knows what atheism will do. It will not be content with lacquer religions and pinchbeck faiths. It will go its way, picking and stealing, chambering and wantoning, lying and slandering, till the pit swallow it ; and the sole logical result of scepticism is that which is openly proclaimed by the cory- phaeus of materialism, the deification of suicide, ETERNAL HOPE. [SF.R. the end of evil and futile misery by the extinction and annihilation of the human race. 1 8. But oh, my brethren, if you will listen to me for a moment more, how, when it is touched by one ray out of God's eternity, does this blank materialism, this grotto of icicles in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, melt into mud and nothingness ! How does this glaring metal colossus, with its golden head of intellectualism, tumble into impotency when the rock of faith smites it on its feet of miry clay ! If there be no hope, and no God, and no things unseen, if there be no atonement for the intolerable wrong, if praying nations uplift their hands in vain, if only a hollow echo followed Christ's prayer of agony upon the Cross, then, as far as I can see, life is a revolting nullity and a hideous dream which no poetic make-believes can redeem from its intolerable weariness. But let but one whisper of God's voice thrill the deafened sense ; let but 1 Schopenhauer. ii.] IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 47 one gleam of His countenance flash on the blinded eyes ; let His hand hold forth to us but one green leaf from the Tree of Life ; and how is all changed! Ah, how can we then thank God for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life ! How can we cry then with bursts of exultation, " Thou, O God, art our Father, our Saviour, our merciful God ; and we that are Thy people and the sheep of Thy pasture will give Thee thanks for ever." If our thoughts have come to us this afternoon " clothed in a cloud," let them depart " encircled with a rainbow." That rainbow may seem at times to be but a watery image, yet it arches the spray of the cataract, it shines upon the menace of the storm. Sorrows ? Yes, but to us they are but mercies in disguise. Sins ? Ah, yes ! But they are forgiven and cast away. Is life worth living ? Ask the atheist, and if he tells you his real thought it must be that of the Greek poet " That it were best never to have been born, and next best to depart as 48 ETERNAL HOPE. [aliK. II. soon as possible ; " l or that of the English poet : " Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free ; And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be." J}ut ask the Christian, " Is life worth living ? " and he will answer, ay, indeed, life is infinitely worth living, and death is even infinitely more worth dying ; for to live is Christ, and to die is gain : to live is to have faith in God, and to die is to be with Him for evermore. " Death is the veil which they who live call life ; We sleep, and it is lifted." 1 Soph. Oed, Col, 1224 : fj.rl (pvvai rbi Hiravra vi- Kq \6yov ' rb 5' eirel tpafrj firjvat KetQev oOeviffp ij- Kft iro\u Sfvrpov, us Ta^'fTa. "Nonnasci homini longe optumum esse, proxumum autem quam primum mori." Cic. Tusc. Disp. i. 48, 114; cf. Alexis, Com. 3, p. 447. This was indeed one of the commonest sentiments of the Greeks and Romans, whose life it is the fashion to represent as so natural and so happy. It was in fact the grand revelation of the im- prisoned Silenus. See Ildt. viii. 138 ; Aristot. ap. Pint. Consol. 27 ; Tlieogn. 543, ap. Welcker, p. 31 ; Creuzcr, Studien. i. 224, &c. SERMON III. "HELL" WHAT IT is NOT. 1 I PET. iv. 6. " For for this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead." WHEN I spoke from this place last Sunday on the question, " Is life worth living ? " when I preached three Sundays ago on Heaven, some of you may possibly have thought, This is all very well for true Christians ; all very well if in this world there were only saints ; but the saints are few in number, and this world is full of sinners. See what a spec- tacle it presents ! Look at the coarseness and foulness exhibited at every turn in the streets around us. Walk at night in squalid purlieus, not 1 Preached in Westminster Abbey, Nov. n. E S o ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. a stone's throw from this Abbey, where glaring gin-palaces are busy, and amid the reek of alcohol you may hear snatches of foul oaths and odious songs ; where women sit shuddering in wretched garrets, to think of the brutal hands which will strike, at the brutal feet that will kick them, when the drunkard staggers home ; where the young lads of the schools over which we spend so many millions of money are being daily ruined and depraved by being allured into low haunts of gambling and degradation. Or walk in the thronged haunts of commerce, where myriads are utterly and recklessly absorbed in that hasting to be rich which shall not be innocent ; or judge from the vile phases of the stage and the opera, that vice in higher places is none the less dangerous from being gilded and perfumed ; note all these facts you may say and then tell us, not in an ideal world, but in this world, which looks too often as though it were a world without souls in this world where there is so much of cruel selfishness, of degraded in.] " HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 51 purpose, of serpentine malice, of insane desire ; tell us, in such a world as this, how does all that you have said apply ? Alas ! the vast majority of men and women whom we see are not saints but sinners, and contented with their sins, and living in their sins ; and covetousness, and drunkenness, and lust, and lying, and dishonesty, and hatred, claim each their multitude of votaries and of victims. Have you then any right to paint the world in rose- colour ? Is it not mere insincerity, mere clericalism to shut your eyes to patent facts ? We, who, by our very presence here, show that we do not belong to classes openly and flagrantly irreligious, are yet, many of us, great sinners. Even when there is no dread crime upon our consciences, many of us are far from God ; our hearts are stained through and through by evil passions ; we are tied and bound with the chain of our sins. You bid us repent ; but how many do repent ? You the clergy, who stand often by the bedsides of the dying ; you who know how men live, and know that in nine cases E 2 52 ETERNAL HOPE. [SKR. out of ten they die as they have lived if your theory of life is to be complete, if it is not to be a mere hollow professional sham what do you think about the future ? Tell us about the lost ! 2. My brethren, you have the fullest right to ask these questions, and it is our bounden duty to answer them : and I for one in all deep humility yet, now and always asking God for fearless courage and perfect honesty will try to give you such answer as I can. If it be but the fragment of an answer, it is because I believe it to be God's will that no other should be possible ; but at least I shall strive to speak such truth as is given me to see, and to answer no man according to his idols. Those who take loose conjectures for established certainties ; those who care more for authority than for reason and conscience ; those who pretend to dignify with the name of Scriptural argument the " ever-widening spirals " of dim and attenuated inference out of " the narrow aperture of single texts " ; those who talk with the self-complacency in.] " HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 53 of an ignorance that takes itself for knowledge, as though they alone had been admitted into what with unconscious heresy and unintentional irrever- ence they call " the council-chambers of the Trinity," they may be ready with glaring and ab- horrent pictures of fire and brimstone ; and those of them who are not tender, and not true, may feel the consolatory glow of personal security, as they dilate upon the awfulness and the finality of the sufferings of the damned. But those whose faith must have a broader basis than the halting recon- ciliation of ambiguous and opposing texts ; they v.ho grieve at the dark shadows flung by human theologians athwart God's light ; they who believe that reason, and conscience, and experience, as well as Scripture, are books of God, which must have a direct voice in these great decisions ; l they will not be so ready to snatch God's thunder into 1 Luke xii. 57, " Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?" Prov. xx. 27, "The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord." Rom. ii. 14, 15. "Reason is the only faculty whereby we have to judge of anything, even revelation itself." Br. BUTLER. 54 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. their own wretched and feeble hands ; they will lay their mouths in the dust, rather than make sad the hearts which God hath not made sad ; they will take into account the grand principles which domi- nate through Scripture no less than its isolated expressions ; and undeterred by the base and feeble notion that virtue would be impossible without the horrors of an endless hell, they will declare their hope and trust if it be not per- mitted us to go so far in this matter as belief and confidence that, even after death, through the infinite mercy of the loving Father, many of the dead shall be alive again and the lost be found. 3. I cannot pretend, my brethren, to exhaust in one sermon a question on which whole volumes have been written. There are some of the young in this congregation ; many of you, I regret to see, are standing I am reluctant ever to trespass too long on your attention, and cannot therefore profess to-day to meet and to silence all objections. in.] HELL" WHAT IT IS NOT. 55 But one thing I can do which is to tell you plainly what, after years of thought on this subject, I believe ; and what I know to be the belief of multitudes, and of yearly increasing multitudes, of the wisest and most learned both of the laity and of the clergy in our English Church. 4. What the popular notion of hell is, you, my brethren, are all aware. Many of us were scared with it, horrified with it, perhaps almost maddened by it in our childhood. It is that, the moment a human being dies at whatever age, under whatever disadvantages his fate is sealed hope- lessly and for ever ; and that if he die in unre- pented sin, that fate is a never-ending agony, amid physical tortures the most frightful that can be imagined ; so that, when we think of the future of the human race, we must conceive of " a vast and burning prison, in which the lost souls of millions and millions writhe and shriek for ever, tormented in a flame that never will be 56 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. quenched." l You have only to read the manuals, you have only to study the pictures published, though but rarely, by members of our own Church, and more frequently by some Roman Catholics on the one hand, and some sections of Noncon- formists on the other, 2 to see that such has been 1 Rev. S. Cox, Salvator Mundi, p. 41. Without entirely agreeing with Mr. Cox, I can strongly recommend this lucid and forcible argu- ment to all earnest inquirers. It comes with all the greater force from the author of the Expositors Note-Book and other valuable works which have thrown, a flood of light on the difficulties of Scripture. 2 It is quite true that many of the ablest and most thoughtful Nonconformists and especially among the vigorous and eloquent Independent ministers have rejected the dogma of endless agony for all who die in sin. Nevertheless it is true, I think though I do not allude to it in any unkind spirit that since, as a body, the rank and file of Roman Catholic priests and Nonconformist ministers are less highly educated than the Anglican clergy, horrible inventions about hell pardonable to the unenlightened mediaeval theology, but not so pardonable now are to be found with far greater frequency in the religious literature which originates outside the Anglican Church than in that which proceeds from within its pale. It is, however, only just to add that, for Roman Catholics, the pressing and imme- diate horror of hell is very greatly mitigated, and even to some degree dispelled, by the doctrine of purgatory. But, alas ! pic- tures of hell which curdle the blood with horror, and thrill the soul with indignation, are not peculiar to any age, and passages of III.] " HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 57 and is the common belief of Christendom. 1 You know how Dante, in his vision, comes to a dark wall of rock, and sees blacker in the blackness Tertullian (De Pocnit. c. 12) and Minucius Felix (Octav. 35), or the Eliicidarium usually printed with the works of St. Anselm, are as frightfully blasphemous against the God of love as those in the Con- templation of the State of Man erroneously ascribed to Jeremy Taylor, or in the tracts of the Rev. J. Furniss or of Mr. Moody. With these, in charity, I will not stain my page ; but specimens of them may be seen in Mr. Lecky's II Ltory of Rationalism (i. 235- 241), where he refers also to Wright's Purgatory of St. Patrick, Delapierre's L ' Enfer dccrit par ceux qui font vu, and Alger's His- tory of the Doctrine of a Future Life. Whose heart would not burn within him with a feeling very opposite to that of love or holiness after reading such passages ? Nor must it be supposed that in modern days at least such descriptions have been confined to the sermons of uneducated people. To avoid giving needless offence in proving this, I will confine myself to one extract from Jonathan Edwards : "The world will probably (!) be converted into a great lake or liquid globe of fire, in which the wicked shall be overwhelmed, which shall always be in tempest, in which they shall be tossed tc and fro, having no rest day or night, vast waves or billows of fire continually rolling over their heads, of which they shall ever be full of a quick sense, within and without ; their heads, their eyes, their tongues, their hands, their feet, their loins and their vitals shall for ever be full of a glowing, melting fire, enough to melt the very rocks and elements. Also they shall be full of the most quick and lively sense to feel the torments, not for ten millions of ages, but for ever and ever, without any end at all," &c., &c. 1 See Excursus I., Popular Views of Hell. 58 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. the chasm of hell's colossal portal, and, over it, in characters of gloom, the awful line : " All hope abandon ye who enter here ; " and how, passing through it they reach a place, where, in the mere vestibule, and even before they reach the region of more frightful agonies, sighs and wailings trembled through the starless void, and the sound of voices deep and hoarse, and hands smitten wildly together, whirling always through that stained and murky air. 1 But it is 1 ' ' Per me si va nella citta dolente ; Per me si va nell' eterno dolore : Per me si va tra la perduta gente. * * * * Dinanzi a me non fur cose create, Se non eterne ed io eterno duro ; Lasciate ogni speranza voi M entrate. * * * * Quivi sospiri, pianti, e ad alti guai Risonavan per 1" aer senza stelle. . . . * * * * Diverse lingue, orribili favelle, Parole di .dolore, accent! d' ira Voci alti e fioche, e suon di man con elle Facevano un tumulto, il qual s' aggira Sempre in quell' aria senza tempo tinta, Come la rena quando il turbo spira." DANTE, Infa-n. in.] " HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 59 even more awful to find such things in our own great writers, who had no belief, like Dante, in that "willing agony" of purgatory, into which poor souls might gladly plunge, assured that at last, redeemed and purified, they too should pass into their paradisal rest. 1 Read how the great Milton, 1 Few can estimate the diminution of the horror of contemplat- ing the future which Roman Catholics derive from the doctrine of purgatory. The souls in purgatory are, as Dante says, " Content 'i nel fuoco" and the description in Newman's Dream of Gerontiui is that of an agony akin to bliss " Softly and gently, dearly ransomed soul, In my most loving arms I now enfold thee, And o'er the pearly waters as they roll I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee ; And carefully I dip thee in the lake, And thou, without a sob or a resistance, Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take, Sinking deep, deeper into the dim distance." The antiquity and wide spread of the doctrine of purgatory is due, in some measure, to the relief which it offered to the conscience from the dogma against which it revolts. I do not hold it a. hope for the future of many of the lost being something very different, and indeed not necessarily more than the well-known doctrine of "Mitigatio," and " refrigeria," admitted even by St. Augustine and St. Jerome. But the English Church, while in rejecting pur- gatory it intended to reject any definite belief about a penal state between death _and judgment, in which souls are purified by pains 60 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. after telling us of " the supereminence of beatific vision," plunges at once into the frightful sentence that they who have been wicked in high places, "after a shamefull end in this life (which God grant them), shall be thrown downe eternally into the deepest and darkest gulfe of hell, where under the despightfull controule, the trample and spurn of all the other damned, that, in the anguish of their torture, shall have no other ease than to exercise a raving and bestiall tryanny over them as their slaves and negroes, they shall remaine in that plight for ever, the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and downe- trodden vassals of perdition." l Or read Bishop Jeremy Taylor's sermon on Christ's Advent to Judgment, and see how his imagination revels in the " Tartarean drench " which he pours over his lurid page, when he tells us how " God's heavy hand shall press the sanies and the intolerableness, which may be abbreviated by prayer and masses, did not close the door of hope, and most deliberately refrained from doing so. 1 Milton, Of Reformation in England, ii. ad. fin. in.] ** HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 61 the obliquity, and the unreasonableness, the amaze- ment and the disorder, the smart and the sorrow, the guilt and the punishment, out from all our sins, and pour them Into one chalice, and mingle them with an infinite wrath, and make the wicked drink off all the vengeance, and force it down their unwilling throats, with the violence of devils and accursed spirits." l Or, once more, read in 1 Jeremy Taylor, Works, viii. 24 (Eden's edition). Here is another specimen: " For though in hell the accursed souls shall have no worse than they have deserved, and there are not these over- running measures as there are in heaven, and therefore that the joys of heaven are infinitely greater joys than the pains of hell are great pains, yet even these are a full measure to a full iniquity, pain above patience, sorrow without ease, amazement without consideration, despair without the intervals of a little hope, indignation without the possession of any good ; there dwells envy and confusion, dis- order and sad remembrances, perpetual woes and continual shriek- ings, uneasiness, and all the evils of the soul. " Id. p. 39. What a world, we may well exclaim, for the loving and merciful eye of God to contemplate ! How frightful a result, in spite of how infinite a sacrifice ! And we are taught that one instant makes all the difference between a poor, frail, sinful soul, over which its Saviour yearns, for which the Spirit pleads, which God, its Father and Creator, loves with an infinite tenderness, and a lost, accursed, shrieking, blaspheming, ever-never-dying son of endless and irre- trievable perdition ! This is what the popular, the common view 52 ETERNAL HOPE [SER. Henry Smith the silver-tongued Platonist of Cambridge how, when Iniquity hath played her part, " all the Furies of Hell leap upon the man's heart, like a stage. Thought calleth to Fear; Fear whistleth to Horror ; Horror beckoneth to Despair, and saith, ' Come and help me torment this sinner.' . . Irons are laid upon his body, like a prisoner. All his lights are put out at once." 2 Can we wonder that, receiving and believing such doctrines, the poet Habington writes : " Fix me on some bleake precipice, Where I ten thousand years may stand, has a thousand times asserted, and still professes to assert ! . . And is this the Gospel? Are these the "glad tidings of great joy?" Yet Jeremy Taylor, who as I have pointed out in Masters of Englifh Theology, p. 195), not unfrequently uses wavering language, seems to have held the theory of conditional immortality, at any rate, as Coleridge observes, in alditis fidei. For, after observing in this same sermon ( Works, viii. p. 43), that this was the belief of Justin Martyr, and of Irenreus, and noticing different fancies of the Fathers on this'subject, he refers to the argument that "though the fire is everlasting, not all that enters into ,it is everlasting," and that the word "everlasting" "signifies only to the end of its proper period." 1 Sermon on the Betraying of Christ. in] "HELL" WHAT IT IS NOT. 63 Made now a statua of ice, Then by the summer scorch'd and tann'd ! Place me alone in some fraile boate 'Mid th' horrours of an angry sea ; Where I, while time shall move, may floate, Despairing either land or day : Or, under earth my youth confine To th' night and silence of a cell, Where scorpions may my limbs entwine, O God ! so Thou forgive me hell ! " 1 or that Shakspeare, after lines of marvellous power, should exclaim " 'Tis too horrible ; The weariest and most loathed earthly life Which age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death ! " * 5. Well, my brethren, happily the thoughts and hearts of men are often far gentler and nobler than the formulae of their creeds ; and custom and tradition prevent even the greatest from facing the full meaning and consequences of the words they use. When Milton talks thus of Hell he is but giving 1 Habington's Castara. 2 Measure for Measure, 'in. i. 6.| ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. form and colour to his burning hatred of irre- sistible tyranny and triumphant wrong ; when Jeremy Taylor and other great divines and poets wrote thus of it, they gave us but the ebullient flashes from the glowing caldron of a kindled imagination. 1 What they say is but, as it were, the poetry of indignation. It is only when these topics fall into vulgar handling, it is only when they reek like acrid fumes from the poisoned crucible of mean and loveless conceptions, that we see them in all their intolerable ghastliness. Many true and loving Christians have, I know, held these views, and have mourned with aching hearts over what seemed to them the fatal neces- sity for believing them. 2 But others, less good and less pure, have exulted in them, and I know nothing more calculated to make the whole soul revolt with loathing from every doctrine of religion 1 See Coleridge, Apologetic Preface to Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, a Excursus II., 'Agony of Christians in Contemplating the Doctrine of Endless Torments.' in.] " HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 6; than the evil complacency with which some cheer- fully accept the belief that they are living and moving in the midst of millions doomed irrever- sibly to everlasting perdition. St. Augustine dared to say that infants dying unbaptised would certainly be damned, though only with a lemssima damnation Even St. Thomas of Aquinum lent his 1 " Potest recte dici parvulos sine baptismo de corpora exeuntes in damnatione omnium mitissimo futures." August. De peccat. meritis et remiss, i. 16 ; Enchirid. 