CIBRAgi
 
 fllSB C1BR5R2
 
 QUESTION OF 
 
 An Essay in New Orthodoxy. 
 
 BY A PURITAN, 
 t! 
 
 \a\si, ok Xoyia 
 
 WILSON & COMPANY. 
 
 NEW YORK : AMERICAN NEWS COMPANY. 
 
 1873, 
 
 *.** 
 
 -v
 
 HH3 
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by 
 Wilson & Co. , in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at 
 Washington. 
 
 Press of DKNISOS, GRENBLL & BARKER, 
 New Haven, Conn.
 
 UCS0 
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 p. 27, line 3 ; for "to that," read "that to." 
 
 p. 74, line 3 ; for "AN" read "ON." 
 
 p. 76, fifth line from bottom, for "where" read "whence."' 
 
 p. 81, line 2 ; for "to God" read "of God." 
 
 p. 85, line 6 ; for "lasting" read "hasting." 
 
 p. 89, line 8; for "sight" read "sigh." 
 
 p. 101, lines 1 and 2, belong as lines 2 and 8 on the next page 
 
 p. 102, last line ; for "annointed" read ''anointed."
 
 ;HO
 
 P R E F ACE 
 
 THE essay here published is intended to break ground in 
 tiifc direction of that new providential interpretation of 
 Christianity which is evidently, and with power and author- 
 ity, breaking forth from Christian thought and learning and 
 experience, in our age of emancipated and enlightened in- 
 quiry. The pages which follow assume the certainty of 
 these three facts. (I) that Christian confession, in its most 
 unquestioned and thorough types, is in our day undergoing 
 profound regeneration, through the operation evidently of 
 that inward spirit and truth of holiness and love which offer 
 the most indisputable mark of genuine Gospel faith ; (2) that, 
 through this regeneration, accredited external orthodoxy 
 what is called simply " orthodoxy" in the following pages 
 is giving way to a new, a more profound, and a far more cor- 
 rect orthodoxy ; and (3) that one of the ripest and most evi- 
 dent fruits of this change is the hope, the belief, the courage 
 to implicitly and joyfully trust, that the family of God's moral 
 and spiritual creation is absolutely one through God in 
 Christ reconciling the world unto himself, and that heavenly 
 growth to holiness and blessedness, according to a christen-
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 ing aud redeeming power of God working in us, is assured 
 beyond all question, not alone to such as spiritual help 
 reaches effectually in the present initial life, but to those also 
 who fall into the abyss of God's future inexorable punish- 
 ment of sin, or who through ignorance are all their life here 
 alienated from wisdom and holiness. 
 
 That the Divine Kingdom over all souls, revealed in 
 Christ, is one of discipline fully adequate to bring every 
 creature to the stature of a perfect man, its tremendous se- 
 verities no less than its evident mercies designed in sure wis- 
 dpm and perfect love, and the Creator's gift, in the very na- 
 ture ot the creature under Divine Fatherhood, a boon of 
 eternal life without exception or repentance, is the solemn, 
 joyful conviction with which the discussion of this little vol- 
 ume has been undertaken. The CHRISTENING FATHERHOOD 
 of God, with its illustration and sacramental symbol in the 
 CHRISTENED HUMANITY of Jesus, to the imitation of which, 
 and heirship of God with which, we are called, would seem 
 to be upon close discrimination, the very truth of Christ for 
 immediate practical use, until we all come in the unity of the 
 faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a per- 
 fect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of 
 Christ. 
 
 That this truth has been no more distinctly and profoundly 
 lield, and has only now begun to take the form of loyalty to 
 God and love to man for the redemption unto holiness and 
 heaven of every creature, may be ascribed to this cause the 
 fact that Disciples' Christianity has always proceeded upon a 
 -wrong principle, suggested by the natural and Judaic rather
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 than the regenerate and Christian mind, and has never to 
 any great historical purpose correctly represented the gen- 
 uine spiritual method of original Christian teaching. Jesus 
 told his own chosen that they must change entirely in order 
 to enter the kingdom in very truth. That he cannot have 
 referred to the conditions of provisional discipleship and per- 
 sonal salvation, is plain upon the face of the matter. He 
 must have referred to the change from very imperfect pro- 
 visional discipleship, to that complete imitation of himself 
 and thorough discipleship which should make them with 
 him fully sons of God and heirs of the Divine Kingdom. 
 Now this change was never made, at least not in any thor- 
 ough external way, and in consequence Judaic and natural 
 self-assertion and opinion have thus far ruled the external 
 course ol Christian history, and instead of spiritual conform- 
 ity to Christ, and faith rooted and grounded in the love 
 which he pronounced the true test of real discipleship, there 
 has prevailed a dogma about Jesus, with related dogmas and 
 practices, too often flagrantly false to the divine law of love. 
 Jesus felt constrained to say to an ardent burst of dogmatic 
 devotion in Peter, "Get thee behind me, Satan." It was 
 because the Christ which Peter took him to be was- a thor- 
 oughly false Christ, inasmuch as it savored of setting up Je- 
 sus in a way not consistent with true sacrifice to God. Yet 
 to this day imitation of Peter's zeal in opinion of Jesus has 
 greatly outrun imitation of Christ's pure sacrifice, and for the 
 Gospel ideal of holiness and love, reflected in the obedience 
 of Jesus, we have gospellers' ideas ol dogma and ordinance. 
 A discipleship faithfully attempting to obey the repeated and
 
 PKKFACK. 
 
 imperative cautions and rebukes aaddrcssed te the first disci- 
 ples, to save them from doing as the heathen did and from 
 following false traditions of Judaism, was not attempted by 
 primitive Christianity apart from Paul's single struggle against 
 the older and more immediate apostles, and Paul barely 
 fought down for himself the ban of Petrine orthodoxy, and 
 left no successor to his great task. 
 
 But what no Father, no Reformer, no Doctor of the 
 Church, had so much as attempted, universal Christian learn- 
 ing and life have groped towards always, and have uncon- 
 sciously reached to no small degree within recent years, until 
 it seems only necessary for some clear providential word to 
 be spoken to inaugurate a reform exceeding in significance 
 everything humanly undertaken on behalf of Christianity 
 since Paul rested from his labors. Such a reform would re- 
 cur to the Christian discernment which characterized Paul, 
 to divide, in prophetic record, evangelic report, and apostolic 
 teaching, between the very truth of Christ and the intruding 
 leaven of Petrine opinion, and to make definite and thorough 
 and conclusive that evolution of the spirit of holiness and love 
 which has become the prevailing highest mood of Christen 
 dom. 
 
 It is in the hope that providence and inspiration are indeed 
 bringing about this comprehensive reconsideration of Chris- 
 tian method and matter, and are preparing thereby a new 
 birth of historical Christianity, a regeneration equal to bring- 
 ing home our faith to awakened mankind, that the present, 
 and some other essays have been prepared, as studies in new 
 orthodoxy. The penman has endeavored to recur to the gen-
 
 PKEKACK. 
 
 uine method of our faith, that of partial and provisional 
 dependence only on text and record, and of a considerable 
 looking unto the unwritten oracles of christened conscience 
 and reason, the lights of that eternal Word which abundantly 
 aids patient search guided by fervent loyalty to God and 
 love to man. And after the manner of this dependence on 
 providence and spirit, he has ventured an appeal of strong 
 confidence to the name and authority of inspiration, as he 
 discerns it in the pure thoughts now deeply moving the Chris- 
 tian mind, and, as of the very truth of God in Christ, has pro- 
 posed to move the previous question of the Christian Religion 
 Holiness and Love upon the dogmatic orthodoxies of sect 
 and creed and church, which have been created after the 
 opinions of men, and not after God in righteousness and true 
 holiness. The essay now published opens a discussion which 
 will be continued in other essays, more specifically devoted 
 to interpreting the essential truth of Christ according to the 
 writer's conception of new, or regenerate and true ortho- 
 doxy. 
 New Haven, Sept. 1st, 1873.
 
 THE 
 
 QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 ORTHODOX PERPLEXITY. 
 
 There is in our day no more significant theologi- 
 cal spectacle than that of the orthodox world with 
 the dogma of eternal punishment in its hands. 
 How not to hold it and how not to drop it, is the 
 problem which drives believers and preachers into 
 all sorts of experimental speculations. It seems as 
 if evangelical faith must break, or at least ease, 
 the yoke of strict orthodox dogma, or perish in the 
 attempt. 
 
 THE MISCHIEFS OF UNCERTAIN TEACHING. 
 