93. He condemned the Pelagian doctrine of a limbus infantum. "Non est ullus ulli medius locus, ut possit esse nisi cum diabolo, qui non est cum Christo." De peccat. merit, i. 28. See Hagenbach, Hist, of Doc- trines, i. 390 (English translation). Owing mainly to the authority of St. Augustine, which was in many respects so disastrous, the entire Mediaeval Church held the doctrine of the damnation of infants dying unbaptised. Dante, in the first circle of the Inferno, sees the " Duol senza martin, Ch' avean le turbe, ch' eran molte e grandi E d'infanti e di femmine e di viri," of which the Master, himself a sufferer in that limbo, says " Per tai difetti, e non per altrio rio Semo perduti, e sol di tanto offesi Che senza speme vivemo i disio," i,e. " without hope, we live in desire " of seeing God. Inf. iv. 2843. Comp. Paradise Lost, x. 995. F 66 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. saintly name to what I can only call the abomin- able fancy that the bliss of the saved may be all the more keen because they are permitted to gaze on the punishment of the wicked. 1 Boston, in his Fourfold State, talks of God holding up the 1 "Unumquodque ex comparatione contrarii magis cognoscitur . . . et ideo ut beatitude sanctorum eis magis complaceat, et de ea uberiores gratias Deo agant, datur eis ut poenam impiorum perfecte videant !" St. Thorn. Aquin. Summa Theol. iii. Suppl. Qu. 94. art. I. Compare the language of Peter Lombard : "Egredientur ergo electi ad vivendum impiorum cruciatus, quos videntes non dolore afficientur, sed laetitia satiabuntur, visa impiorum ineffabili calami- tate." Sentent. iv. dist. 5, 9. Strange influence of system and dogma ! Can any one with a heart, any man worthy of the name of Christian, any man worthy of the name of man, fully realise the meaning of such words with a soul unblinded by prejudice and unsteeled by custom, without calling it inhuman language, and wondering that any could have uttered it who thought that they were preaching a gospel of infinite love? Yet even this has survived to us from the Middle Ages. "The damned," wrote Jonathan Edwards, "shall be tormented in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb, so will they be tormented also in the presence of the glorified saints. Hereby the saints will be made more sensible how great their salva- tion is. The view of the misery of the damned will double the anlour of the Ijt'e and gratitude of the taints in in.] " HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 67 wicked in hell-fire with the one hand, and tor- menting them with the other. Now even a saint of God sins when he speaks thus, and is setting up in the place of God the Idol of the Tribe or of the Den, and no language can be stern enough to reprobate the manner in which some, who are not saints of God at all, who are not even the elder brothers of the Prodigal, whose religion has re- solved itself into a mere feeble heresy-hunting, have turned God's gospel of plenteous redemption into an anathema of all but universal perdition. Which of us has not heard sermons, or read books to the effect that if every leaf of the forest trees, and every grain of the ocean sands stood for billions of years, and all these billions were exhausted, you would still be no nearer even to the beginning of eternity than at the first ; l and that (pardon me for 1 One specimen neither more nor less futile than hundreds of others will suffice. " Give us a millstone," say the damned, "as large as the whole earth, and so wide in circumference as to touch the sky all round, and let a little bird come once in a hundred thou- sand years and pick off a small particle of the stone not larger than the tenth part of a grain of millet, and after another hundred F 2 68 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. reproducing what I abhor) if you could conceive an everlasting toothache, or an endless cautery, or the incessant scream of a sufferer beneath the knife, that would give you but a faint conception of the agony of hell ; and yet in the same breath that the majority of mankind are doomed to hell by an absolute predestination ? Which of us has not heard teaching which implied, or did not even shrink from stating this ? And dare any one of you regard such teaching as other than blasphemy thousand years let him come again, so that in ten hundred thousand years he would pick off as much as a grain of millet ; we wretched sinners would desire nothing but that thus the stone might have an end, and thus our pains also yet even that cannot be ! " Suso (died 1365). " O caecas hominum mentes I " But are we really bidden to believe that after a life sad and troubled as most of our lives are, man with his judgment so weak, his passions so strong, his temptations so intense, shall after a few years be tortured by a merciful, long-suffering God, "not only millions of years of pain for each thought, or word, or act of sin . . . not only millions of ages only for every such act, but a punish- ment which when millions of ages of judgment have been inflicted for every moment man has lived on earth is no nearer its end than when it first commenced ? " See Mr. Jukes's excellent book, The Restitu- tion of All Things, p. 115. in.] " HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 69 against the merciful God ? If you are not un- affected when "the destitute perish of hunger, or the dying agonise in pain," is there any human being, worthy the dignity of a human being, whose soul does not revolt and sicken at the notion of " a world all worm and flame " ? One who is not of us wrote yesterday to the Times, how, stand- ing in that Parisian prison where the Girondists held their last supper ; whence Danton passed to his scaffold ; where Robespierre, the night before his execution, lay weltering in his blood ; where Marie Antoinette poured out her soul in the last hour of her life ; he saw an exquisite crucifix of ivory in the cell where it had been left since that queen, and wife, and mother had turned to it all night in her last agony ; and he adds that, in such a scene as that, all logic, doctrine, politics, severity of judgment are hushed, and " Human nature asserts its preeminence, and claims the whole field of thought for pity. In presence of that agonising figure on the cross, the whole soul revolts against 70 ETERNAL HOPE. [SEK. judicial terrorism in whatsoever name, by what- soever tyrant committed." He is speaking, of course, of earthly tyrants ; but, my brethren, " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ? " and shall the image of the crucified Redeemer inspire, in one who rejects His divinity, the noble pity which seems as if it were alien to many of His sons ? I can sympathise with the living poet when he cries, " Were it not thus, O King of my salvation, Many would curse to Thee, and I for one, Fling Thee Thy bliss, and snatch at Thy damnation, Scorn and abhor the shining of the sun ; King with a reckless shivering of laughter, Wroth at the woe which Thou hast seen so Ion j, Question if any recompense hereafter Wails to atone the intolerable wrong." If St. Paul, again and again, flings from him with a " God forbid ! " the conclusions of an ap- parently irresistible logic, 1 we surely, who have very little logic of any kind against us in this 1 See an admirable sermon on the subject preached at Oxford by my friend Prof. Plumptre. tn] " HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 71 matter, but only questionable exegesis, supported in too many instances by spiritual selfishness and impenetrable prejudice, do in the high name of the outraged conscience of humanity, nay, in the far higher names of the God who loves, of the Saviour who died for, of the Spirit who enlightens us, hurl from us representations so cruel, of a doctrine so horrible, with every nerve and fibre of our intellectual, moral, and spiritual life. 1 Ignorance may make a fetish of such a doctrine if it will ; Pharisaism may inscribe it upon its phylacteries ; hatred may write it, 1 My language in this, and in the preceding and subsequent para- graphs, has been either intentionally perverted or unintentionally misunderstood. I apply these terms (strong, if you will, but not, it seems to me, in the slightest degree too strong), not of course to the general belief in endless punishment, but to the awful variations upon it, and inventions about it, to which I have referred. Many, I know, who are blessed and holy souls, believe, or imagine them- selves to believe, in an endless hell for most of the human race ; but when they in any .way face the significance of their own -words the language which they use is that of the authors adducpd in Excursus II., not that of those referred to in Excursus III. " On the Popular Views of Hell." 72 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. instead of " Holiness to the Lord," on the sacerdotal petalon in which it degrades and simu- lates the name of love : but here, in this vast mausoleum of the glorious dead, here amid the silent memorials of the sons of fame and the fathers who begat us, of whom many, though not saints, were yet noble, though erring men ; and of whom (though they, and we alike, shall suffer, both here and hereafter, the penalty of unrepentant sin) we yet cannot and will not think as damned to unutterable tortures by irre- versible decrees, I repudiate these crude and glaring travesties of the awful and holy will of God ; I arraign them as ignorantly merciless ; I impeach them as a falsehood against Christ's universal and absolute redemption ; I denounce them as a blasphemy against God's exceeding and eternal love ! And more acceptable, I am very sure, than the rigidest and most uncompro- mising self-styled orthodoxy of all the Pharisees who have ever judged their brethren since time ITT] HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 73 began more acceptable by far to Him, the friend of publicans and sinners, who, on His cross, prayed for His murderers, and who died that we might live more acceptable, I say, by far, than the delight which amid a deluge of ruin hugs itself upon the plank which it has seized would be the noble and trembling pity so fearfully unlike the language of divines and schoolmen, which made St. Paul ready to be anathema from Christ for the sake of his brethren ; l which made Moses cry to His God at Sinai, " Oh, this people have sinned : and now, if Thou wilt forgive their sin ; and if not, blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written." 2 6. But I would ask you to believe, my brethren, that I speak now no longer with natural passion, but with most accurate theological precision, when I say that, though texts may be quoted which give prim& facie plausibility to such modes of teaching, yet, to say nothing of the fact that the light and 1 Rom. ix. 3. * Ex. xxxii. 32. 74 ETERNAL HOPE, [SER. love which God Himself has kindled in us recoil from them, those texts are, in the first place, alien to the broad unifying principles of Scripture ; that they are founded on interpretations which have appeared to many wise men to be demonstrably groundless ; and that for every one so quoted, two can be adduced whose prima facie and literal interpretation tells on the other side. 1 There is an old, sensible, admitted rule, " Theologia sym- bolica non est demonstrativa " in other words, that phrases which belong to metaphor, to imagery, to poetry, to emotion, are not to be for- mulated into necessary dogma, or crystallised into rigid creed. Tested by this rule, nine-tenths of the phrases on which these views are built fall utterly to the ground. But even were this other- wise, yet, once more, in the name of Christian light and Christian liberty ; once more in the name of Christ's promised Spirit ; once more in 1 See P^xcursus IV. Texts bearing on the doctrine of Eternal Hope. ill.] " HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 75 the name of the broadened dawn, and the daystar which has arisen in our hearts ; I protest at once and finally against this ignorant tyranny of isolated texts which has ever been the curse of Christian truth, the glory of narrow intellects, and the cause of the worst errors of the worst days of the cor- rupted Church. Tyranny has engraved texts upon her sword ; Oppression has carved texts upon her fetters; Cruelty has tied texts around her faggots ; Ignorance has set knowledge at de- fiance with texts woven on her flag. Gin-drinking has been defended out of Timothy, and slavery has made a stronghold out of Philemon. The devil, as we all know, can quote texts for his purpose. They were quoted by the Pharisees* not once or twice only, against our Lord Himself, and when St. Paul fought the great battle of Christian freedom against the curse of Law, he was anathematised with a whole Pentateuch of oppos- ing texts. But we, my brethren, are in the dis- pensation of the Holy Spirit. Our guide is the 76 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. Scriptures of God in their broad outlines ; the Revelation of God in its glorious unity; the Books of God in their eternal simplicity, read by the illumination of that Spirit of Christ which dwelleth in us, except we be reprobates. 1 Our guide is not, and never shall be, what the Scrip- tures call " the letter that killeth ; " 2 the tyran- nous realism of ambiguous metaphors, the asserted infallibility of isolated words. But if this must be made simply and solely a matter of texts ; if, except as a dead anachronism, we mean nothing when we say, "I believe in the Holy Ghost !"- if we prefer our sleepy shibboleths and dead traditions to the living promise, "I will dwell in them and walk in them ; " then by all means let this question be decided by texts alone. I am quite content that texts should decide it. Only, first, you must go to the inspired original, not to the erroneous translation ; and secondly, you must take 1 2 Cor. xiii. 5. 2 2 Cor. iii. 6 ; Rom. ii. 29 ; vii. 6 : John vi. 63. ITI.1 " HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 77 words, and interpret words in their proper and his- torical significance, not in that sense which makes them connote to you a thousand notions which did not originally belong to them ; and thirdly, you must not explain away, or read between the lines of the texts which make against the traditional view, while you refuse all limitation of those on the misinterpretation or undue extension of which that view is founded. Now I ask you, my brethren, where would be these popular teachings about hell the kind of teachings which I have quoted to you and described if we calmly and deliberately, by substituting the true translations, erased from our English Bibles, as being inadequate or erroneous or disputed renderings, the three words, " damnation," "hell," and "everlasting" ? Yet I say, unhesitatingly, I say, claiming the fullest right to speak on this point, I say, with the calmest and most unflinch- ing sense of responsibility, I say, standing here in the sight of God, and of my Saviour, and it may be of the angels and spirits of the dead 78 ETERNAL HOPE. [SFR. that not one of those three expressions ought to stand any longer in our English Bibles, and that, being in our present acceptation of them in the notion (that is) which all uneducated persons attach to them simply mistranslations, they most unquestionably will not stand unexplained in the revised version of the Bible if the revisers have understood their duty. 1 The verb " to damn " in the Greek Testament is neither more nor less than the verb " to condemn," and the words trans- lated " damnation " are simply the words which, in the vast majority of instances the same trans- lators have translated, and rightly translated, by "judgment" and "condemnation." The word alwvtos, sometimes translated "everlasting," is simply the word which, in its first sense, means agelong or aonian; and which is in the Bible itself applied to things which have utterly and long since passed away ; and is in its second sense 1 See Excursus V. On the translation of Kpiveiv, aluvios, and Hi.] " HELL "WHAT IT IS NOT. 79 something " spiritual " something above and beyond time, as when the knowledge of God is said to be eternal life. 1 So that when, with your futile billions, you foist into this word aitavtos the fiction of endless time, you do but give the lie to the mighty oath of that great angel, who set one foot upon the sea, and one upon the land, and with hand uplifted to heaven sware by Him who liveth for ever and ever that "Time should be no more." 2 And finally in the 1 See Excursus VI. On the word aliivios. 3 Rev. x. 7. on xp6vos ovKfTi ta-rat. This has been interpreted to mean " That no further delay should intervene." It may possibly be so, but the meaning attached to it by Bede, " Mutabilis saecula- rium temporum varietas in novissima tuba cessabit" which is also the rendering of the E. V. furnishes a very true and noble sense, the possibility of which is by no means disproved. " For spirits and men by different standards mete The less and greater in the flow of time. * * * * Not so with us in the immaterial world ; But intervals in their succession Are measured by the living thought alone, And grow or wane with its intensity. And time is not a common property, Hut what is long is short, and swift is slow, And near is distant, as received and grasped By this mind or by that, and every one If, standard of tus own chronolocy." NEWMAN, Dream of Gerontius. 80 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. Gospels and Epistles the word rendered Hell is in one place the Greek "Tartarus," borrowed as a name for the prison of evil spirits, not after, but until, the resurrection ; in five places "Hades," which simply means the world beyond the grave ; and in twelve places " Gehenna," which means primarily the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, in which, after it had been polluted by Moloch-worship, corpses were flung and fires were lit ; and is used, secondarily, as a metaphor, not of fruitless and hopeless, but for all at any rate but a small and desperate minority of that purifying and corrective punishment which, as all of us alike believe, does await im- penitents in both here and beyond the grave. But, be it solemnly observed, the Jews to whom and in whose metaphorical sense, the word was used by our Blessed Lord, never did, either then, or at any period, normally attach to the word Gehenna that meaning of endless torment which we attach to "Hell." To them, and in their style of ill.] "HELL" WHAT IT IS NOT. 81 speech, and therefore on the lips of our blessed Saviour who addressed it to them, and spake in terms which they would understand it meant not a material and everlasting fire, but an interme- diate, a remedial, a metaphorical, a terminable retribution. 1 1 I call earnest attention to the im mense importance of this argu- ment. It surely cannot be denied that our Blessed Lord, speaking as ' ' Judaeus, ad jhtdaeos, apud Judaeos, " must have used the words of His day in the sense wherein those words would have been under- stood by His hearers. If so it is demonstrable that the Jews did' not hold, and as a Church they never have held, the two doctrines which I am here declaring to be unproven, viz., 1. The finality of the doom passed, at death. The universal and very ancient use by the Jews of the Kaddish, or prayer for the dead, is a sufficient proof of this. 2. The doctrine of torment, endless if once incurred. Neither etymologically nor historically, nor in its ordinary usage, does the word convey that meaning. Gehenna is spoken of some five times, I believe, in the Mishna, and in no one of them does it connote what "Hell" connotes to the common ear. For the original significance of " Gehenna " I may refer to my article on "Hell" in Dr. Smith's Dictionary of the Bible. For the meaning attached to it by Jews themselves I may quote the testimony of some very learned Talmudic scholars. "There is no everlasting damnation according to fhe Talmud. There is only a temporary punishment, even for the worst sinners. ' Generations upon generations ' shall last the punishment of G 82 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. 7. Thus then, finding nothing in Scripture or any- where to prove that the fate of every man is, at idolaters, apostates, and traitors. But ' there is a space of only two fingers' breadth between hell and heaven : ' the sinner has but to repent sincerely and the gates to everlasting bliss will spring open." Deutsch, Remains, p. 53. After, verifying and examining every passage in the Talmud quoted by Lightfoot, Schottgen, Buxtorf, Castell, Schindler, Glass, Bartoloccius, Ugolino, and York, Dr. Dewes declares as the result of his examination "that there are but two passages which even a superficial reader could consider to be corroborative of the assertion that the Jews understood Gehenna to be a place of everlasting punishment.' 1 Plea for a New Translation, p. 23. We find such passages as these : " Gehenna is nothing but a day in which the impious shall be burned." Abhoda Zara, i. " The judgment of the ungodly is for twelve months." Adyolh, ::. 10. BabhaMetzia, 58 ; Jebhamdth, 102 ; Nedarim, 40, &c. The editor of the Jewish Chronicle generally believed to be a learned Talmudist emphatically declares in recent numbers that endless torment has never been taught by the Rabbis as a doctrine of the Jewish Church. "Die Strafen in Gehenna. In diesem Punkt erklaren sich die falmudlehrer entschieden gegen die Annahme der Ewigkeit der H'dllenstrafen." Hamburger Talmudisches Worterbuch : s.v. Hb'lle. For further testimonies ancient and modern on these very im- portant facts, see pp. 207 214. They are more than sufficient to prove that the language of the Targums (Jonathan on Is. xxxiii. 14, Ixv. 5, Onkelos on Deut. xxxiii. 6, Gfrorer, Jahrb. des Hell's, ii. 289, 311) has no bearing on the controversy, since "fire" and in.] "HELL" WHAT IT IS NOT. 83 death, irrevocably determined, I shake off the hideous incubus of atrocious conceptions I mean "for ever," mean in them just what they do in Scripture, and no more. See Exc. p. 197. The most distinct utterance in the Talmud is Rosh Hashand, i. (f. 16, 2, 17, i), where it is said that the just shall rise to bliss ; ordinary sinners shall be ultimately redeemed ; the hopelessly bad shall be punished for a year, and then annihilated. (See Buxtorf, Syndg. Judaica, p. 23 ; Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenth. 323 369. Any one may here see that a year was the ordinary period fixed by the rabbis to their purgatory.) We have therefore this result. If our revisers retain the word " Hell " for Gehenna they will be perpetuating in the English word its latest, darkest, and (as I believe) least Scriptural conno- tations ; and will be stereotyping a series of untenable inferences, by substituting for the technical expression a rendering which involves conceptions deliberately excluded by those who used the original word. Surely it is a sacred duty in this matter to follow the example set by Christ and the Apostles themselves. When they spoke of Gehenna they spoke of something to which a definite meaning was attached ; and instead of obscuring that definite meaning by changing it into some inexact Greek expression, they simply trans- ferred the Hebrew term into a Greek transliteration. To thousands of educated men " Hell " and " Gehenna " must mean henceforth different things, and to try to make them equivalent will be a perpetuation of error which must inevitably doom the work of the revisers to yet further revision. In all humility, but with deep earnestness, feeling how much is at stake, I intreat them to allow due weight to these considerations. G 2 84 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. those conceptions of unimaginable horror and physical excruciation endlessly prolonged attached by popular ignorance and false theology to the doctrine of future retribution. But neither can I dogmatise on the other side. I see nothing to prove the distinctive belief attached to the word Purga- tory. I cannot accept the spreading doctrine of Conditional Immortality; I cannot preach the certainty of Universalism. That last doctrine the belief that " Good shall fall At last, far off, at last to all," does indeed derive much support from many passages of Scripture ; it or a view more or less analogous to it was held by Origen, the greatest and noblest, by Gregory of Nyssa, the most fear- less, by Clemens of Alexandria, the most learned, by Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the most elo- quent, by Justin Martyr, one of. the earliest of the Fathers ; it was spoken of in some places with half approval, or with a rejection which even when III.] "HELL" WHAT IT IS NOT. 85 absolute was sympathetic and respectful, by theo- logians like St. Irenaeus, St. Athanasius, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, even St. Augustine himself; 1 in modern times, among many others, it has been held by great and most orthodox theologians like Bengel and Tholuck, and by saints of God like Erskine of Linlathen and Bishop Ewing of Argyll. And further, whatever may have been the motives which influenced them, the Reformers struck out of the Prayer-book the Forty-second Article, which declared that " All men shall not be saved." 2 On 1 For an examination of this statement, see Excursus III. Sketch of Eschatological opinions. 3 The excluded Forty-second Article (of 1552) ran as follows : " All men shall not bee saved at the length. "Thei also are worthie of condemnation' who indeavour at this time to restore the dangerouse opinion that al menne, be thei never so ungodlie, shall at length bee saved, when they have suffered pain for their sinnes a certainetime appointed by God's justice." It was omitted in 1562, and almost certainly through the influence of Archbishop Parker. Now on this Article I observe that if the omission of the original Forty-first Article left the belief in the millennium open (as most " Evangelicals " admit), the omission of this Article leaves even " Universalism " an open question. But as far as I am S6 ETERNAL HOPE. [SFR. such a question as this I care but little for indi- vidual authority, but this much at least is proved by the many differing theories of wise and holy men that God has given us no clear and decisive revelation on the final condition of those who have died in sin. It is revealed to us that " God is love ; M1 and that " Him to know is life eternal ; " 2 and that it is not His will that any should perish ; 3 and that " as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive;" 4 but how long, even after death, man may continue to resist His will ; how long he may continue in that spiritual death which is alienation from God ; that is one of the secret things which God hath not revealed. But this much, at any rate that the fate of man is not finally and irreversibly sealed at death, you your- selves unwittingly perhaps, but none the less concerned the Article would not have touched my view at all, for I am not a Universalist. 1 I John iv. 8. a James xvii. 2. * 2 Pet. iii. 9. 4 I Cor. xv. 22. in.] "HELL" WHAT IT IS NOT. 87 certainly admit, and declare, and confess, every time you repeat, in the Apostles' Creed, that Christ descended into hell. For the sole passage which proves that article of the Creed is the passage in St. Peter, which tells us that " He went and preached to the Spirits in prison, 1 which sometime were dis- obedient." St. Peter in my text tells you in so many words that "the Gospel was preached to them that were dead," and if, as the Church in every age has held, the fate of those dead sinners was not irrevocably fixed by death, then it must be clear and obvious to the meanest understanding that neither of necessity is ours. 2 There then is the sole answer which I can give to your question, " What about the lost ? " My belief is fixed upon " that living God " who we 1 That the prisoners there may be "prisoners of hope," appears from Matt. v. 26, where the same word, v\a.Krl, is used. Even if the payment of the debt be not possible to man it is possible to God (Matt. xix. 26). a See Dr. Plumptre's sermon at St, Paul's, "The Spirits in Prison," of which Bishop Thirl wall spoke in terms of the very warmest approval. 88 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. are told is " the Saviour of all men." My answer is with Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, that " we are lost here as much as there, and that Christ came to seek and save the lost ; " and my hope is that the vast majority, at any rate, of the lost, may at length be found. If any hardened sinner, shamefully loving his sin, and despising the long- suffering of his Saviour, trifle with that doctrine, it is at his own just and awful peril. But if, on the other hand, there be some among you as are there not ? souls sinful indeed, yet not hard in sin; souls that fail indeed, yet even, amid their failing, long, and pray, and love, and agonise, and strive to creep ever nearer to the light ; then I say, Have faith in God. There is hope for you ; hope for you, even if death overtake you before the final victory is won ; hope for the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven ; hope for the mourners, for they shall be comforted, though you too may have to be purified in that Gehenna of aeonian fire beyond the grave. Yes, my brethren, III.] "HELL" WHAT IT IS NOT. 89 " Say ye to the righteous, that it shall be well with him ; for they shall eat the fruit of their doings. Woe unto the wicked ! it shall be ill with him ; for the reward of his hands shall be given him : " l but say also, as Christ's own Apostles said, that there shall be " a restitution of all things," 2 that God willeth not that any should perish ; 3 that Christ both died, and rose, and revived that He might be Lord both of the dead and the living; 4 that as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive ; 5 and that the day shall come when "all* things shall be subdued unto Him, that God may be all in all" irdvra ev iraaiv omnia in omnibus all things in all men. 1 Is. iii. 10. 2 Acts iiL 21. 8 2 Pet. iii. 9 ; Ezek. xxxiii. 1 1 ; Ro. ii. 4 ; I Tim. ii. 4. 4 Rom. xiv. 9. 5 I Cor. xv. 22. 6 I Cor. xv. 28. SERMON IV. ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED? 1 LUKE xiii. 23, 24. "Then said one unto Him, Lord, are there few that be saved? And He said unto them, Strive to enter in at the strait gate." THIS passage, my brethren, gives us the very essence of our Lord's teaching respecting the present and the future. Since He had dwelt so often on the difficulty and narrowness of virtue's uphillward path, and on the few who toil in it, whereas many are to be seen rushing along the broad road that leadeth to destruction, some one (who perhaps had more speculative curiosity than moral earnestness) wanted to know the 1 Preached in Westminster Abbey, Nov. 18, 1877. SER. iv.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED? 91 issues of this fact ; and therefore asked Him the plain, direct question, " Lord, are there few that be saved ? " Now supposing that it were so ; supposing that, as thousands .of theologians have taught for thousands of years, the vast majority are in the next world for ever lost, would not our Lord have said so ? would not His. teaching have gained a terrific awfulness from admitting it ? Had the answer to the question been a plain " Yes !" and had that view been as essential to morality as some assert, surely it would have been worse than dangerous, it would have been unkind to suppress it ! But what is the answer of Divine wisdom ? Is it some glaring agony of fire and brimstone for billions of years ? Is it in that style in which the coarse terrorism of the Puritan is at one with the coarse terrorism of the Inqui- sition ? No ; but it is a refusal to answer. It is a strong warning to the questioner. It is a tacit rebuke of the very question. It is the pointing to a strait gate, and a narrow way, 92 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. whereby alone we can enter into the kingdom of God. In this sad world it is but the few who find that way, and until they find it they cannot see the kingdom of God. But there is not one word here about an irreversible doom to a ma- terial torment ; not one word to tell us that all who walk in that broad road inevitably reach its fatal goal. And are we not ' bound to consider the silences of Scripture no less than its utterances ? ' If we still yearn for any answer about the future we may find it perhaps in the glorious words of Isaiah, " Fear not ; for I am with thee : I will bring thy seed from the East, and gather thee from the West ; I will say to the North, Give up ; and to the South, Keep not back ; bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth j" 1 or in the dazzling vision of the seer of the Apocalypse, " I beheld, and lo ! a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues, stood before 1 Is. xll 10. iv.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED ? 93 the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands ; " l or in the calm promise of our Blessed Lord Himself. " In My Father's House are many mansions." 2 But the spirit of the answer of our Blessed Lord was this, " The fate of the souls that He hath made is in the hands of Him that made them, not in thine. Enter thou in at the strait gate." 2. It was in that spirit, my brethren, that I strove to speak to you last Sunday, believing that much of the popular teaching about the awful subject of future retribution its physical tortures, its endless duration, its irreversible finality at the instant of death, gives us an utterly false picture of the God of Love, which, though it may find warrant in the primd facie aspect of texts wrongly translated or totally misunderstood, finds no warrant either in the general tone of Scripture or in God's no less sacred teachings to our indi- vidual souls. And if some would represent such 1 Rev. viL 9. * John xiv. 2. 94 ETERNAL HOPE. FSER. a view as dangerous, I reply that my only question is, ' Is it true ? ' It is falsehood which is always dangerous; but truth never. It is not for us to construct after our own fashion the unseen world. You think that men will not love God without the terror of an endless hell ? So thought not David. He said, " There is mercy with Thee : there- fore shalt Thou be feared." And in any case it is useless to dogmatise about things which God has not revealed. " Things are as they are, and will be as they will be ; " and for us to misrepre- sent them by the fallibility of human system, or at the bidding of human expedience, is a blas- phemy against truth and against God. What is dangerous is to drive some into indignant atheism, and to entangle others with an evil superstition, and to crush others under a deep despair, by repre- senting Him whose name is Love as a remorseless Avenger, instead of as a Father, who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, neither keepeth He His anger for ever. Evil souls iv.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED ? 95 and foolish souls can make any doctrine dangerous. St. Peter tells us that they wrested the writings of St. Paul, as they did also the other Scriptures, to their own destruction ; l would you, therefore, have had the Scriptures unwritten ? or ought St. Paul never to have taken up his pen ? Some of the Fathers, I am afraid, held what I believe to be the truth on this matter, just as hundreds of our ablest clergy do, but feared to preach it ; 2 but the best 1 2 Pet. iii. 16. * Origen (C. Cels. vi. 26) openly proclaims the desirability of this reticence. " All that might be said on this topic," he observes, " is not suitable to explain now or to all For the many need no further teaching than the punishment of sinners. For it is not expedient to go further on account of those who scarcely through the fear of eternal punishment restrain the outpouring into any amount of recklessness." The force of the remark is entirely answered in the text. Chris- tianity admits of no esoteric doctrines. All the children of the Church, be they ever so humble, have a right to all that any of her teachers know. It seems to us to far more of us, and to far greater and wiser men than is generally supposed that the common teach- ing on the subject of Hell is not true : and the cause of God can only be served by the utterance of truth. "I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth." i John ii. 21. The doctrine of "accommodation" (olKovopia, crvyKar^$a(ns) was 96 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. and greatest of tht Fathers did preach it, and many saints at whose feet I gladly sit have preached it in this age. And, if we see a truth, are we to be " liars for God " l by suppressing it, because those think it dangerous who believe in no more potent motive for virtue and the love of God than a ghastly terror ? Are we to go before the very God of truth with a lie in our right hands ? Richard Baxter a saint of God if there ever was one avowed his belief that even a suicide, if hurried by sudden passion into self-slaughter, may be saved, and " If," he nobly added, " if it should be objected that what I maintain may encourage suicide, I answer, I am not to tell a lie to prevent it ! " We English can't do that. But, oh, my brethren, I am not afraid, I never shall be afraid, of doing harm by asking you " to think noble things of God." I am not afraid to bid you plead with Him too prevalent with some of the Fathers, and there is good reason to think that it influenced St. Chrysostom on this very question. 1 Job xiii. 7. "Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for ll'imf" iv.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED ? 97 in the spirit of righteous Abraham, " That be far from Thee, Lord : shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ? " l I am not afraid to say of Him with holy Paul, " Is there unrighteousness with God ? God forbid ! " 2 I am not afraid to plead with Him, in that syllogism which, as Luther said, sums up all the Psalms of David " the God of pity pities the wretched. We are wretched ; therefore " not surely in this short world only, but for ever " God will pity us." Punish us ? Yes, punish us be- cause He pities. But " God judges that He may teach, He never teaches that He may judge." His aeonian fire is the fire of love ; it is to purify, not to torture ; it is to melt, and not to burn : " We would be melted by the heat of love By flames far fiercer than are blown to prove And purge the silver ore adulterate." God Himself tells us that " He afflicteth, not will- ingly, but for our profit, that we may be partakers 1 Gen. xviii. 25. 3 Rom. ix. 14. H 98 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. of His holiness ; " but could it be " for our pro- fit" to be tortured for ever in a hopeless hell? And shall He belie His own words ? Our Church, thank God wiser than her wisest, tenderer than her tenderest ministers speaks not in such tones in her burial service ; and I, who believe in a God whose name is Love I, who rely with all my heart on "the mercy of the Merciful," l I who put my whole trust and confidence in that living God who is " the Saviour of all men " I, who think that the key to all the dreadful perplexities of life and death lies in the belief that Christ lived and died I, for one, say, God forbid ! I would rather go to the instinct of the Christian saint than to the system of the dogmatic theologian ; I would rather accept, as reflecting the mind of God, the broad humanitarian charity, the keen and tender sensibility of the Christian poet, than the hard 1 The Sultan of Zanzibar when in England used the striking expression, " Since my father was taken to the mercy of the Merciful." iv.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED? 99 logic of the inflexible systematist. And our great living poet ends his dread "Vision of Sin" in the very spirit of my text : " At last I heard a voice upon the slope Cry to the summit, ' Is there any hope ? ' To which an answer pealed from that high land, But in a tongue no man could understand : And, on the glimmering summit far withdrawn, God made himself an awful rose of dawn." 2. Dismissing then all controversy, which I never wish to introduce into this or into any pulpit, not thinking it well to answer that part of contro- versy which springs from mere ignorance or angry prejudice, but realising, with deep responsibility, the sacredness of this place, and desiring, in deep humility, to lead aright the thoughts of men and women of open minds and loving hearts, I will ask you to glance a little closer with me at God's ways with man. Not in idle speculation, not in the interests of any dogma, but because, a few years hence, death stares every one of us in the face, and because the faith in the future may beneficently H 2 ioo ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. influence our work in the present let us, for a few moments, glance at what men are, and at what we may hope in the future for them and for ourselves. 3. There are, in the main, three classes of men : there are the saints ; there are the reprobates ; there is that vast intermediate class lying between yet shading off by infinite gradations from these two extremes. 1 I. Of the saints, my brethren, I shall not speak ; their promise is sealed ; their lot is sure. Beautiful, holy souls, into whom, in all ages, entering, the Spirit of God hath made them friends of God and prophets, 2 these are the joy of heaven they are the salt of earth. We, every one of us, are better for them, as the dull clods of the earth are better for the snowy hills whence the rivers flow ; as the stagnant air of earth is better for the pure winds which scatter the pestilence. Oh, what would the 1 Seethe similar remark in the Talmud, Rosh Hashanah, f. 17, r. 1 Wisd. vii. 27. iv.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED ? 101 world be what would England be what would this huge oppressive city be without them ? with out the ten righteous, the thirty, the forty, the fifty righteous, for whose sakes the heavens do not burst to drown, with deluging rain, " The feeble vassals of lust, and anger, and wine, The little hearts that know not how to forgive ? " What would this city be if it were nothing more than one mad greedy coil of jarring slanders, of reckless competition, of selfish luxury, of brutal vice ? Few, we know, are these saints of God, and mostly poor, and often despised ; and yet it is they alone who save the world from cor- ruption by the gangrene of its vices, from dissolu- tion by the centrifugal forces of its hate. Their gentle words break our fierce wranglings with the balm of love ; their calm faces look in upon our troubles with peace and hope : " Ever their statues rise before us, Our loftier brothers, but one in blood, At bed and table they lord it o'er us, With looks of beauty and words of good." 102 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. A millionnaire, a successful man, though the world crawl at his feet, is but as the small dust of the balance ; but, " O God, O God, give us saints ! " About them we have no controversy. We know that they shall be happy ; we know that God shall treasure them in the day when He maketh up His jewels ; we know that " eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor heart conceived " what God shall give to them that love Him. 1 , II. But if they be unassailably secure, eternally happy, what of the other extreme ? what of the reprobates ? We see sometimes an heroic virtue ; would to God that we never saw also a brutal vice. Not far from here is a vast prison, 2 holding some 1,200 criminals. Every time the great clock of Westminster booms out its chimes to the tune " Lord, through this hour, Be Thou my guide ; So, by Thy power, No foot shall slide ; " 1 I Cor. ii. 9. * Millbank. iv.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED ? 103 those prisoners hear it. Among them are some who have got within the arm of the law, but are hardly criminals at all ; those might be even liberated : others who have fallen into crime only from surrounding temptations, and from natures weak but not depraved ; these might be reclaimed : but some there are whom those who know them describe as filthy, cruel, brutal, irreclaimable, and whom society gives up. 1 It is thus (but I have been obliged altogether to soften down his words) that a great living writer speaks of them : " Miser- able distorted blockheads," he calls them, " with faces as of dogs or oxen ; angry, sullen, degraded, sons of greedy mutinous darkness ; base-natured beings, on whom, in a maleficent, subterranean life of London scoundrelism, the genius of darkness has visibly set his seal. Who," he asks, " could ever command these by love ? " A collar round 1 Professor Tyndall quotes this remark from the conversation of a governor of a prison ; and it is to be found in almost the same words in a recent narrative of Five Years' Penal Servitude. 104 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. the neck, a cartwhip on the back, these, in an impartial and steady human hand, are what should be afforded them, and he proposes, with all the speed possible, to make an end of them at once. 1 Well, my brethren, the punishment of crime is just, and society has a right by stern punishment to protect the innocent ; yet I am glad that the Saviour of man spake never in terms like these. I rejoice that He rather said that He came to call sinners to repentance ; 2 to seek and save the lost. 3 And if you ask me whether I must not believe in endless torments for these reprobates of earth, my answer is, Ay, for these and for thee, and for me too, unless we learn with all our hearts to love good and not evil ; but whether God for Christ's sake may not enable us to do this even beyond the grave, if we have failed to do so in this life I cannot say. I know that God hates sin, because He loves the soul which it destroys ; I know that s Carlyle, Latter Day Pamphlets. 2 Matt. ix. 13. 3 Matt, xviii. II ; Luke xv. 4, &c iv.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED? 105 u the path of that hatred is as the path of a flaming sword ; which he who hath eyes may see, divinely beautiful and divinely terrible, every- where burning, as with unquenchable fire, the false and death-worthy from the true and life- worthy." x Yet I know also that for these Christ died. The bigot may judge their souls if he likes ; the Pharisee may consign them with con- ventional orthodoxy to endless torment; but so cannot and will not I. " Forbear to judge," said the holy king by the awful death-bed of Cardinal Beaufort, who died and made no sign " Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all ! Close up his eyes, and draw the curtain close, And let us all to meditation." 2 Born and bred as these have been, surrounded as they have been from infancy with sights and sounds of degradation, what should we have been, what wouldst thou have been, O comfortable bigot, 1 Carlyle. 2 Henry VI. t act iii. sc. 3. 