 The plan of neither holding nor dropping a dog- 
 ma so conspicuous and significant as that of the 
 eternal perdition of sinners, palsies faith and mor- 
 ality to a perilous degree, neither that nor any 
 other definite view of retribution being distinctly 
 preached to doubting and tempted men. A com-
 
 12 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 prehensive indecision marks the popular pulpit, and 
 to avoid speaking decisively on great topics of 
 sound divinity, preachers resort to the small themes 
 of the passing earthly spectacle, and we hear the 
 catchwords of public gossip instead of the terms of 
 gospel truth. The name of some Jim or Jack of 
 rascality, made notorious by a violent death, runs 
 the round of the pulpits of the land, with an inter- 
 est keener a great deal than commonly attaches to 
 the name of Jesus. Not that dogmatic views of 
 Jesus are not abundant, nor that everybody would 
 not be greatly shocked at the mere thought of any- 
 thing conflicting with those views, but simply 
 this, that certain grand aspects of that name, suciv 
 as that of redemption from eternal misery through 
 it alone, are become so perplexing, if not so doubt- 
 ful, to average belief, in and out ot the pulpit, that 
 very few people want, and very few preachers can 
 give, any distinct, decisive message on such points, 
 and all are content to postpone judgment to come, 
 and find a theme of Sunday interest in the last 
 topic of the day. It may be taken for certain that 
 an overwhelming overthrow of dogma, by the in- 
 road of positive heresy, would be far better than 
 this terribly shaken and doubtful state of the be- 
 lieving mind, and that any energetic attempt to 
 take some ground, clearly and vigorously, with 
 definition and argument, should be heartily wel- 
 comed.
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 13 
 
 AN UNORTHODOX HELL. 
 
 In this view of the case, an unusual interest may 
 well attach to a treatise on The Duration and Na- 
 ture of Future Punishment, (by Henry Constable, 
 M. A. Prebendary of Cork), which Prof. C. L. Ives, 
 M. D., of Yale College, has introduced to Ameri- 
 can readers, in a pamphlet published not long 
 since at New Haven ; especially as Prof. Ives very 
 distinctly and forcibly avows his own conversion 
 to the theory of Mr. Constable, and makes, in a 
 brief introduction, a noteworthy confession and 
 plea, to the most serious prejudice of the current 
 orthodox dogma. As a means of getting a firm 
 and intimate hold of the subject, the more signifi- 
 cant statements of these two witnesses are of great 
 value. Both continue to adhere with the most 
 pious sincerity to the absolute authority of Scrip- 
 ture, and both assert a thorough dogma of eternal 
 perdition, at the same time that they destroy root 
 and branch, in their own earnest and carefully rea- 
 soned conviction, the old orthodox idea of what 
 perdition is, and do this with an incidental expos- 
 ure of the interior of orthodoxy, which is alone 
 worthy of the most thoughtful, not to say anxious, 
 attention. If any considerable proportion of or- 
 thodox believers are still strict in belief on no bet- 
 ter ground than that which Mr. Constable and 
 Prof. Ives appear to have stood upon, we may well
 
 14 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 expect some great catastrophe to the dogma called 
 orthodox, either a downfall of orthodoxy, or a total 
 change of front, which shall give it the aspect of a 
 new departure, more significant than any which 
 has taken place since Paul turned the infant 
 church out of its Judaic nest, adrift over the wide 
 uncertainties of a world of heathenism. 
 
 AN ORTHODOX WITNESS AGAINST ETERNAL HELL. 
 
 The confession and plea of the New Haven Pro- 
 fessor, which serves as a preface to Mr. Con- 
 table's treatise, in the publication to which we 
 have referred, deserves, and will repay, distinct 
 consideration. Professor Ives, though evidently 
 grounded to the fullest measure of piety in dog- 
 matic orthodoxy, and an able and scholarly inquir- 
 er, is, as a professor of medicine for the body 
 rather than the soul, a layman in divinity, and on 
 this account somewhat more frank and energetic, 
 as a convert, than an occupant of a pulpit would 
 have been. At any rate he says things which are 
 very much to the point of thorough and candid dis- 
 cussion. To begin with, he remarks upon his own 
 state of mind, while yet professing an orthodox 
 faith, in the following terms : 
 
 " Taught from childhood, as doubtless you also have been, 
 that all souls are possessed of immortality, and that, for the 
 wicked ones, hell is a place of eternal torment, I ever accepted 
 the belief, and for years have earnestly enforced it upon others. 
 But 1 during a recent journey in Europe, my faith in that doc-
 
 THE QUESTION 01 HELL. 15 
 
 trine was staggered by the sight of the multitudes there and 
 at the thought of the outlying millions still of Asia and 
 Africa, all hurrying on to God's tribunal. Can it be, that in 
 their hcedlessness and ignorance, or in their delusive strivings 
 after pardon, they are to meet a doom such as, in its infinity 
 of torture, the human mind could neither conceive nor'en- 
 dure the thought of ? I had learned to know somewhat of the 
 love of God, the Creator and upholder of these lost millions ; 
 how could I reconcile that with the accepted doctrine of 
 unending suffering? I did try, faithfully ; even, in these 
 struggles of the mind, writing home to a 'doubting Christian 
 brother to confirm him in this belief, which 1 feared was 
 slipping from under me." 
 