106 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. or thou, O prosperous Pharisee hadst thou had but as small a chance as they'? Pointing to a murderer on his way to execution, " there," said a good and holy man, " there, but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford." If, as we look into the abyss of our own hearts, we see infinite potentialities of guilt and vice, so, as I look on these I see in them, in spite of all their shame and stain, the in- finite potentialities of virtue. And is it not almost blasphemous to suppose that He who made a human being with such rich capacities will in one moment " throw it from Him into everlasting dark- ness ? " Not mine at any rate shall it be to close against them " with impetuous recoil and jarring sound," the gates of hell, lest those gates should more justly be clanged on me j 1 but I commend them with 'humblest hope, even after this life of hope- lessness, to Him who did not loathe the whiteness of the leper, and who suffered the woman that 1 James ii. 13. " He shall have judgment without mercy, that showeth no mercy ; and mercy rejoiceth against judgment." IV.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED? 107 was a sinner to wash his feet with tears. 1 That without holiness none can see God ; that every guilty deed, if unrepented of, must bring its own just and awful retribution; that, for every impure and cruel soul there remaineth, behind the clouds of this world, the dark night of the next ; that I know. But when I remember that even these have been known to burst into tears at a mother's name ; that even these have been known at times to flash out into high deeds of momentary heroism I see that God's Spirit has nowhere taught us that He who gave cannot give back ; that He who once made them innocent children cannot restore their innocence again ; that He who created them, He who will have all men to be saved, 2 cannot re- create them in His own image, cannot uncreate their sins. At any rate no arrogant word, no theologic dogma, no acrid prejudice of mine, shall ever utter to them the language of despair, or stand between these God's lowest and His love. Nay, I believe 1 Luke xii. 48. 2 I Tim. ii. 4. io8 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. that the Good Shepherd, for so He Himself has told us, will not cease to search for these His lost sheep, until He find them. 1 Here again the Christian poets teach us a truer charity than the hard theologians : " Still for all slips of her, One of Eve's family, Wipe those poor lips of her, Oozing so clammily. * * * Make no deep scrutiny Into her mutiny. . . Cross her hands humbly, As if praying dumbly, Over her breast. Owning her -weakness, Her evil behaviour, And leaving with meekness Her sin to her Saviour ! " III. But, my brethren, the vast, vast mass of mankind belong to the third class : they are not utter reprobates any more than they are saints. They may rise to the one, they may sink to the other ; but for the most part they are undecided. 1 Luke xv. 4. iv.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED? 109 They face both ways ; they halt between two opinions ; they are neither saints nor criminals ; they have not closed heart and soul with good, they have not abandoned themselves utterly to evil. They want to be pardoned, yet they want to retain the offence ; they admire holiness, but they dally with iniquity ; they shudder to be in a state of sin, yet they attain not to a state of grace ; there " is an Adam in them, and there is a Christ ; " l now they sin with reckless abandonment, now they repent in bitterest remorse; "the angel has them by the hand and the serpent by the heart." 2 To how many here do these words apply ? We break no law of man ; to the eye of man it might seem that we broke no law of God. But O what would be thought of us if we were all seen as we are ? if our hearts were naked and open to each other as they are to God ? And it is those who do try to be God's children who most realise 1 J. Martineau, Endeavours after a Christian Life. 2 Ruskin. ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. their own exceeding sinfulness. This is why (as one has said) the cry of remorse and anguish which springs from the lips of a Fe'ne'lon or a Cowper is far more bitter than any confession which is ever wrung from a Richelieu or a Voltaire. Many, many of these better, and tenderer, and saintly souls have, I believe, been rendered utterly and hopelessly wretched, even to madness, as poor Cowper was, by that false view of God which is given by the pitiless anathemas of man. But to all these comes the cry, " Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith our God." 1 Your own holier instinct tells you so. Son, or brother, or friend, or father dies : we all have lost them ; it may be that they were not holy ; not even religious ; perhaps not even moral men ; and it may be that, after living the common life of man, they died suddenly, and with no space for re- pentence ; and if a state of sin be not a state of grace, then certainly, by all rules of theology, * Is. xl. i. iv.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED? in they had not repented, they were not saved. And yet, when you stood O father, O brother heavy-hearted by their open grave ; when you drank in the sweet words of calm and hope which our Church utters over their poor remains ; when you laid the white flowers on the coffin ; when you heard the dull rattle of " earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust ; " you, who, if you knew their sins and their failings, knew also all that was good, and sweet, and amiable, and true within them, dared you, did you even in the inmost sessions of thought, consign them, as you ought logically to do, as you ought if you are sincere in that creed to do, to the unending anguish of that hell which you teach ? Or does your heart, your conscience, your sense of justice, your love of Christ, your faith in God, your belief in Him of whom you sing every Sunday that His mercy is everlasting, rise in revolt against your nominal profession then ? You can bear to think of them, as you can bear to think of your- ii2 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. self suffering, as they never did on earth, the aching pang of God's revealing light, the willing agony of His remedial fire. We should desire, we should even pray for that the natural conse- quence of our own alienation meant not to torment us, but to perfect But an arbitrary in- fliction a burning torment an endless agony a material hell of worm and flame a doom to everlasting sin ; x and all this with no prospect 1 Mark iii. 29. "All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies "vuherewithsoever they shall blaspheme : but he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal sin " (such is the true reading, djuapTT^aror, X.B.L. djuaprfay, C. D. not Kpiffecas). 1. Now " hath never forgiveness," is OVK ex t &pe(np els rov aloSva, and it is superfluous to tell scholars that ej's rbv aloava no more necessarily implies endlessness than "?W does. (SeeExcursusp.197, on altavios.) 2. Our Lord states with immense plainness, and with no reserva- tion, the possible ultimate remission of every sin and blasphemy except one. 3. What that one is no human being has ever been able to decide. 4. Even of that one it is only said (in the parallel passage, Matt. xii. 32) that it shall not be remitted to him "either in this or in the future age or ' dispensation' (aluvi)." I make no comments, but merelyask allmentoweigh these passages. IV.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED? 113 of amendment, with no hope of relief the soul's transgressions of a few brief hours of struggling, tempted life followed by billions of millenniums in scorching fire and all this meant, not to correct but to harden ; not to amend, but to torture and degrade : did you believe in that for those whom you have loved ? Again, I say, God forbid : again, I say, I fling from me with abhorrence such a creed as that ! Let every Pharisee, if he will, be angry with me let every dogmatist anathematise but that I cannot, and do not believe. Scripture will not let me ; my conscience, my reason, my faith in Christ, the voice of the Spirit within my soul, will not let me ; God will not let me ! What I do believe is this, that for every wilful sin which we commit, unless it be repented of, we shall, as we do, feel the heavy and merciful wrath of God, until He have purged the vile dross from us, and made us as the fine gold for Himself. But what ? Shall nature fill the hollows of her coarse rough flints with purple amethyst; shall she, out of I 114 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. the grimy coal, over which the shivering beggar warms himself, form the diamond that trembles on the forehead of a queen ; shall even man take the cast-off slag and worthless rubble of the furnace and educe from it his most glowing and lustrous dyes and shall God not be able to make 'anything of His ruined souls? And what? shall we be able to pity and to love those that hate us ; and to bless those who curse us ; and to forgive those who have wronged us ; shall we be willing to pardon our prodigals and to call them home ; and shall God not be willing (and if willing who shall dare to say that He is not able?) beyond the grave? "Shall mortal man be more just than God ? Shall man be more just than his Maker ? " We made them not ; they are not people of our pasture, or sheep of our hands ; yet if we can feel for sinners a yearning love, a trembling pity ; and if that love and pity springs from all that is holiest and most Christlike in our souls; and if it would be wholly impossible for iv.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED? 115 any wretch among us to be so remorseless as to doom his deadliest enemy to an endless vengeance, are we to believe this of God ? to believe that He who planted mercy in us is merciless, and that He will " hold us up with one hand and torment us with the other," who knoweth our frame, and remembereth that we are but dust ? Or shall we not rather believe, as the wise woman of Tekoah said to David three thousand years ago, "We must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground ; and God does not take away life, but devises devices that the wanderer may not for ever be expelled from Him." 1 Yes, where sin aboundeth grace shall much more abound. 2 If God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the fourth generation of them that hate Him, He showeth mercy, not only unto thousands, as our version has it, but "unto 1 2 Sam. xiv. 14 (see the commentaries on this passage). 9 Rom. v. 20. I 2 n6 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. the thousandth and thousandth generation " l of them that love Him, and keep His command- ments ; and so always, in God's promises, though not in man's systems, in God's revelations though not in man's beliefs, there is a vast overbalance of mercy above wrath. Ay, my brethren, fear not ; have faith in God ; think noble things of God ; be sure that trust in the righteous God means the ultimate triumph of good over evil ; be sure that the cross of Christ, Christ's infinite atonement, Christ's plenteous redemption, means, for all who do not utterly extinguish within their own souls the glimmering wick of love to God, 2 the conversion of earth's sinners, far off it may be, but at last, far off, at last, into God's saints. 1 Such is the true meaning of Ex. xx. 6, as the late Mr. Erskine of Linlathen was so fond of pointing out. The Hebrew is D*S/JO with which must be understood DHl" 5 ?. 2 In Matt. xxv. 8, the true rendering is, not "our lamps are gone out," but are going out are being quenched (at \a/jLird$es rfrtaij' iv.] ARE THERE FEW THAT BE SAVED? 117 " I say to thee, do thou repeat To the first man thou mayest meet In lane, highway, or open street, " That he, and we, and all men move Under a canopy of love As broad as the blue sky above. " And, ere thou leave him, say thou this, Yet one word more, they only miss The winning of that final bliss, " Who will not count it true, that love, Blessing, not cursing, rules above And that in it we live and move. " And one thing further make him know, That to believe these things are so, This firm faith never to forego, " Despite of all that seems at strife With blessing all with curses rife That this is blessing this is life ! " (ARCHBISHOP TRENCH.) SERMON V. 1 EARTHLY AND FUTURE CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. ROM. vi. i. ' ' What shall we say then ? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound ? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein ? " WE are, my brethren, poor blind creatures at the best ; so one-sided, so imperfect, so liable to error, so easily led astray by the pride which apes humility so apt to be puffed up by the igno- rance which takes itself for knowledge that we constantly turn into banes what God intended as our richest boons, and store the very manna of His love in such earthen vessels of frailty and presumption, that, in our keeping, it breeds worms 1 Preached in Westminster Abbey, Nov. 28, 1877. SER. v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 119 and grows corrupt. And hence even God's most holy truths become liable to dreadful perversions. It was so in the first ages when there were un- godly men who turned the grace of God into lasciviousness. 1 It was so again when Luther at the Reformation shook down the hollow structure of tradition which men had accepted as their faith. It may be so when we open to the despair of the guilty even in the Valley of Achor a door of hope, and ask men to take nobler and truer views of God than those which run counter to what the Scriptures teach us of His everlasting mercy ; 2 of His purpose in punishment being not to torture but to redeem ; 3 of the day when Christ shall have triumphed for ever, and God shall be all in all. 4 I did not seek the topic, nor shall I pursue it ; but when it came in the ordinary course of our meditations I could not but strive to remove thoughts which, as I know, goad 1 Jude 4. 2 Ps. c. 5. 3 Heb. xii 10. 4 vdvra ti> iraffi, "All things in all men." I Cor. xv. 28. 120 ETERNAL HOPE. [SRR. some men into wretchlessness and infidelity, and embitter the hearts of others with a narrow, railing, Pharisaic dogmatism, full of cursing bitter- ness against all who presume to differ from itself. But there are deeper reasons than these for preaching what we believe to be the truth on this dim subject The virtue which has no better basis than fear of Hell is no virtue at all. No virtue is in the least degree virtuous which springs only from the hope of profit or the fear of punishment. Although, for instance, honesty is the best policy, yet, as was truly said by Arch- bishop Whately, " The man who is honest be- cause it is the best policy is no better than a rogue." Would you think much of one who only did not commit murder because of the hangman ? or was only not a scoundrel from fear of being found out ? Fear may create the enforced obedi- ence of the slave : love only can win the devotion of the child ; and that is why God hath not sent to us who know the truth and whom the truth v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 121 has made free l the spirit of fear and of bondage, but of love, and of power, and of a sound mind. 2 And this love is the sole eternal basis of holiness. To preach that God willeth all men to be saved that is Gospel truth ; to preach that it is not the love of Christ, but the fear of hell which con- straineth us that is the soul-destroying error. What was the sum of the teaching of our Blessed Lord ? was it " turn or burn " ? or was it " Come unto Me, and I will give you rest " ? Was it hell- fire that He preached to the rejoicing multitudes as He sat among the lilies above the silver lake ? or was it the beatitudes of the meek and the merciful, and about a Father who maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust ? I know that He said with awful solemnity, " If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out ; if thy hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee : it is better for thee to enter into life blind, or maimed, than, having two 1 John viii. 32. * 2 Tim. i. 7. 122 ETERNAL HOPE. [SFR. eyes or two hands, to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire, where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." But what childish vanity and arrogance is it to quote such texts without knowing any of the laws of their mean- ing or their interpretation ! It is just as childish as it is to quote the words, "This is My body," and hold them to be decisive in proof of tran- substantiation ; or to quote " them He did pre- destinate" as decisive in proof of Calvinism. I claim to speak with at least as much authority as any one else when I say that there is not a word here about that which neither the Roman nor the Anglican Church requires us to believe viz., an irreversible doom at death, for all sinners, to endless torments. 1 The language of our Blessed Lord and Master is no more literal in the second half of the verse than in the first. We have 1 The Catech. Trident., 1. 6, qu. 3, uses language which seems to imply endless torments for some ; but I mainly allude to the doctrine of Purgatory. v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 123 no more right to take the first half metaphori- cally and the second literally, than the youthful Origen had to take the first half literally and the second metaphorically. Our Lord speaks, as He did habitually and designedly, in meta- phors and parables; and His metaphors meant this awful truth that the most painful physical agony and the worst physical mutilation is a less anguish and a more trivial loss than that shame and corruption which are the inevitable consequence of sin the flame of remorse which will always burn so long as sin is practised; the worm of conscience, which will always gnaw until it is forgiven. 1 Such a warning has no affinity with that dogmatic and damnatory hatred which says, " Hold this opinion or you will find yourself in a 1 I have already spoken of the sole sense in which the Jews understood the word Gehenna. The expression, " quenchless fire," for the phrase "that never shall be quenched " is a simple mistrans- lation is taken from Is. Ixvi. 24, and is as purely a figure of speech, as it is there, or as it is in Homer's Iliad, xvi. 123, and many other passages. The Gospel, like the law, speaks, as the Talmudic pro- verb so wisely says, " in the tongue of the sons of men." 124 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. lake of inextinguishable fire." What our Saviour taught what, thank God, we all agree in teaching, is this : ' Resist the evil which is in you, for it is your curse and ruin ; and until you have learnt to forsake and hate it, you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. Resist it because God hates it ; because God loves you ; because He desires to save you from it and from its deadly consequences. Resist it because it was to seek the lost that I came, and to redeem them that I died.' That is true, that is divine teaching. " So the All-Great is the All-Loving too, So through the thunder comes a human voice, Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here ; Face my hands fashioned, see it in myself; Thou hast no force, nor canst conceive of mine ; But love I gave thee, with myself to love, And thou must love me who have died for thee.' " 2. That then, my brethren, is the true motive for all holiness Christ's redemption God's love. We are dead with Christ unto sin ; we live to God unto righteousness. 1 And God created us, not to 1 Rom. vi. 16. v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 125 destroy, not to torment, not to take vengeance on us, but to save, and to save us to the uttermost, from sin, from corruption, from that true Gehenna which is not a burning prison, but a polluted heart. Alienation from God ; hatred of truth ; hatred of purity ; a hard, bitter, railing, loveless spirit ; mean, base, selfish, sensual desires ; these are the elements of hell : and as long as any man, be he Pharisee or be he publican, is given to these, so long he will be made to feel with the evil spirit, ' ' Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell, And in the lowest deep a lower deep, Still gaping to devour me, opens wide, To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven." Hell is a temper, not a place. So long as we are evil, and impure, and unloving, so long where we are is hell, and where hell is there we must be ; and when all the world dissolves, and every creature is purified, whom God's love can purify, then " all places shall be hell that are 126 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. not heaven." * How long, how far, \ve in our pride and obduracy and corruption may harden ourselves, even beyond the grave, against the con- straining love of God, we know not, and none knows ; but so long as we continue to do this, it is not God who is kindling for us His avenging tortures, but we who by our own impenitence are defeating His infinite purposes and destroying and ruining ourselves. Good men, as I have said, may and do hold this doctrine of endless torture, with pity and fear and trembling, and awful sub- mission; but let those men suspect their own hearts and their own purposes to whom so terrible a dogma terrible even if it be true is so dear, 1 These lines from Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, " Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place ; but where we are is hell, And where hell is there we must ever be. And, to be short, when all this world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell which are not heaven," bear a curious, though certainly accidental, resemblance to the view s of Scotus Erigena (see p. 170), except that they do not so fully admit the d.iroKa.Tdtna.ai'i ir v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 127 and precious, and comforting, that they are quite " distressed " at the thought of losing it, and never seem so happy as when they are denouncing it on others. They bid me tremble ; but it is not I who tremble. When I stand before the bar of my Maker, a humble and penitent sinner; when I cry that my sins may be covered with the white robe of my Saviour's merits, as the snow falls upon a miry world ; when I admit before Him, with shame and sorrow, that my very tears want washing, and my repentance needs to be repented of : yet not on this account shall I fear. Man may curse Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naama- thite, and all their company may protest but Thou, O Father, wilt not be angry with Thy child because he thought and tried to bid others think just and noble things of thee : Thou, O Saviour, wilt not frown at him because he trusted in the nfmitude of Thy compassion: and Thou, O Holy Spirit, whose image is the soft stealing of the dew 128 ETERNAL HOPE. [snt. and the golden hovering of the dove, wilt know that if he erred it was because he fixed his eyes, not on the glaring and baleful meteors of anathe- matising orthodoxy, but on the star 'of Bethlehem and the clouds that begin to shine about the coming of the Lord ; and that if perchance he erred the light which led astray was light from heaven. No ! it is not I who tremble. Let the zeal of a damnatory religion tremble ! Let those tremble who would turn the Gospel of salvation for most men into a threat of doom ! Let those tremble who are indignant at the thoughts which see room for hope beyond the grave ! If indeed they be in the right, still their tenet is one so harrowing that it should be uttered only as the true saints who believed it have uttered it, with tears, and trembling pity, and bated breath. But if there be one thing which He must loathe whose name is Love, it is the hallelujahs of exultant anathema, and the thinly-disguised hate which rages and v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIX. 129 protests with so fierce an ignorance against a trust in Mercy founded only on these two great doc- trines (which they say they own) the doctrine of Christ's infinite redemption ; the doctrine of God's boundless love. 1 3. But I have now said all that it seems my duty to say on this subject. I thank God from my heart that what I believe to be His truth, taught us by His own word, confirmed in us by His own Spirit, has proved a source of relief and comfort to thousands of hearts all over England ; and I do not think it necessary to enter on the endless task of either repudiating misrepresentations or deigning to take notice of abuse. My object to-day is a wholly different one. It is to leave all those without excuse who, on the grounds of a 1 I am alluding, not to humble and holy Christians who hold such opinions, but to men like the preacher described by Dr. Guthrie, who "declared that he had a bad opinion of the con- dition of those who did not rejoice that God's enemies were destroyed without remedy. I thought I saw the man stamping with his foot, and putting out the smoking flax. It was a horrible caricature of the Gospel." Life, p. 511. K I 3 3 ETERNAL HOPE. [SF.R. possible hope beyond the grave, try to make light of sin. And therefore, my brethren, and above all, you who are young and ignorant, I earnestly ask your whole attention while I rede you beware how you wrest God's mercy to your own ruin. Have any of you said, ' Because we may never cease to hope, therefore we may go on in sin ' ? Ah, if you have said that, you must indeed be in a gall of bitterness and a bond of iniquity from which it is clear that no horrible dread of an endless hell has saved you ! Dare any one, who professes and calls him- self a Christian, say in his heart, " Let us con- tinue in sin, that grace may abound " ? l Will he can he dare to turn the grace of our God into lasciviousness ? 2 to count the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified an unholy thing? 3 to say, 'Because God loves me, there- fore I will do that which He hates; because Christ died for me, therefore deliberately, unblushingly 1 Rom. vi. I. 2 Jude iv. 8 Heb. x. 29. CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 131 I will crucify Him afresh, and put Him to an open shame ? l Because it is His long-suffering which calls me to repentance, 2 therefore He shall wait my time ? ' My brethren, there are two kinds of sin wilful sin and 'willing sin. Wilful sin is that into which, because of the frailty of our nature, because of the strength of passion and temptation, not loving, but loathing it not seeking, but resisting it not acquiescing in, but fighting and struggling against it, we all some- times fall. This is the struggle in which God's Spirit striveth with our spirit, and out of which we humbly believe and hope that God will, at the last, grant unto us victory and for- giveness. But there is another kind of sin, far deadlier, far more heinous, far more incurable, it is willing sin. It is when we are content with sin ; when we have sold ourselves to sin ; when we no longer fight against sin ; when we mean to continue in sin. That is the darkest, lowest, 1 Ileb. vi. 6. 2 I Pet iii. 20. K 2 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. deadliest, most irredeemable abysm of sin ; and it is well that the fooiish or guilty soul should know that on it, if it have sunk to this, has been already executed, self-executed the dread mandate, " In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die." l By that curse was not meant a physical, but a spiritual death. The man who is sold under sin is dead, morally dead, spiritually dead ; and such a man is a ghost, far more awful than the soul which was once in a dead body, for he is a body bearing about with him a dead soul. Better, far, far better for him to have cut off the right hand, or plucked out the right eye, than to have been cast as he has been, now in his lifetime and as he will be cast until he repent, even beyond the grave into that Gehenna of aeonian fire ! It shall purify him, God 1 It is astonishing that this text should be quoted as though it aad the very slightest bearing on this subject. In what sense is any one more puilty of preaching the devil's falsehood " Ye shall not die," by urging that there may be a hope beyond the grave, than we all are by urging that there is a hope on this side the grave ? Neither logic, nor charity, nor common sense have any share in such arguments. CONSEQUENCES OF SIX. grant, in due time; but oh! it shall agonise, because he has made himself, as yet, incapable of any other redemption. So that if any youth have wickedly thought in his heart that God is even such an one as himself that he may break with impunity God's awful commandments, that he may indulge with impunity his own evil lusts, let him recall the sad experience of Solomon, which he heard this morning, " Walk in the ways of thine heart and in the sight of thine eyes : but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment ; " l let him remember the stern warning of Isaiah, "Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil ; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness ; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Therefore as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust : because they have cast away the law of the Lord of Hosts, 1 Keel. xi. 9. 134 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel." * I. For first, my brethren, let us all learn that the consequences of sin are inevitable; in other words, that punishment is but ' the stream of consequence flowing on unchecked.' There is in human nature an element of the gambler, willing to take the chances of things ; willing to run a risk if the issue be uncertain. There is no such element here. The punishment of sin is certain. All Scripture tells us so. " The soul that sinneth, it shall die." 2 " Be sure your sin will find you out." 3 " Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished." 4 " The way of transgressors is hard." 5 All the world's proverbs tell us so. " Reckless youth, rueful age." " As he has made his bed, so he must lie in it." " He who will not be ruled by the rudder, must be ruled by the rock." 1 Is. v. 24. - Ezek. xviii. 4. 3 N um l). xxxii. 23. 4 Prov. xi. 21. 5 Prov. xiii. 15. v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 135 Even Satan himself would not deny it. In the old legend of Dr. Faustus, when he bids the devil lay aside his devilish propensity to lying, and tell the truth, the devil answers, " The world does me injustice to tax me with lies. Let me ask their conscience if I have ever deceived them into believing that a bad action was a good one." Even bad men admit it. They would gladly preach, if they could, that sin is but " a soft in- firmity in the blood, not to be too severely visited ; " but the facts are too fatally against them, and those facts say, with unglosing voice, " If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy." 1 So that you see, on the testimony alike of the deceived and the deceiver, the punishment of sin is (first) inevitable. II. Notice, too, secondly, that the punishment of sin is impartial. There is a form of self-deception common to all of us, and especially in youth, by 1 I Cor. iii. 17. 136 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. which we admit the general law, but try to shirk its personal, individual application. It is the old, old story of Eden over again, in the case of every one of us ; the serpent, creeping up to us all glitter and fascination, all dulcet flattery and sinuous glide, and whispering, ' See the fruit how fair it is ; how much to be desired ; be as a god knowing good and evil ; thou shalt not surely die ; ' and so the boy and the youth, healthy, and bright, and gay, and even, in his folly, the grown man, believes that it shall not be so with him ; that he will repent in time ; that he is the darling of Provi- dence, he the favourite of Heaven, he the one who may sin and shall not suffer. If others handle pitch they shall be defiled ; if others take fire into their bosom, they shall be burned j 1 but God will indulge him; and the very spirits of evil laugh at each one going as an ox to the slaughter, whom they dupe into the fancy that out of special favour to him "this adamantine chain of moral gravita- 1 Prov. vi. 27. v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 137 tion, more lasting and binding than that by which the stars are held in their spheres, will be snapped ; that sin for him will change its nature," 1 and at his approach the Gehenna of punishment be trans- formed into a garden of delight. Is it so ? Has there been any human being yet, since time began, however noble, however beautiful, however gifted, however bright with genius or radiant with fasci- nation, who has sinned with impunity? Ah, no ! God is no respecter of persons. Fire burns and water drowns, whether the sufferer be a worthless villain, or a fair and gentle child ; and so the moral law works, whether the sinner be a " David or a Judas, whether he be publican or priest." In the physical world there is no forgiveness of sins. Sin and punishment, as Plato said, walk this world with their heads tied together ; and the rivet that links their iron link is a rivet of adamant. ' A man who cannot swim might as well walk into a river, 1 Archd. Hare. ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. and hope it will not drown, as a man, seeing judg- ment and not mercy denounced on willing sin, hope that it will turn out to be mercy and not judgment, and so defy God's law.' l Will he escape ? O boy, O man, wilt thou escape ? Ah no ! if you choose sin you will meet with retribu- tion ; and experience, in your own person, the lex talionis of offended nature, " eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe." 2 III. You see then that the punishment of sin is inevitable, and is impartial, and now see why it is so. It is so because the punishment of sin is not an arbitrary interference, but a necessary law. I do not mean that God never directly interferes. He does. We see it daily in the history of crime. We see it in strange detections ; in providential accidents ; in the infatuations of penal stupidity shown by able men bent on concealed wickedness. 1 Irving. * Ex. xxi. 24. v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 139 But leaving out of account these obvious visitations in which " God's terrible and fiery ringer Shrivels the falsehood from the souls of men," there is generally a frightful resemblance which shows that the penalty is a genuine child of the transgression. We receive the things that we have done. There is a dreadful coercion in our own ini- quities ; an inevitable congruity between the deed and its consequences ; an awful germ of identity in the seed and in the fruit. We recognise the sown wind in the harvest whirlwind. 1 We feel that it is we who have winged the very arrows that eat into our heart like fire. It needs no gathered lightning, no divine intervention, no miraculous message, to avenge in us God's violated laws. They avenge themselves. You may laugh at Bibles, sneer at clergymen, keep away from churches, and yet your sin, coming after you with leaden footstep, and gathering form, and towering over you, smites you 1 Hos. viii. 7. 140 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. at last with the iron hand of its own revenge. I cannot pretend to work out now the whole vast scheme of this sacred Nemesis, or read for you, on the wall of guilty hearts, this Mene, Mene, Tekel, Peres of reddening doom. It would need a picture such as when " Some great painter dips His pencil in the hues of earthquake and eclipse " it would need a voice like that which he who saw the Apocalypse heard cry in the heaven aloud " Woe to the inhabiters of earth." But for no one shall say that he went unwarned ; no one shall shield himself under the plea that sin was robbed, for him, of one true element of awfulness, I will tell you of one or two ways in which, if God's love avail not, His terrors may at least leave us in no doubt as to what He hates. Sleep under it you who will, but if your souls be really in earnest in inquiring about this matter I will try for a few moments to accentuate for you some syllables of that Voice behind thee saying, " This v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 141 is the way, walk ye in it," when ye turn aside to the right hand or to the left. IV. Well, then, take disease as one form of the working of this inevitable law. Not always of course the direct result of sin, yet how much of it is directly due to dirt, neglect, folly, ignorance, the infected blood, the inherited instincts of this sad world ? But are there not some diseases, and those of the most terrible which earth knows, which do spring directly, immediately, exclusively, undeniably from violations of God's law ? Is not madness, very often, such a disease ? Is there not, at this moment, many a miserable, degraded lunatic, who never would have been such but for repeated transgressions of God's known will ? Is there not again in the very life-blood of mil- lions an hereditary taint, blighting their health poisoning as with a fury's breath the flower of their happiness breaking out afresh in new generations which has its sole source and origin in uncleanness ? 142 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. Is there not, too, an executioner of justice told off to wait upon drunkenness which would cease to exist if drunkenness ceased to exist ; which is God's warning against that fearful intemperance against which senates will not fight, and they who love their fellows fight as yet in vain ? Have you ever seen if not, may you never see ! a young man suffering from delirium tremens ? Have you heard him describe its horrors, horrors such as not even Dante imagined in the most harrowing scenes of his Inferno " the blood-red suffusion before the eyes quenched suddenly in darkness the myriads of burning, whirling rings of concentric fire millions of foul insects seem- ing to weave their damp, soft webs about the face the bloated, hideous, ever-changing faces of their visions the eyes that glare from wall to roof the feeling as if a man were falling, falling, falling, falling, endlessly, into a fathomless abyss." Why is all this ? Because God inflicts it on man ? No, but because man inflicts it on him- v.] CONSEQUENCES CF SIX. 143 self; and the God who loves us, wishing us to see how drunkenness blasts, and scathes, and debases, and imbrutes, to save men from all this horrible stain, and agony, and shame, has attached this law to the abuse of intoxicating drinks, exactly as, to save us from handling fire, He causes fire to burn. Does God interfere ? No, but He says, O my son whom I have made, this is the signboard of thy tippling-house, this is the goal to which Intemperance leads ; as thou lovest Me, as thou lovest thine own soul, cut off thy right hand, pluck out thy right eye; it is better for thee to enter into life blind or maimed rather than cast thyself into this Gehenna of seonian fire this depth of disgrace and of corruption where the worm of the drunkard dieth not, and his fire is not quenched. V. Or take any one, not of the physical, but of the moral workings of this law of punishment. Read with me another syllable of this handwriting upon the wall. Take Fear, for instance. You 144 ETERNAL HOPE. have heard of haunted houses : have you ever heard of haunted men ? Are there any here who are groaning under the burden of undetected sin ? If so will they not recognise themselves as suffer- ing this Nemesis of fear ? As there are some men whose sins are open, going before to judgment marshalling them in undisguised array to the very judgment-seat so there are some men whose sins follow after. There are men everywhere there are probably men here now who ever, as they walk through life, hear footsteps behind them ; for whom "the earth is made of glass," on whom the stars seem to look down as spies ; men whose pulses shake at every sudden ring of the door- bell whose faces blanch if they be suddenly accosted who tremble if a steady gaze be fixed upon them. Have not such men, abject in the dismay and weakness to which sin has reduced them thousands of times betrayed themselves by their own unreasonable fears, and by imagining that their sin was being spoken of, when some- v.j CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. thing quite different was being spoken of ? I think it is the ancient writer Plutarch, in his re- markable pamphlet " On the Delayed Vengeance of Deity," who tells how a youth, on being reproached for his cruelty in fiercely wringing the necks of some young birds, betrayed his hideous crime by exclaiming, " It was their own fault : why did they keep twittering at me ' Parricide, Parricide ! ' ' Take the life even of David. After he had sent that fatal letter to Joab about Uriah do you think that he ever had a moment's peace afterwards ? \Vas not his own servant his master now, because he knew his guilty secret ? And if there be one here who has done deeds which he would give worlds to have left undone ; about whose roof is heard 'the flapping of unclean wings'; who never again, in this world, shall sleep the sleep of the innocent ; for whom the " furies have taken their seats upon the midnight pillow," on whose breast, through the dark hours, ill dreams ride heavily in the shape of his deadliest sin ; will such L 146 ETERNAL HOPE. [SEK. as these tell you that they were lucky not to have been caught ? happy in that they were not found out ? fortunate in that no stroke of detection or punishment arrested them before fruition, and in mid career ? Achan concealed his theft ; never spent his wedge of gold ; never wore his Babylonish garment ; yet, when discovery crept nearer and nearer to him, and at last touched him ; when the lot fell and the tribe of Judah was taken ; and the lot fell again, and the family of the Zarhites was taken ; and the lot fell again, and the household of Zabdi was taken ; and the lot fell once more, and Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, was taken, and was stoned, and burned, he, and his family, with the accursed stolen thing, in the valley of Achor, did not Joshua indicate to him that detection might be a blessed thing ? Did not he too, as I have done, open in the valley of Achor a door of hope, when he said to the v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIN 147 exposed criminal, " My son, give, I pray thee, glory to the Lord God of Israel ; and tell me now what thou hast done ; hide it not from me " ? And would not Achan too have cause to say, " Minds which verily repent Are burdened with impunity And comforted by chastisement ; That punishment's the best to bear That follows soonest on the sin, And guilt's a game where losers fare Better than those who seem to win." l VI. But you will say, " There are many sins whose commission involves no great fear." Yes, truly ; but if the soul have any life left in it, when one ray of God's eternity shines into it, shame and the agonising sense of lost worth and self-loathing comes withal. When our first parents had tasted the fruit, then their eyes were miserably opened. " Innocence, that as a veil Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone, Just confidence, and native righteousness, And honour from about them, naked, left To guilty shame." 2 1 Coventry Patmore. 2 Milton, Paradise Lost. L 2. U8 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. Ah, my brethren, have none of you, even very early, felt the working of this law? Have you known but for one hour what it is to be utterly miserably, intolerably ashamed of yourself? If so, you, too, have been in that Gehenna of aeonian fire of which your Saviour speaks. It is the glare of illumina- tion which the conscience flings over the soul after a deed of darkness. It is the revulsion of feeling on which we did not calculate when we have done with the sin, but the sin has not done with us. It is the little grain of conscience, within the very worst of us, which makes forbidden pleasures sour. It is the fact that none of us can be quite wicked enough really to enjoy wickedness. It is the aching crave after the brief intoxi- cation. It is the Dead Sea apple shrivelling into hideousness the moment it has been tasted. It is the horror of the murderer when his passion of revenge is spent, and the cold grey dawn reveals the face of his murdered victim. It is the waking of the famished wretch who v.l CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 149 has dreamt of food and water, and he wakes, and lo ! he is sick of hunger and scorched with thirst. It is the cry from ten thousand biographies of those who have sinned and suffered : " When I received this volume small My years were barely seventeen. When it was hoped I should be all Which once, alas ! I might have been. " And now my years are thirty-five; And every mother hopes her lamb, And every happy child alive, May never be what I now am 1 " l So, my brethren, you see, the very youngest of you, that, if you choose sin you must have sin as your companion; sin in her own hideous presence, and with her the death which ever dogs her footstep, and notches against her his arrow en the string. I am not even pretending to show you all the workings of that inevitable, impartial law which we, in our loneliness and alienation, call 1 Lines written by Hartley Coleridge in his Bible. i5o ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. the heavy wrath of God. It is but as if I plucked one leaf and showed it you as a specimen of the boundless forest ; it is but as if I showed you one little wave, and told you that a whole ocean was be- hind. But I will only ask you to glance at one more feature of this law. There shall be (let us suppose it) no intervention ; no sickness ; no detection ; no shame even ; no fear ; no outward and visible punishment of any kind. Conscience shall, for a time, be dead ; life shall, for years, be prosperous. Does sin escape then ? Is the sinner happy then ? Ah no ! he is worst off then. " Nulla poena, quanta pcena!" 1 This is God's worst, severest punishment. "Ephraim is joined to idols ! " What then ? Arrest him as with the punishment of a dear and pleasant child ? Make him sick with smiting him into penitence ? Ah, no ! worse than that let him alone ; 2 blind his eyes ; put the scourge in his own hand ; let him strut to his confusion ; let the guilt which he has chosen come into his bowels 1 Augustine. 