 EDUCATION CHIEFLY OCCASIONS THE ORTHODOX 
 FAITH IN HELL. 
 
 It appears from this statement, that Dr. Ives is 
 now conscious that education has been the chief 
 occasion of his belief, although that belief has gone 
 to the extent of earnest effort to persuade others. 
 This doubtless is the average ground of a similar 
 belief. Our orthodox Christians accept, insist on, 
 and vigorously contend for, extreme dogmas, chiefly 
 because they have been taught to do so, and find 
 that it is the rule to do so. And by consequence, 
 if ever a large view of the facts of the case is 
 brought home to their minds their belief can hardly 
 fail, having 'a chiefly traditional foundation, to 
 experience a shock. 
 
 DANGER OF REALLY THINKING WHAT HELL MEANS. 
 
 Dr. Ives was staggered when he came to really 
 think about it for himself. That he had not be-
 
 16 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 fore thought about it seems the sole explanation 
 of his previous unshaken confidence that the dogma 
 of eternal perdition is indeed true. A similar fail- 
 ure to really think about it, to comprehend even a 
 little the whole case, is doubtless the explanation 
 of ordinary assent to a dogma so fearful to real 
 thought as that which passes current under the 
 name of eternal punishment. It may be taken 
 almost for granted that no mind fully alive to 
 moral realities ever gave a full assent to this 
 dogma. Either men suppose themselves doing 
 this, while in fact hopes, or at least thoughts, of 
 mercy, are holding them back from full assent, or 
 they give a thorough assent because they are radi- 
 cally selfish and bad, and they think to buy their 
 own security by heartily consenting to promiscuous 
 perdition. 
 
 FAITH 'IN HELL UNNATURAL TO A CHRISTIAN MIND. 
 
 To be rooted and grounded in the thought of 
 damnation for others, in the same way that a soul 
 may be rooted and grounded in love, is not possi- 
 ble to a Christian, if indeed it be to anything but 
 a devil. This being the case, it is plain that Dr. 
 Ives is now a witness against his former self, to the 
 effect that, without thinking, and from the eftect 
 of education, he held, in Christ's name, a doctrine 
 worthy of the mind of a devil. And this we shall
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. IT 
 
 find both Dr. Ives and Mr. Constable admitting to 
 have been the case. 
 
 INFINITE TORTURE OF SOULS INCREDIBLE. 
 
 The great question which rose out of Dr. Ives' 
 consciousness of the divine love, -like an island 
 upheaved from the depths of the sea, never to sink 
 from view again, is a question which no thoroughly 
 awakened mind can escape Is infinite torture of 
 souls possible to GOD ? The common disposition 
 of this question is a verdict of not proven. Most 
 good persons, who think upon the subject, quietly 
 record this verdict, as one would slyly draw back a 
 bolt, and there leave the matter. They do not 
 permit themselves to go a single step further, or 
 even to admit that they cherish a hope for the 
 wicked. They innocently disguise, even to them- 
 selves, much more in argument with others, their 
 real hope and trust, by earnestly considering and 
 urging the reasons why we should act as if the 
 peril of hell were beyond all doubt. In experiences 
 which make them take definite ground, and compel 
 them to show where they stand, they let their hope 
 appear, or even their distinct and firm confidence, 
 at the same time that they avoid any very open or 
 thorough denial of the real dead dogma, and do 
 not venture to profess any very decisive faith that 
 Grod rules to redeem. Thus a doctrine of hell, 
 which is of lidl in every sense, gets borne on upon
 
 1 8 THE Q UES TION OF HEL L, 
 
 the current of general faith, though no more a part 
 of that faith than a dead log is of the living stream 
 on which it rides to the sea. When education, 
 therefore, shall cease to insist on this dogma, the 
 average Christian mind will be emancipated from 
 it, and faith in redemption, which is now whis- 
 pered in the ear, will be the open confession of all. 
 
 DOGMATIC TEMPTATION TO DISHONESTY. 
 