2 Hos. iv. 17. v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 151 like water and like oil into his bones ; let sin be the deadliest executioner, the most merciless avenger of sin. Let the acute pang become the chronic malady. Let the thought become the wish, and the wish the act, and the act the habit. Let the solitary become the frequent, the frequent the incessant, the incessant the all-but-necessary, all- but-inevitable transgression. Let crime awake him. Let the serpent's egg become a cockatrice, and its seed a fiery flying serpent. Let hatred become murder ; let ambition become conspiracy ; let greed become theft and swindling : let lust become some deadly impurity. Ah ! when God sends forth a besetting sin a guilty habit to be His executioner, the case is most awful, most hopeless then. God only, by Christ's redemption, can save from the body of that death ! My brethren, will you now say that " I will go on in sin, and it does not matter ?" Ah ! but, most terribly and awfully, it does matter ! You may be saved indeed, at last, if God will ; saved, not from 152 ETERNAL HOPE. [SF.R. Him and His wrath, but from yourself and your own self-destruction ; but even then there is a sense in which it may be awfully true that our millenniums depend upon our moments; and though God's infinite love may be able to save you, yet, alas ! it may only be as a brand is plucked, half-consumed, out of the burning ; " as a shepherd tears out of the mouth of a lion two legs and the piece of an ear ! " l Do not think that repentance is an easy thing, and be quite sure of this, that the longer it is delayed the less easy does it become, and the more terrible are the consequences both here and hereafter which the delay involves. " A spotless child sleeps on the flowering moss ; 'Tis well for him ; but if a guilty man, Envying such slumber, should desire to put His guilt away, can he return to rest At once by lying there ? Our sires knew well The fitting course for such : dark cells, dim lamps, A stone floor one may writhe on like a worm, No mossy pillow blue with violets." 3 1 Amos. iii. 12. " Browning's Paracelsus. v.] CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. 153 The path of repentance may never be closed to us ; so I believe the Catholic Church of Christ has in most ages taught ; but O how hard may that path of repentance be ! over what bleeding flints ; through what a scorch of fiery swords ; through what deep shame, what dread corruption, what pain of body, what misery of remorse, what agony of soul ! O ! were it not better to cut off the right hand, and pluck out the right eye, than go of our own choice into the Gehenna of aeonian fire, here and hereafter, such as I believe that Christ meant, and such as I have now in part only in shadow and in outline described ? God is the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgres- sion and sin, and yet by no means clearing the guilty. Why ? Because He loves us not ? Not so, for " God's severity is all love " ; but because sin is the one deadly enemy which He must destroy in us, lest it destroy us, and we, with it. 154 ETERNAL HOPE. [SER. v. destroy ourselves; He must destroy it for our sakes, because, as you will hear just now in glorious music, " The greatness of His mercy reacheth unto the heavens, And His truth unto the clouds." BRIEF SKETCH OF ESCHATOLOGICAL OPINIONS IN THE CHURCH. THE Scriptures reveal indeed a future state of retribution, but are when competently interpreted in the light of modern criticism absolutely silent as to " endless torture " ; or, if this be not con- ceded, they at least seem to express with the utmost possible plainness a view of Final Restitu- tion which cannot be reconciled with the ultimate and all-but-universal perpetuity of sin. Hence the language of the Fathers, who freely adopted both sets of phrases, is frequently self-contradictory. In the earliest of them Justin Martyr and Ire- naeus are some well-known passages which seem clearly to imply either the ultimate redemption or the total destruction of sinners ; and though 156 ETERNAL HOPE. they also use language which may be inter- preted in accordance with a belief in endless torments, it is by no means clear that the phrases they adopt may not be meant in the same sense in which we believe them also to be used in Scripture. It was in answer to the bitter taunt of Celsus, that the God of the Christians kindled a fire in which all except Christians should be burned, that Origen first argued that the fire should possess a purifying quality (KaOdpaiov} for all those who had in themselves any materials for it to consume ; any wood, hay, stubble in their thoughts and theo- logical systems. All, he said, even Peter and Paul, must pass through this fire (Is. xliii. 2), and ordi- nary sinners must remain in it till purged. It is in fact a baptism of fire, at the second resurrection, for those who had not received effectually the baptism of the Spirit (FTept apx&v, i. 6, C. Cels. vi. 26 ; Horn, in Psalm iii. i; in Jerem. ii. 3; in Ezek. i. 13). It was not a material fire, but self-kindled, like an internal fever. It was in fact remorse for ORIGEN AND CLEMENS. 157 remembered sin, a " figurative representation of the moral process by which restoration shall be effected." The English Church, which condemned in Article 22 the "Romish" doctrine of Purgatory, never condemned these merciful opinions, which have always been more or less prevalent in the Greek Church. Clemens of Alexandria (Strom, vii. 6) had already spoken of the fire as a sort of spiritual fire (i>vp (frpoi'ipov), which does not burn the flesh, but purifies the soul. And though he does not express himself with perfect distinctness, yet the whole drift of his remarks proves that he could not have held an unmitigated doctrine of endless punishment, but only of a punishment which would necessarily cease when its remedial object was attained (see Baur, Dogmengeschichite, i. 718). And Clemens, like Origen, seems to imply an ultimate amendment of every evil nature (Strom. \. 17, 86; vii. 2; Pcedag. i. 8 10) in something of the same spirit as the modern poet 158 ETERNAL HOPE. " O wad ye taka thocht and men', Ye aiblins might, I dinna ken, Still hae a stake ; I'm loath to think upon yon den E'en for your sake." 1 Satan, in the opinion of Origen, is " the last enemy ; " but his " destruction " means that he ceases to be an enemy. God, he says, made no being irreclaimable, but all for a good purpose, and creatures thus produced cannot be annihilated. The final reconciliation will be universal. (On this esoteric doctrine of restitution see Orig. De Princip. 1 It is, I think, demonstrable that this opinion of the salva- bility of devils (a question which I set aside as beyond our range) gave far deeper offence than the peculiar universalism of Origen as regards mankind (see Jer. adv. Pelag. i. 9). For the views of Clemens on the purifying intelligential fire, see Strom, vii. 6, ad fat. ; on the hope beyond the grave (e'irel fn.r]Sfls r&iros dpybs evirortas fov), id. iv. 6, 37 ; vi. f. 638, 639 ; on the intention of punishment as a benefit (irpbs rb xp^i ffL P- v } both collectively and individually to those who are punished, Padag. i. 8, passim, Strom, vii. 13, 14, 16, and a striking passage in the Fragm. in i Joh. (ed. Pott, p. 1009, cf. Theodoret In Ezech. vi. 6) ; on Christ's preaching to the dead, see Strom, vi. 6 (cf. Hermas. iii. 16). The remedial fire of the Alex- andrians, &c. (Trvp ifiov, KaBapffiov, autppovouv) differs from purgatory, because it is (i.) after the resurrection, and (ii.) not instead of Hell (Bishop Harold Browne, Articles, pp. 498 450). GREGORY OF NYSSA. 159 iii. 6, 6 ; i. 6. 3 ; ii. 8, 4 8 ; c. Cels. vi. 26 ; Neander, ii. 437 ; Hagenbach, i. 242.) That these particular views have never been condemned by any decree of the Universal Church is certain. Neither the Fifth nor any other CEcumenical Council, nor even the " Home Synod " of A.D. 541, ever condemned the tenet of a hope for the lost even beyond the grave. (See Cave, Hist. Liter., p. 548 ; Hefele, Concilien-Geschichte, ii. 759 764; Dean Stanley, Essay on Church and State, pp. 137, 318; F. N. Oxenham, Letter on Everlasting Punishment, pp. 17 25.) The views of Gregory of Nyssa were (Or. cat. viii. ; and xxxv. and Uepl Vvxfjs, Opp. ii. 12 ; iii. 226 229, &c : ed. Paris, 1630), that the soul, having an affinity to God, must ultimately return to God ; and that the anguish it must suffer is necessarily caused during the separation of good from evil, not from any desire on God's part to torment. Hence all evil will ultimately disappear. Virtue is in this life the purification of the soul, and KTKRNAL HOPE. if during life it has not been cured from vice, it may be purified hereafter by the baptism of fire, and all things will at last serve God. All punish- ment is educational, purgatorial, remedial in its object. 1 The writings of this great Father are most important as proving the permissibility of these views. His authority stood deservedly high as a great and persecuted champion of the Nicene faith, and his orthodoxy was so unimpeachable that he was one of the most prominent figures at the Council of Constantinople, " his advice being chiefly relied upon in the most import- ant cases ; and therefore when it was thought necessary to make an explanatory confession of faith, especially in the Article of the Holy Ghost, the drawing it up was committed to his care, and this is the Constantinopolitan, or, as among us it is called, the Nicene Creed." 1 Cave, Lives of the Primitive Fathers, ii. ad Jin. See Niceph. Coll, xiii. 13. Even if Gregory did not (as Nicephorus asserts) draw up the changes and additions of the Nicene Creed, yet he occupied a most commanding position at the Council of Constantinople (Mohler ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA. 161 The traces of the same doctrine in Diodorus of Tarsus, Didymus of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nazianzus are slight, but (fxavavra a-vveToiaiv. When the latter speaks of one kind of fire as being annihilative, but adds, " unless it be more humane in Herzog, Encycl. s. v., quoting Cod. Theod. i. 63, Sozomen H.E. vii. 6, Socrates H.E. v. 8, and Gregory, Opp. Hi. 645). It is true that these additions occur in a work of Epiphanius several years before the First Council of Constantinople (De Broglie, L'giiu et V Empire Romain, v. 45 1 ), but Gregory's authority must have aided their acceptance, and therefore it must have been more than per- missible to accept the clauses about a future life in the sense which he attached to them a sense such as to include " the blessed hope that God's justice and mercy are not controlled by the powers of evil, that sin is not everlasting, and that in the world to come punish- ment will be corrective and not final, and will be ordered by a love and justice, the height and depths of which we cannot here fathom or comprehend" (Dean Stanley, Essays on Church and State, 318, &c.). No scholar will now revive the attempts of Germanus in the eighth century, and of Tillemont {Mem. ix. 561, scqq.) to regard as interpolations such passages as those to which I have referred. Vincenzo in his work quotes other passages of a different apparent tendency, but this is due to the varying character of the Scriptural evidence. Let those, at least, who in sheer ignorance impugn the Gospel of Eternal Hope, remember that it was openly preached by this canonised Saint and Bishop the "Father of Fathers " whcse writings were referred to by the Council of Ephesus as the great bulwark of the Church against heresy ! M i62 ETERNAL HOPE. to perceive even here the action of beneficence, and worthily of Him who punishes " (^>i\.avdpa)7r6Tepov Kal rov A:oXabvTO? eVai'&>?), it is clear that the great Patriarch of Constantinople he who earned the title of " The Theologian " leaves this an open question. (Or. xxxix. 19; xl. 36; xxx. 6, &c.) Even teachers who were in other respects opposed to Origen adopted this view, namely, Diodorus of Tarsus in his He pi Ot/covo/iia?, ana Theodore of Mopsuetia in his commentary on the Gospels. They grounded their objections to the popular doctrine upon the disproportionateness of endless punishment to the sins of a brief life ; upon the mercy of God ; and upon the impossi- bility of imagining that the wicked would be purposelessly raised from the dead only to be tormented, without any capacity for amendment. 1 1 The views of these great teachers may be found, as quoted by a Nestorian bishop, in Assemanni, Bibliotheca Orientalis, iii. 323 seqq., Photius, Bibl. Cod. 81. On the prevalence of this opinion both in the East and West see Neander, iv. 456, E. Tr. Hagenbach. i. 245 ; Haag, Hist, des Dogmes, ii. 342 ; Gieseler, i. 362, E. Tr. ST. ATHANASIUS. These opinions were indeed rejected by indi- vidual theologians, but (as I have pointed out in Sermon III., p. 85) in a tone which, because it springs from deeper knowledge, is far more sympa- thetic, and far more respectful, than that adopted by the most ignorant of modern controversialists. Thus, St. Athanasius who might have been supposed to have as keen an eye for heresy as any one so far from speaking angrily of Origen Origen the adamantine Origen the holy, the self- denying, the pre-eminently learned whom it is the fashion to place below St. Augustine, but who in every respect, except a power of rhetoric, was his superior speaks of him tenderly and admiringly as "the marvellous and indefatigable Origen" (6 Oav/jLaa-Tos Kal ^tXoTrovcoTaro?), 1 and in one passage only alludes with oblique and kindly disapproval to his opinion on the Restitution of all things. 2 1 De Com. essent. torn. i. p. 236. 2 Cave, Lives of the Primitive Fathers, i. 23. M 2 1 64 ETERNAL HOPE. St. Ambrose, though using the ordinary phra- seology in some places, distinctly states the doctrine of universal restitution (Comment, in Ps. xxxv. 15, cxix. 153; cf. Ambrosiaster in Ep. ad Eph. ii. iii.). St. Augustine admits that not only some, but very many (nonnulli immo quam plurimi) held this merciful view ; and although he devotes the twenty-first book of his De Civitate Dei to what he supposes to be a refutation of their opinion a refutation which however turns out, on exami- nation, to be nothing remotely resembling a refutation, and to be indeed little more than an assertion of his own interpretations of various texts calls them " our party of pity " (nostri miseri- cordes), and deals with them in perfect courtesy and toleration (pacific^ disputandum\ Moreover, it is in the De Doctrind Christiand of St. Augus- tine that we find the first distinct outline cf that doctrine of Purgatory which robs the opinion of endless torments of its most pressing horrors. ST. AUGUSTINE AND ST. JEROME. 165 (See De Civ. Dei, xx. 25, &c. ; Cyrill. Catech. T 5> 9! Orig- C. Cels. v. 15, &c.) The tone adopted by St. Augustine proves that he is dealing with a matter not of faith, but of opinion ; and without sanctioning, he yet did not reject the belief that even amid endless punishment God might show His mercy by various alleviations. His view is therefore far less dark and intolerable than that of post-Reformation theologians (De Civ. Dei, xx. ; EncJiir. 29, &c.) ; and it is abso- lutely indisputable that both the opinions of St. Augustine, and those of the Fathers in general, approximate far more nearly to those which I have here advocated than the more modern and popular theory of current teaching. St. Jerome, fiercely as he opposed Origenists, yet held Origen's opinions on future Restoration, so far at any rate as Christians are concerned. In his letter to Avitus he treats the question as an open one, and holds " Christianos, si in peccatis praeventi fuerint, salvandos esse post poenas." 166 ETERNAL HOPE. (See Adv. Pelag. i. 9 ; Adv. Rufin. ii. I ; in Jes. ad fin; in Eph. iv. 12; Gal. v. 22, &c.) If it be averred that the opinion w supplicia aliquando finiri et post multa tempera tcrminum habere tormenta" which St. Jerome tells us was common in his day, merely implied the end of pain (poena sensfis) not the end of loss (damnation, poena damni], it is still clear that the views of the early Church were far less ruthless than those of the present day. As to Councils, " none of the first four General Councils lay down any doctrine whatever concern- ing the everlasting misery of the wicked, or directly or indirectly give any interpretation of the Scriptural expressions which describe their condition." The question had indeed " been most vehemently disputed and discussed, yet the Church was wisely silent, and allowed various mutually irreconcilable opinions to be held by her sons without rebuke. Neither at Nicea (A.D. 325), nor at Constantinople (A.D. 381), nor at Ephesus (A.D. 431), nor at Chalcedon (A.D. 451), was any special PURGATORY. 167 doctrine laid down 'respecting the future rewards and punishments, nor were the opinions of Origen and his followers on that subject condemned, or even alluded to." 1 For many subsequent centuries "the dark shadow of Augustine" was thrown so powerfully over the current -theology that there was little question about the endlessness of torment. They had however the developed doctrine of Purgatory, which alone helped the human conscience to dis- pense with Origen's theory of Restitution. The metaphysical grounds indeed on which the doc- trine of endless torment was based were utterly inadequate and even absurd, as, for instance, that " offence against an Infinite Being must re- quire an infinite penalty, and since a finite creature is not capable of punishment infinite in degree, requiritur lit sit saltern duratione infinita.!' This argument would require endless torment for any sin, even the most venial, and it tells quite as 1 Rev. H. B. Wilson, Speech, p. 99. 168 ETERNAL HOPE. strongly against any possibility of forgiveness on this side of the grave. It is therefore nihil ad rent; and the agonizing incidence of such a view was lightened by the belief that all earthly sins could be removed even in articulo mortis by priestly absolution. They held, too, the doctrine of miti- gation. "The punishment," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "will not be absolutely removed, but while it lasts pity will work by diminishing it." Still it is to the Middle Ages and to scholastic theology that we mainly owe the rigidity of the common dogmas as to (i) the endlessness of doom, and (2) its irreversibility after death. The extreme confidence of the schoolmen, and their imaginary knowledge of all the secrets of the other world, might have taken warning from the passages in which St. Gregory the Great (De Vitd aeternd Animarum, iv. 40), after telling us a great deal about purgatory, asks, " How so much was then known about souls, when nothing had been known in earlier days ? " and can furnish no JOHANNES SCOTUS ERIGENA. 169 other answer than that the futnrum saecuhun becomes better known as the praesens saeculum draws to its conclusion. From Gregory the Great till Anselm "the theology of Western Christendom slept her winter sleep." The sleep was "disturbed rather than broken by the strange apparition in the ninth century of Johannes Scotus Erigena, one of the most original thinkers of his own or any age, as of one born out of due time." x This brilliant and subtle metaphysician made future punishment consist only in the absence of divine bliss. " In igne aeterno nihil aliud esse poenam quam beatae felicitatis absentiam " (De Praedest. c. 16). Evil, being a mere negative conception, so also is punishment, and neither can be eternal. That which Christ has redeemed cannot be punished. The contradiction of this teaching to Scripture is, he says, merely apparent, and due to the finite character of human language. Bliss and pain 1 II. N. Oxenham, Catholic Doctrine of Atonement, p. 63. 170 ETERNAL HOPE. will be in the conscience only; fire, brimstone, &c., are but symbols meant to teach the dull imagi- nation of the carnal. All things shall ulti- mately return to God. The distinction of sex shall be abolished (Gal. iii. 28), heaven and earth shall be all Paradise, and the creature shall be one with the Creator. God shall be all in all (Scotus Erig. De Divis. Nat. ii. 6; v. 8). " Erit enim Deus omnia in omnibus quando nihil erit nisi solus Dcus ;" and there shall be a mirabilis atque incffa- bilis rcversio of human nature into God (pp. 232 234). He contrived to reconcile this with a nominal acceptance of everlasting punishment by saying that though all malitia will be abolished its phantasiae in the conscience will remain ; but in v. 27, p. 260, he speaks with unmistakable clear- ness of the complete and final a-jro/carda-rao-is. The Reformers mostly held to the old Augusti- nian conceptions, except in so far as they rejected Purgatory. In the Augsburg Confession, art. 17, we find " Damnant Anabaptistas, qui scntiunt THE REFORMERS. 171 hominibus damnatis et diabolis finem poenarum futurum esse " (Cf. Conf. Helvetic, xi.). In fact (with the one exception already noted) they made but little change in the mediaeval escha- tology, which lay indeed beyond the range of the subjects with which they dealt. And if they intended to condemn the views of Origen, neither they nor the 42nd Article stated those views with any approach to accuracy. Aban- doning the doctrine of the infallibility of the Church, they took refuge in the infallibility of Scripture, and, as is so often the case, this was ex- tended into the infallibility of "the letter that killeth ; " and this, again, involved the infallibility of an exegesis which was yet in its merest infancy ; and worse still, the infallibility of all sorts of "private interpretations," such as no Scripture tolerates, 1 and respecting which no two sects or churches are thoroughly agreed. And yet the voice of reason and conscience, rising in revolt against a doctrine 1 5r<7o TrpobijTfia, ypcupTJs ISias iiri\v, e d. Mangey, i. 277 ; De Norn. Mnlnt. ad fin (Mangey, i. 619) ; Greg. Naz. Orat. 38, " What to us is time, measured by ihe motion of the sun, is to the Immortals the >Eon." See Ecclus. xviii. 8 n. 200 ETERNAL HOPE. above and beyond time, time being simply a mode of thought neces- sary only to our finite condition (See John v. 39, xvii. 3) yet it is by no means necessarily the case that the word should have iden- tically the same meaning in both clauses, since the meaning of the same adjective might quite conceivably be modified, and even altered, by that of the substantive to which it is attached. Nothing could be more in accordance with the ordinary genius of human speech than that the same adjective might have its fullest meaning in one clause, in which that meaning is entirely consonant with reason and conscience, yet not have it in the other, where it would be shocking and terrible. What makes the argument as abso- lutely inexcusable on philological as it is on all other grounds, is that in Rom. xvi. 25, 26, this very word occurs twice, and in one of the two clauses cannot mean " everlasting," since it is speaking of time which has come to an end ; and is yet translated " everlasting " by our translators in the very next clause ! *' According to the reve- lation of a mystery hidden in silence in the eternal times " (E.V. "before the world began," where the reader will see that " endless" would be a flagrant absurdity), "but now made manifest according to the command of the Eternal God." 4. That in this instance the substantive Ko\a,(ris is a word which in its sole proper meaning "has .reference to the correction and bettering of him that endures" (see Philo. Leg. ad Cat. i). So that Clement of Alexandria "defines KuAao-eu as (ifpiKal 7rai5e?ai." Archbishop Trench does indeed remark (A T ew Test. Synonyms, p. 30) that " It would be a very serious error to transfer this dis- tinction (of Ko\a K6\a(rii TOU TrdcrxovTos eVe/ca fanv' 7) 5e TOU jrotowTos "ivo. dTroirXrjpwBrj, Rhet. i. 10, 17). It is Josephus, not our Lord and His Apostles, who use such phrases as aQa.va.-ros Tinwpia and flpynos dittos ; and though " everlasting death" occurs in our Liturgy, it nowhere occurs in Scripture, frequently as we read of aeonian life. 5. But surely there are other grounds on which we ought to have heard the last of this dreary argument, to which it is hardly possible to listen without indignation. Good men, from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas (Szimm. part iii., StifpL Qitaest. 99, iii.), and from St. Thomas to Dr. Pusey, have gone on repeating it ad nauseam, and even the gentle Keble wrote " And if the treasures of Thy wrath could waste, Thy lovers must their promised heaven forego." We hear the question asked triumphantly in sermons, "If the punishment of the wicked is not to last for ever, what guarantee have we that the felicity of the blessed will last for ever ? " I reply, Is there not in the question when not traditionally repeated, but plainly considered an intense selfishness and a most ignoble thought of God? Thank God, my own hopes of seeing God's face for ever hereafter do not rest on ten times refuted attempts to read false meanings into the Greek lexicon, in order to support a system far darker than St. Augustine's, from whose mistaken literalism it took its disastrous origin. But here I declare, and call God to witness, that if the popular doctrine of Hell were true I should be ready to resign all hope, not only of a shortened but of any immortality, if thereby I could save, not millions, but one single human soul from what fear, and superstition, and ignorance, and inveterate hate, and slavish letter-worship, have dreamed and taught of Hell. I call God to ETERNAL HOPE. witness that so far from regretting the possible loss of some billions of aeons of bliss by attaching to the word altavios a sense in which scores of times it is undeniably found, I would here, and now, and kneeling on my knees, ask Him that I might die as the beasts that perish, and for ever cease to be, rather than that my worst enemy should endure the hell described by Tertullian, or Minucius Felix, or Jonathan Edwards, or Dr. Pusey, or Mr. Furniss, or Mr. Moody, or Mr. Spurgeon, for one single year. Unless my whole nature were utterly changed, I can imagine no immortality which would not be abhorrent to me if it were accompanied with the knowledge that millions and millions and millions of poor suffering wretches some of whom on earth I had known and loved were writhing in an agony without end or hope. 1 1 It may be worth while to add these further notes about aio.J'. Heyschius says it is sometimes used for " a long time ; " and Origen alludes to the same fact. In Exod. Horn. vL 13 ; irepl apx is used of a definite period (wepl dpHTfLfVov xP^vov \afj.fMyerai). Caesarius (Dial. 3) even observes that the Origenist argument on the terminability of torment was derived from the use of this very word 1 Huetius, Origeniana (Of ft- ed. Pnris, iv. pp. 2-51, 233). EXCURSUS IV. (p. 64). HOW THE OPINION OF ENDLESS TORMENT FOR ALL WHO DIP, UNCONVERTED IS REGARDED BY SOME OF THE BEST OF THOSE WHO HAVE ACCEPTED IT. "For my part I fancy I should not grieve if the whole race of mankind died in its fourth year. As far as we can see I do not know that it would be a thing much to be lamented." Henry Rogers (Greyson's Letters, i. 34). "In the distress and anguish of my own spirit I confess that I see no light whatever. I see not one ray to disclose to me the reason why sin came into the world, why the earth is strewed with the dying and the dead, and why man must suffer to all eternity." Albert Barnes, Practical Sermons, p. 123. " Were it possible for man's imagination to conceive the horrors of such a doom as this, all reasoning about it would be at an end, it would scorch and wither all the power of human thought." Archer Butler's Sermons (second series), p. 383. "The same gospel which penetrates our soul with warm emotions, dispersive of selfishness, brings in upon the heart a sympathy that tempts us often to wish that itself were not true, or that it had not taught us so to feel." Isaac Taylor, Restoration of Belief, p. 367. " As being that had burned Half an eternity, and was to burn For evermore he looked. O sight to DC Forgotten, though too terrible to think ! " PolLk, Course of Time. 204 ETERNAL HOPE. "Far be it from us to make light of the demerit of sin. . . . But still what is man?" (After dwelling on his corrupt nature, his weakness, his ignorance, the strength of his passions and appetites, and the short sinful course of his few fleeting years on earth, he adds ) "But endless punishment! Hopeless misery through a duration to which the terms above imagined will be absolutely nothing ! I acknowledge my inability (I would say reverently) to admit this belief together with a belief in the divine goodness the belief that ' God is love,' that ' His tender mercies are over all His works. ' " John Foster, On Future Punishment. " O most tender heart of Jesus, why wilt Thou not end, when wilt Thou end, this ever-growing horror of sin and woe ? When wilt Thou chase away the devil into his own hell, and close the pit's mouth, that Thy chosen may rejoice in Thee, quitting the thoughts of those who perish in their wilfulncss?" J. H. Newman, Discourses. " Decretum horribile fateor." Calvin, Instt. I have said that the doctrine, as commonly taught, is a fruitful source of scepticism : " L'Eglise Romaine s'est porte le dernier coup : elle a consomme son suicide le jour ou elle a fait Dieu implacable et la damnation eternelle." George Sand, Spiridion, p. 302. "If this be the logical result of accepting theories, better believe in no God at all." Leslie Stephen, Englhh Thought in Eighteenth Century. KXCURSUS V. p. 74. THE VOICE OF SCRIPTURE RESPECTING ETERNAL HOPE. Before adducing the various passages of Scripture which are here referred to, I may make one or two observations respecting them. I. In proportion to the deep and unfeigned reverence which I have ever felt for Holy Scripture, is the sense of sorrow, and almost of indignation, with which I view its constant perversion by the attempt to build up infinite systems out of metaphorical ex- pressions and isolated texts. I have spoken of this terrible abuse in one of my sermons ; and I have said elsewhere that we must be guided, not by texts torn from their context, but by the whole scope and tenor of revelation. Texts have been perverted from the earliest times to the most unworthy purposes. They have to the deadly injury of the divine authority of Scripture been quoted for centuries in the cause of ignorance and sin. They have been abused, by the endless errors of private interpretation, to countenance every absurdity, and check every science, and denounce every moral reformation. They were quoted against Columbus, against Coper- nicus, against Galileo, against the geologists. They were quoted against St. Peter, against St. Paul, nay, even against Christ Him- self. They were quoted against Wycliffe, against Luther, against Wilberforce, against the cause of Education, against the cause of 206 ETERNAL HOPE. Temperance. They have been quoted in defence of polygamy, in de- fence of oppression, in defence of persecution, in defence of intoler- ance, in defence of "the right divine of kings to govern wrong." I care but little in any controversy for the stress laid on one or two isolated and dubious texts out of the sacred literature of fifteen hundred years. They may be torn from their context ; they may be distorted ; they may be misinterpreted ; they may be irrelevant ; they may be misunderstood ; they may as the Prophets and the Apostles and our Blessed Lord Himself distinctly intimated they may reflect the ignorance of a dark age or the fragment of an imperfect revelation ; they may be a bare concession to im- perfection, or a low steppingstone to progress. What the Bible teaches as a whole what the Bibles also teach as a whole for History, and Conscience, and Nature, and Experience these too are Sacred Books, that, and that only, is the immutable law of God. 1 II. Now if the doctrine of endless torment, with all iis Calvinis- tic and popular accretions, be true, it is incredible that there should be no trace of it in the entire Old Testament, 2 except by putting on 1 Two writers, with neither of whom I a<^-ee, but who are distinguished by the most devout reverence for the Wi>rd of Gr>d in Holy Scripture, have recently expressed similar thoughts. "The Bible," says Mr. White, " has fallen much into the hands of those who imagine that a few favourite ' texts ' will suffice to prove that Omniscience is on the side of even the most extravagant theologies. The world has already suffered too much fr m systems founded on a handful n, " saves by the revelation which it makes of the heart and mind of God," and when we are faced by such a doctrine as " endless torment," is it unnatural to " inquire whether there may not be s nme mistake in the common interpretation of the four or five passages which are thought to attribute such an intention to the Creator?" 2 LJan. xii. 2 to say nothing of the fact that it only says " many of them that sleep," and that the word rendered " everlasting " does not mean "everlast- EXCURSUS V. 207 the Hebrew phrase "for ever" a sense which it cannot and does not bear. Those who insist on doing this put themselves at once out of court as incompetent and biassed critics. Nor can anything more forcibly illustrate what I have said on the reckless abuse of texts than the ignorant persistence with which such passages as Is. xxiii. 14, or Eccl. xi. 3, are urged in favour of endless torments, with which they have not the very remotest connection. III. I have already stated that the Jews, studying the Old Test- ament without any polemical bias about this subject, and with every temptation to interpret every passage of it in the darkest sense which might gratify their passionate, and not unnatural, indignation against a world which has treated them with such unbounded cruelty and scorn, have yet never held or taught the doctrine of endless torment as any part of their religion. I have consulted Rabbi H. N. Adler on this subject, and in his very full and courteous reply he assures me that " the Jews do not possess any authorised dog- matic teaching on the subject of endless punishment ; and that the views of each rabbi depended on his interpretation of the several Scripture texts bearing upon this point and upon the results of his own reflection and investigation." I have referred to the principal passages of the Talmud bearing upon the question. There are two loci classici. Rosh Hashana, p. 17. "But unbelievers, &c., go down into Gehenna and are adjudged therein for generation after generation." This phrase does not, I think, imply endless punishment. ing " seems to state, when rightly translated and rightly interpreted, that many shall enj >y the first resurrection, while those who do not shall be doomed t> sha-ne and contempt, which (for all that appears in the text) may fall upon them while dead; for the word JIKT;! ^ ere used is applied to " dead corpses " in Is. Ixvi. 24. On this text see Mr. White's Life in Christ, p. 172. The Jews interpreted the passa^o of " death and immobility." WeJl, Le Judaisme, iv, ciogm. xiii. ch. ii>. J i. 208 ETERNAL HOPE. Baba Mezia, p. 58. "All who go down into Gehenna rise up again, with the exception of those who go down and do not rise, the adulterer," &C. 1 Philippson, in his Israelitische JReligionslehre (ii. 255), says, when speaking of immortality, "Die Rabbiner nehmen keine Ewig- keit dcr Hblienstrafen an, auch die grossten Sunder werden nur ' Generationen hindurch ' gestraft. Ailegorisch drucken sie dies auch so aus, dass zwischen der Holle und dem Paradiese nur ein Zwei Finger breiter Zwischenraum sei, so dass esalso dem reinigen Siincler sehr leicht wird aus der ersteren in das letztere zu gelangen." (Midrash, Kohelet.} "With respect to the teachings of the present day, I think it would be safe to say that they do not teach endless retributive suffering. They hold that it is not conceivable that a God of Mercy and Justice would ordain infinite punishment for finite wrong-doing." So writes the Rev. H. N. Adler. " Of this you may be quite sure," wrote the late Dr. Deutsch, with his usual impassioned energy, to the Rev. S. Cox, "that there is not a word in the Talmud that lends any support to that damnable dogma of endless torment." "The upshot is," says Rabbi Marks, "that the Jewish doctors laboured rather to adorn the future of the good, than to adorn the destiny of the wicked. Stronger than their fear of justice is their belief in the Divine mercy. ' He will not contend for ever, neither will He retain His anger to eternity ' (Ps. ciii. 9), which is a powcr- 1 It appears from other passages of the Talmud that these latter were supposed by some of the Jews to be annihilated ; but even this was the rarer view, though favoured by Maimonides, Jad Hachazaka, Hilchoth Teshuba. viii. i. Rabbi Adler refers me to two Post-Talmudic Rabbis (R. Saadjah and R. Joseph Albn, in his Seplter Ikkarim iv. 36) who appear to teach endless torments for the few. Hartwig Wessely, the friend of Moses Mendelssohn, wrote a valuable little treatise on Jewish opinion respecting this subject, and there are some remarks in Brecher's Unsterblichkcitslehrc. EXCURSUS V. 209 ful argument against the modern Christian doctrine of everlasting woe." The Chief Rabbi of Avignon, B. Mosse, has written against the doctrine of endless torments in his local journal, La Famille de Jacob. The Chief Rabbi Michel A. Weill, in his elaborate work, Le Judi- 'isme, ses Dogmes et sa Mission, distinctly decides that the doctrine of endless torment is Scripturally untenable. He treats Gehenna not as a real denomination, but as a figurative expression for chastise- ment. Of the fire and flames he says, " Qui ne reconnait dans ces termes 1'hyperbole prophetique et poetique, qui est comme le genie de la litterature sacree." He refers to other passages, such as Is. xlviii. 22, Ivii. 21, I Sam. xxv. 29, &c., to show the spirituality of punishment, while he explains that " they shall no more see the light," of Ps. xlix. 20, as perhaps identical with the n~O, kareth, or "excision" of the Mosaic code. "Would there not," he asks, " be a flagrant contradiction between endless torments and the good- ness of God so magnificently celebrated in Biblical annals ? Does not Moses announce to us, does he not himself invoke in solemn circumstances ' the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin' (Ex. xxxiv. 6, 7)? Does not the prophet say, in the name of the Lord, ' I will not contend for ever, neither will I be always wroth, for the spirit would fail before me and the souls that I have made' (Is. Ivii. 1 6)? And the Psalmist of Israel, how does he speak on this subject ? ' His wrath endureth but the twinkling of an eye, but His favour a lifetime ' (Ps. xxx. 5). Nothing, therefore, seems more incompatible with the true Biblical tradition than an eternity of suffer- ing and chastisement." * 1 Le Judiilsint , iv. p. 590. 210 ETERNAL HOPE. But while it is interesting to find this unanimity of opinion in a matter of simple exegesis among modern Rabbis, it is to the Mishna that we should look for the nearest approach to the Jewish view of Gehenna in the time of our Lord. Now according to Dr. Dewes, 1 Gehenna is alluded to four or five times only in the Mishna, and from these passages we learn that "the judgment of Gehenna is for twelve months," that "it shall fail" though they who go into it shall not fail," and that "Gehenna is nothing but a day in which the impious shall be burnt." Even Bartolocci, after fifty- six quarto pages on Gehenna, is obliged to confess that the Jews "did not believe in a material fire, and thought that such fire as they did believe in would one day be put out." Just as in the middle ages we have the most pitiless and the most material picture of hell, so it is in the dark and evil days in which the Pirke R.Eleazar and the Zohar were written that we find the most intimidating pictures of Gehenna. But so incontestable an autho- rity as the great Rabbi Akiba, the second Moses, the second Ezra of the oral law, said, " The duration of the punishment of the -wicked in Gehenna is twelve months" (Adyoth, ii. 10). He quotes Is. Ixvi. 23 in this sense. This indeed was the prevalent conception. 2 Some Rabbis said Gehenna only lasted from Passover to Pentecost. Even in Zohar (in Genes, col. 205) it is said that Noah stayed twelve months in the Ark because the judgment of sinners lasts so long, and Rabbis Jose, Jehuda, and Eliezer are quoted in favour of this view (Buxtorf, Lex. Talm, s. v. E3H3). The figurative nature of our Lord's language finds striking illustration in such passages as " Better put thyself in a fiery oven than make thy neighbour blush in public" (Berachoth,/ 43, 2). 1 Plea for Rational Translation, p. 23. 2 See Eisenmenger, Enid. Judenth. p. 354. Rabbi argued " It is absurd to say that the (morally) dead will live, seeing that even in life they are dead.' 1 EXCURSUS V. 211 Even the few Rabbis who held another opinion were far more merciful in their interpretation than modern Christians. They held that the least repentance, even the sl-ghtest velleity of repentance, was an impenetrable shield against retribution, even at the moment of death ; 1 and the due performance of even a single precept of the law entitled a man to the future world (plam ha-ba)? They inter- preted Job xxxiii. 23 in the sense that 999 hostile testimonies before God were outweighed by one favourable testimony. 3 They thus hold the salvation of the vast majority of men, and reduce almost to zero the number of those whose doom they regard as final those only who have not done one meritorious act, or had one desire to repent. " So that, even taken literally" says Chief Rabbi Weill, ' ' endless torment loses its terror, since it does not involve concep- tions which militate against a merciful God, whose loving-kindness is over all His works." R. Saadja, in his Sepher ha-cmunah, does, indeed, hold the doc- trine of endless torment, but holds that even without repentance the majority of mankind are admitted into grace if they have not com- mitted capital crimes. If their good deeds preponderate over their evil, the sorrows of earth are sufficient to present them pure to heaven. In fact, Saadja extends so widely the range of penitence, and diminishes so greatly the numbers of the doomed, that he brightens his own horizon after making it seem dark. If any Rabbi may be regarded as specially entitled to explain the views of the Jews, it is surely Moses Maimonides, "the eagle of the doctors," of whom the Jews say " that from Moses to Moses there was no one like Moses." * In his Yad Ilachazaka he makes the 1 See the singular tenderness and leniency of the views of Maimonides, Yad Hacliazakah, I. vii. 2 Sanhedrin, p. in; Maccjth, ad Jin. ; Ikkarim, iv. 29. 3 Shabbath, p. 32- n&>D3 Dp & r)C? TIN P 2 212 ETERNAL HOPE. future life immaterial, and says that the worst of all punishments is Kareth, " excision," which he explains as annihilation (Num. xv. 31), and says that it is allegorically described by the prophets as Abaddon, Tojthet, and "the horseleach, expressions of destruction and corruption, in consequence of there being that destruction after which there is no existence, and that ruin which admits of no repa- ration." 1 He makes Gehenna a name or metaphor, explained by some of the sun, by others of an inward fire (of remorse). 2 Maimonides' opinion as to the annihilation of the wicked is doubt- less derived from the famous passage of the Talmud (Rosh Hash- anak, 17), which says that after twelve months of expiation the bodies of the wicked cease to exist, their soul is burned, and a wind scatters their cinders under the feet of the just." Rabbi Bar Nachman regards this passage as so metaphorical that he interprets it as a quie ude after Gehenna, a relative beati- tude inferior to that of the just. It is only for a few r.theists and renegades that he reserves a more terrible kareth. But even in these cases he finds it impossible to get over the distinct state- ment of the Talmud, ''''After the last judgment Gehenna exists no longer."* "The future world," he says, "the olam haba, will have its Gehenna, but the last times (Leadoth labo) will have it no more." R. Albo 4 is another of the few Rabbis who admit endless tor- ment if indeed these few really do mean endlessness by the expressions which they use. He ranks future relribulion under 1 Yad Plachazakah Hikhoth Teshuba, via. i. See Surenhusius Mishna, vi. 265. Mai. iv. i, 2; Abhoda Zara ; Is. xxx. n ; Bcreshith Rabba, 6; Weill, iv. 606. 3 Nedarin, 8 ; Midrash Rabba, i, 30 : Aboda Zara. 3 (Resh Lakish). 4 Jkkaritn, iv. 3040. EXCURSUS V three grades : (l) Gehenna for a year, and then blessedness; (2) Gehenna for a year, and then annihilation; (3) "Eternal" chastisement for a few renegades, &c. Yet he dwells on the bound- less mercy of God, and founds the remission of eternal punishment, for all except the worst, on Ps. Ixii. 14, Micah vii. 18 20, &c. It will be seen, therefore, that even the few exceptional Rabbis who diverged into this view held it in a form unspeakably less repellent than modern writers ; and that their Gehenna was far more like Purgatory than Hell. And in arriving at this conclusion they can barely reconcile it with the more ancient authority of the Mishna and Gemara. Further, the Rabbis, like all Romanist theologians, held that "nothing can resist repentance." In the Midrash on Koheleth the answer to the question, "Why did God create Paradise and Gehenna," we read, "In order that the one may save from the other." But what is the distance between them ? According to Johanam, a wall ; according to Acha, a palm ; according to other Rabbis, only a finger (see Eisenmenger, pp. 314, 315). And the inference drawn is that even from Gehenna the guilty can be redeemed by a return to duty. Generally, it may be stated with confidence that the Rabbinic opinion was that of Abarbanel, 1 that the soul would only be punished in Gehenna for a time proportionate to the extent of its faults ; and it is in accordance with this belief, and that in annihilation as being "the second death," that we must interpret the passages which are sometimes adduced from the Targums of Jonathan and Onkelos and from various parts of the Book of Enoch. 2 I have not referred to the vague testimony of Josephus, 3 because I regard him as an 1 MifJialoth Elohim, viii. 6. 3 See GfrSrer, Jahrb. ties Hcils, ii. 289, 311. 3 Ant. xviii. 3, B. J. ii. 8. See Ewald, Gesch. v. 366 (E. Tr.) 214 ETERNAL HOPE. utterly untrustworthy witness, and because what he says is contra- dicted on this as on a multitude of other subjects by overwhelming and untainted testimony. 4. Now will honest, serious, and competent readers weigh the plain literal meaning of the texts which follow the number of which might easily be trebled, and in weighing them with an earnest and prayerful desire to get rid of traditional bias and attain to truth, will they also do as follows? i. Examine their own reason and conscience as to all that they know, and all that the Bible teaches, respecting the love of God, and redemption through Jesus Christ. ii. See how very little, which is in the least degree decisive, they can produce on the other side ; and how for' every word of that very little an explanation is offered, demonstrably tenable, and far more in accordance with history than that which they adopt. iii. Consider the tremendous weight of evidence which must be thrown against their private interpretation from the fact that neither the Jewish nor the Christian Church has ever been able dogmatically to sanction it. iv. Remember that in the extreme form in which they hold it, which excludes anything resembling Purgatory, it is directly opposed to a large body of primitive teaching, and to the views of the entire Roman Church. v. Give clue weight to the fact that many who have devoted years of earnest labour to the inquiry ripe scholars and good men, ortho- dox Fathers, eminent theologians, profound thinkers, holy and reverent inquirers have come to the deliberate conclusion that there is not a single text in all Scripture which necessitates a belief in endless torment. vi. Bear specially in mind that it rests, almost if not quite exclusively, on the meanings which they attach to two words, "Gehenna" and EXCURSUS V. " yEonian " : of which the first, interpreted by the only possible means of interpretation open to us, cannot bear the sense which they attribute to it ; and the other is over and over again applied in Scripture to indefinite but limited time, or to that which trans- cends all conception of time. 1 vii. Be shamed into a little humility a little doubt as to their own absolute infallibility on all religious subjects a little sense of their possible ignorance or invincible prejudice a little absti- nence from cheap anathemas and contemptible calumnies a little avoidance of such base weapons of controversy as the assertion that those who hold such views as I here have advocated are repeating the devil's whisper, " Thou shalt not surely die" a - by not losing sight of the fact that (i) these views have been held in sub- stance, not only (as I have said) by great teachers and holy saints, but also by whole Churches ; and (2) that they are theoretically involved in practices so universal and so primitive as prayers for the dead. The Kaddish, or prayer for the dead, in the Jewish liturgies is pro- bably as old as the time of our Lord, and if so was by Him un- reproved, though it was believed to be efficacious for the relief of souls in Gehenna. Eminent commentators, comparing 2 Tim. i. 16 and 19, and iv. 19 have believed that St. Paul's prayer for Onesi- phorus is a prayer for one who was dead ; and he does not reprove the principle of even so superstitious a practice as baptism for the dead. 3 i I will add one more testimony to the many already adduced. " In Hebrew and Greek the words rendered ' everlasting ' have not this sense. They signify ' a long duration of time,' ' a period,' whence the phrase ' during these eternities and beyond " ' (De Lammenais). The same crude charge might be brought with ten thousandfold more force against the doctrine of repentance. It is one of the many signs that in all generations religious bigotry and ignorance repeat themselves, that the very same taunt was aimed at the merciful hopes of Archbishop Tillotson. 3 i Cor. xv. 2Q. 216 ETERNAL HOPE. The ancientness of belief in the validity of prayers for the dead " antiquissima omnium Ecclesiarum traditione stabilitum" is beyond possibility of dispute. 1 Of the practice itself I give no opinion ; but it proves most absolutely that the Early Church held as a certain belief the main point for which I have here contended which is, in brief, a possible hope beyond the grave. When Aerius taught the modern popular doctrine, "assuming one broad line of demarcation in the unseen world," he was treated as opposing the practice of the Church from the beginning 2 (Epiphan. Htzres. 75) ; and St. Augustine whose views (as I have pointed out) were so far less frightful in many respects than those now prevalent distinctly declares that we may pray for the dead, "ut sit plena remissio, aut certe ut fiat tolerabilior damnatio." 3 viii. Let them weigh the fact that what Christ did once namely preach to the lost, and open for them the prison doors He may do again and ever. The text on which I preached "throws blessed light on one of the darkest enigmas of Divine Justice the cases in which the final doom seems infinitely out of proportion to the lapse that has incurred it." This was the interpretation of the early Fathers. " May not these inspired words of Peter," says Canon Spence, "hint to us that our Lord's redemptive work is far more extensive than men usually conceive?" (Col. i. 20, Eph. i. io). 4 If any candid truth-seeker will thus inquire, I have very little doubt as to the conclusion at which he will arrive. He will see that while we most heartily agree with him in admitting the immense importance attributed by all Scripture to life as a period of probation, and the certainty that future retribution will be proportionate to the 1 It is needless to point in proof of this to the evidence of the Catacombs as well as the early Fathers. * Diet, of Christ. Biog.. Art. "Death." 3 Enchir. no. * Bibl. Educator, i. 118. EXCURSUS V. 217 willingness and heinousness of our earthly sins, neither Scripture ( nor the Church, nor anything that we learn from any source within or without us respecting God, in any way sanctions the popular dogma of an irreversible doom at the moment of death, for all who die impenitent, to endless physical or mental torment. Of the opposite view, the restitution in its most literal sense of all things, the brightest and ablest of the Scotch prelates, Bishop Ewing of Argyll and the Isles, said in language which goes farther than I can go, " Unless this be held as a matter of faith and not as a specu- lative dogma, it is practically valueless. With me this final victory is not a matter of speculation at all, but of positive faith ; and to disbelieve it would be for me to cease altogether either to trust or to worship God" Lastly, I do not for a moment mean to offer the following catena of texts as even approximately complete. To adduce all the passages which deepen in my mind the trust in Eternal Hope would be to transcribe one half of the Scriptures. Rarely do I read the daily Psalms or the daily lessons without meeting with expressions which seem to run directly counter to the common doctrine. It is also a most important consideration that we must judge from the silence of Scripture as well as from its utterances. Were there any truth in the numberless accretions which have gathered round this simple nucleus that there is a retribution for sin beyond the grave, surely they are of such momentous importance that they would not have been left in an obscurity so deep that the Church has never been able to sanction them, though she was well aware that some of her truest sons have openly rejected them. The silence of St. Paul as to any such doctrines in such passages as Rom. ii. 8, 9 ; v. 21, vi. 23 ; Gal. v. 21, vi. 8; Phil. iii. 18, 19 ; the reticence of St. John in such passages as I John iii. 14, 15, v. 16 in all which places the nature of the subjects handled would have led the Apostles to make 2i8 ETERNAL HOPE. explicit mention of endless torment, had they embraced any such belief cannot by any possibility be the result of accident. 1 "That the doctrinal writings of these three chief teachers of the Gospel St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John are wholly destitute of any assertion of the endles's misery of sinners as the literal sense," says Mr. White, " can be verified by every reader." " Even Luther, like almost every great and true-hearted teacher on this subject, while constantly maintaining the doctrine of endless torment in nearly its present form, yet slides unconsciously into more hopeful ex- pressions ; "God forbid," he says, " that 2 should limit the time for acquiring faith to the present life! In the depths of the diiiiu- mercy there may be opportunity to win it in the future state" 3 1 See essays on Eternal Death by Mr. Barlow, Fellow of Trin. Coll. Dublin. "There is not one place of Scripture which occurs to me," said Dr. Isaac Watts, " where the word death . . . necessarily signifies a certain miserable immortality of the soul." 2 Life in Christ, p. 347. 3 Letter to Hansen von Rechenberg, 1522. (Alger, Doctrine of a Future Life, p. /2i. To the Rabbinic passages already quoted may be added the following : Zijoni, f. 69, 3, "only a thread's thickness between Paradise and Gehenna;" AsaratJi Maamciroth,f. 85, i, " there will hereafter be no Gehenna ; " Jalkutk Shimoni,f. 46, i, "Gabriel and Michael will open the 8,000 gates of Gehenna and let out Israelites and righteous Gentiles ;" Jalkuth Chadash,f. 57, i, " the righteous bring out of Gehenna imperfect souls;" yalknth Rul>oii,f. 167, 4, "Sabbaths and refrigeria of the doomed ;" ZoJiar in Exod. Tr. Gibborim,f. 70. i ; Nishmath Chajim,f. 83, i ; Jalkuth Shimoni, f. 88, 3, and many other pas- sages speak of twelve mouths as the period of punishment in Gehenna. In a magnificent passage of Othoth (attributed to R. Akiba) it is said that God has a. key of Gehenna, and that He will preach to all the righteous ; that Zerubbabel shall say the Kaddish and an Amen ! shall sound forth from Gehenna, and that Gabriel and Michael will open the 40,000 gates of Gehenna and set free the damned. Akiba founds this on Is. xxvi. 2, reading Shotner Amenim, "ob- serving the Amen," for Shomer Emunim, " keeping the truth." Lastly, in Etnek Hammelech,f. 138, 4, " the wicked stay in Gehenna till the resurrection, and then the Messiah, passing through it, redeems them." These and other passages are collected in Stephelin's Rabbinical Literature (1748), ii. 31-71. TEXTS. These then are some of the texts to be considered. The com- ments which, I have quoted must he understood with such limita- tions as I have previously indicated. Gen. iii. 15. "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed ; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shall bruise his heel." 1 Gen. xii. 3. " And in thy seed shall all families of the earth be blessed." See also Gen. xxii. 18, Gal. iii. 8, Acts. iii. 25. 2 Ps. ciii. 9. " He will not alway be chiding : neither keepeth He His anger for ever." See the Psalms passim, and Mic. vii. 18. "He retaineth not His anger for ever, because He delighted in mercy." Ps. cxxxix. 8. " If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there." 3 1 " How could this be so, if Satan triumphed by gaining millions to be his slaves? In this case could it be said, as in Is. Lit. 13, 'He shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied, for he shall bear their iniquities ' ? " Dr. Chauncey, The Mystery hid from all ages, or the Salvation of all Men. 1784. 2 Yet Du Moulin (Reflections on the Number of the Elect, 1622) affirms that not one in a million from Adam downwards shall be saved. 3 " What hell maybe I know not : this I know, I cannot lose the presence of the Lord : One arm Humility takes hold upon His dear humanity ; the other, Love, Clasps His divinity, so where I go He goes ; and better fire-walled hell with Him, Than golden-gated Paradise without." ETERNAL HOPE. Isaiah Ivii. 16. " For I will not contend for ever, neither will I be always wroth : for the spirit should fail before Me, and the souls which I have made." Isaiah xlix. 9. " That thou mayest say to the prisoners, Go forth ; to them that are in darkness, Shew yourselves. " x IIos. vi. i. "Come, and let us return unto the Lord : for He hath torn, and He will heal us ; He hath smitten, and He will bind us up." Hos. xiv. 4. "I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely ; for mine anger is turned away from him." John i. 29. " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." John iii. 17. "God sent not His Son into the world to con- demn the world ; but that the world through Him might be saved." 2 John iii. 35. " The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into His hand." (c. 42, and I John iv. 14, "The Saviour of the Universe.") 3 John xii. 32. "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men (but leg. irdyra) unto me." See also Luke ix. 56, 1 Is. xxxiii. 14, and other passages sometimes quoted to prove endless torment, have not the very remotest connection with the subject. And the fact that in Mark ix. 50, our Lord is borrowing the purely temporal language of Is. Ixvi. 24, is, even alone, an argument of overwhelming force against the meaning which has been attached to His expressions. 2 What affinity is there between these utterances and such a sentence as this from Calvin ? " Unde factum est, ut tot gentes unti cum liberis eorum inf anti- bits aeternA morte involvcret lapsus Adae abseque remedio, nisi quia Deo ita visum est? Decrctum horribilefateor" (fnstit. iii. 23, 7). 3 " The happiness of the blest rests, not on a word or syllable, but on their perfect union with God ; we have no data, whatever on which to ground the assertion that the eternity of evil is equally unlimited, absolute, and infinite." Rev. Archer Gurney. TEXTS. 221 " For the Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them." John xv. 22. "He that knew not his Lord's will and did commit things worthy of stripes shall be beaten with few stripes.'" i John ii. 2. "He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also irepl oKovrov K6fffj.ov." Acts. iii. 21. "Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things (a7ro/caTas Ttdvrtav), which God hath spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began. " Eph. i. 10. "That in the dispensation of the fulness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth." 1 Phil. ii. 10, ii. " That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth." 2 Col. i. 19, 20. " For it hath pleased the Father that in him ihould all fulness dwell ; and, having made peace through the blood of His cross, by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself (diroKa.Ta\\da.i TC) iravra. fls avTbv eipi)voirorfi(ra.s, K. r. A. ) ; by Him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven." See also Rom. viii. 19, 24. " For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For 1 " Will any one contend that the Pauline conception would be satisfied by the endless existence of the majority of the human race in misery and sin ? Has Christ subdued those who gnash their teeth at Him because He makes them suffer ? Is this the working whereby He is able to subdue even all things unto Himself ? Will God be all in all when vast multitudes of His creatures are in impotent but absolute rebellion against Him ? " Rev. J. LI. Davies, Manifesta- tion of tlie Sons of God, p. 358. 3 " Every number of destroyed sinners .... must through the all-working, all-redeeming love of God, which never ceaseth, come at last, to know that they had lost, and have found again such a God of Love as this." William Law. ETERNAL HOPE. the creature was made subject unto vanity, not wLlingly, but by reason of Him who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corrup- tion into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we are saved by hope." Rom. v. 15. "For if through the offence of one many (ol iro\\oi) be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many (-robs iroAAous) " ; and verse 17 and verse 18. " Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemna- tion ; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life ;" and verses 20, 21. " But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound : that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteous- ness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord." Rom. xi. 32. "For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that He might have mercy upon all." Rom. xiv. 9. " For to this end Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that He might be Lord both of the dead and living." I Cor. xv. 22. " For as in Adam all die, even so in Chri>t shall all be made alive ; " and verses 24 28. " Then cometh the end, when He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father ; when He shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. 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. 1 But when He saith all things are put under Him, it is manifest that He is excepted, which did put all things under Him. And when all ' " If all things without exception shall be subjected to Christ, then death, the second death as well as the first death, will be finally swallowed up in victory." Dr. Chauncey. TEXTS. 223 things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all (T& ircivra tv -nS.aiv)." l 2 Cor. v. 19. "To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them ; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation." 2 I Tim. ii. 4.* "'Who willeth (0&\.ei) all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth " (Cf. v. 6). I Tim. iv. 10. "For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe ; " and ii. 1-6, esp. 6, " Who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time (& Sobs tavrbv avriXwrpov inrtp irdfTtay' rb fj.apTvpi.ov Kaipo"is iSiots)." Tit. ii. ii, 12. Not as in English version, but, " For the grace of God hath appeared, which is saving to all men (7) awr-npios -iraa-u- 1 " Uf sit Deus omnia. in. omnibus. Significatur hie novura quiddam sed idem summum et perenne, omnia (adfoqne omnes), sine ulla interpellatione, nulla creatura obstante, nullo hoste obturbante, erunt subordinata Filio, Filius Patri. Hoc reXoj est, hie finis, et apex. Ultra ne Apostolus quidem quo eat habet . . . Ab impiis in mundo habetur Deus pro nihilo, et apud sanctos multa obstant ne sit unus omnia apud ipsos, sed turn erit Omnia, in omnibus." Bengel, Gnomon, p. 760. 2 " The sacnfice for sin was infinitely more potent for good, than sin for evil.'' Rev. E. S. Ffoulkes. > On the vain attempts of St. Augustine and Calvin to do away with the force of this statement, see Gieseler, Eccl. Hist, i, 383 (E. Tr.) * "The sacred writers are singularly emphatical in expressing their trnth. They could not have been more full and peremptory) na d they intended to guard against men's straining their words to another meaning. They speak not only of 'Christ's dying for us,' 'for our sins,' 'for sinners/ 'for the ungodly,' 'f.jr the unjust," but affirm, in yet more extensive terms, that He died ' for the world,' ' i\,r the whole world,' yes, that they might not be misunderstood they say that ' God laid on Him the iniquity of us all ; ' yes, that ' He tasted death for every man; ' yes, that ' He gave His life a ransom f^r all.' " Dr. Chauncey. 224 ETERNAL HOPE. Heb. ii. 14. " Forasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same ; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil;" and verses 8, 9, "Thou hast put all things in subjection under His feet. For in that He put all in subjec- tion under Him, He left nothing that is not put under Him. But now we see not yet all things put under Him. But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour ; that He by the grace of God (or rather x^p'S Oeov) 'for every rational being, or for everything (neut.) except God'} should taste death." Rev. v. 13. " And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth (vvoKaru Trjs yfjs), and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever." Rev. xxi. 4, 5. "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes ; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crjing, neither shall there be any more pain : for the former things are passed away. And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And He said unto me, Write : for these words are true and faithful." Rev. xxii. 3. " And there shall be no more curse ; " and sec, too, Rev. xx. 14. " And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire." On all these passages of St. Paul, St. John, and other sacred writers, so strongly and indisputably asserting the doctrine of uni- versal redemption, I will only remark that "all" cannot possibly mean, as St. Augustine vainly tries to make out, "omnes praedesti- nati" (De Corrept. 14), or " homines omnis generis " (Enchir. 103), or indeed anything except what they say, viz., that Christ died for all. TEXTS. 225 It is, indeed, true that universal redemption does not necessarily imply universal salvation : but I ask any honest and unbiassed thinker whether the predicted triumph of Christ's cross, and the universality of His future kingdom, are consistent with the popular doctrine that only the few are saved ? Bishop Martensen thought that alike universal restoration and never-ending torments were unequivocally taught in Scripture, and that therefore in Scripture, as in life, there were insoluble antinomies. Bishop Thirlwall seems to have inclined to a similar view. My own view is different. It seems to me that if many passages of Scripture be taken quite literally, universal resto- ration is unequivocally taught, just as, if many passages be taken quite literally, the final annihilation of the wicked is taught ; but that endless torments are nowhere clearly taught the passages which appear to teach that doctrine being either obviously figurative or historically misunderstood. If the decision be made to turn solely on the literal meaning of Scripture, I have no hesitation whatever in declaring my strong conviction that the universalist and annihilist theories have far more evidence of this sort for them than the popular view. It may be asked, Why then am I unable to adopt the universalist opinion ? The answer is simple. It is because one or two passages though far more than their due significance seems to have beeu attributed to them seem to make it unwise to speak dogmatically on a matter which God has not clearly revealed. Comparing Scrip- ture with Scripture, limiting Scripture by Scripture, and judging of Scripture as we are encouraged and taught to do by that spirit of man, which is the candle of the Lord, I see no tenable view but that ancient and noble one which I have here tried alas ! very im- perfectly, but to the best of my power under present circumstances to set forth, and to defend. LONDON : E. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, BREAD STREET HILL, E.C. WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. SEEKERS AFTER GOD. THE LIVES OF SENECA, EPICTETUS, AND MARCUS AURELIUS. With Illustrations. New Edition. .Crown 8vo. 6s. " We can heartily recommend it as healthy in tone, instructive, interesting, mentally and spiritually stimulating and nutritious. Mr. Farrar writes as a scholar, a thinker, an earnest ChrisLan, a wise teacher, and a genuine artist." Nonconformist. "IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH." Sermons on Practical Subjects, Preached at Marlborough College, from 1871 to 1876. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. 9.?. "These sermons show us the high gifts intellectual, moral, and spiritual of their author ; we cannot doubt they d.d help most powerfully to do the work which he had so closely at heart." Guardian. " They arc certainly admirable specimens of what school sermons ought to be," John Bull. THE FALL OF MAN: and other Sermons. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. "Ability, eloquence, scholarship, and practical usefulness, are in these sermons combined in a very unusual degree." British Quarterly Review. THE WITNESS OF HISTORY TO CHRIST, Hulsean Lectures for 1870. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. 5*. " High and earnest in tone, they show reading and thought, and they are full of passages of great eloquence and beauty." Guardian. MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE 8ILENCE AND VOICES OF GOD. University and other Sermons. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. "The sermons are marked by great ability, by an honesty which does not hesitate to acknowledge difficulties, by an earnestness which commands respect " Pall Mall Gazette. " We can cordially recommend this singularly beautiful volume of sermons. . . . For beauty of diction, felicity of style, aptness of illustration, and earnest loving exhortatijn, the volume is w.thout its parallel." John Bull. MACMILLAN AND CO., LONDON. THE LIFE OF CHRIST. Eighteenth Edition. Two Vols. 8vo. Price 24?. LONDON : CASSELL, FETTER, AND GALPIN. r UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. APR 6 1974, [TWP ANS OF Form L9-Series 4939 FT 837 1878 PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE THIS BOOK CARD- ^LIBRARY Unive rsity Research Library 0) CD