 Dr. Ives tells us that at the very time that his 
 faith was staggered by thoughts which he could 
 not suppress, he tried to act as if no such doubt 
 troubled his own mind. He even avows that he 
 urged a doubting brother not to doubt, at the very 
 moment that he was himself doubting. Such re- 
 sult of a perplexed faith must not surprise us, 
 much less lead us to harsh judgment. It is as 
 honest in the motive as it is otherwise in the act, 
 and we must understand rather than rebuke. But 
 if the very worst trick of mind is not to be accepted 
 as a means of grace, we must energetically put 
 away all such untruth of profession and plea ; ear- 
 nestly follow light as providence and spirit bring it 
 to our minds, and avoid false confession as a device 
 of the father of lies. 
 
 DOGMATIC UNVERACITY. 
 
 Dr. Ives did perhaps own to his doubting brother 
 that he also was in doubt, and did not profess, or
 
 THE QUESTION Of HELL. 19 
 
 imply, a confidence greater than he really had. If 
 this was not the case, however ; if Dr. Ives, with 
 hisjown mind shaken, urged unshaken conviction, 
 his act was not one whit more moral intrinsically 
 than any other false sacrifice to God, but was as 
 thoroughly heathen and superstitious as if it had 
 been done on the banks of the Ganges, by the most 
 ignorant of idolaters. We are not bound to con- 
 fession, much less to argument, of our heart's 
 faith ; but to attempt either, except in truth and 
 sincerity, and especially to attempt argument to 
 which our own confession would give the lie, is 
 neither praise to God, nor benefit to 'man, but one 
 of the greatest delusions and mischiefs possible. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY DEMANDS TRUTH OF CONVICTION. 
 
 The habit of falsifying real convictions in a sup- 
 posed duty of standing up for beliefs which are 
 slipping away from us, is doubtless exceedingly 
 common. We at least have met it frequently in 
 our intimate experience of the orthodox religious 
 world. And it is our deep conviction that nothing 
 so much as this deserves to be considered against 
 the rule of Christian faith. That faith places 
 every soul under the providence and spirit of God, 
 for every motion of the mind, as well as every act 
 of life. Careful, therefore,, as we may be not to 
 boldly assume the finger of God in our experience,
 
 20 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 we are bound to trust the divine leading of our 
 most earnest efforts to have truth of thought and 
 hope and trust and purpose in the inner man ; and 
 when such efforts bring us to profound question- 
 ings ; when they drive the ploughshare of doubt 
 through old faith, to open deeper ground of new 
 faith ; we are bound to study honesty as well as 
 humility, and to no more think of telling, by word 
 or act, what is not true, to a doubting brother, 
 than we would tell a lie to the Holy Ghost. 
 
 THE CRIME AGAINST CHRIST. 
 
 The Christian communion of our day sadly needs 
 open and free confession among its members. 
 Those of our dogmatists who treat such confession 
 as a crime, are sinning with a high hand against 
 the pure doctrine of Christ. They are Jesuits as 
 much worse than the Catholic ever were as the 
 new inquiry of our day is deeper than that which 
 sprang up on Catholic ground. If it please God 
 to decimate, once and again, our orthodox doctors 
 of divinity,* with a plague of sudden summons from 
 this scene of struggling faith, and pour upon them 
 
 * Such persons will find the story of Ananias and Sapphira 
 a much needed lesson, if they will, in a truthful figure, take 
 the former to represent Catholic Ecclesiasticism, and the lat- 
 ter Protestant dogmatism. The feet of the young men who 
 carried out the former, dead by the hand of God, about the 
 space of three historical hours ago, are at the door, and shall 
 carry thee out, thou mother of lies, Protestant Dogmatism !
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 21 
 
 that remain a spirit of honest opening of their 
 hearts, that in the fear of God we may all reason 
 together of the things that concern our peace, it 
 will be more to the purpose of the coming of the 
 kingdom of God on earth than anything which has 
 occurred since Jesus said plainly to a chief apostle, 
 Get thee behind me, Satan. 
 
 L1TEKAL DEATH IN HELL. 
 
 Dr. Ives found in Mr. Constable's treatise on 
 Future Punishment the doctrine that eternal death 
 is literally death, the extinction, through the 
 plague of sin and the pains of hell, of the sinful 
 soul ; and this he accepted as a substitute for the 
 orthodox dogma of eternal torment. 
 
 ETERNAL EXTINCTION PUT FOR ETERNAL HELL. 
 
 The spirit and method of his conversion to this 
 doctrine of eternal extinction of the wicked, he 
 indicates in these sentences : 
 
 lt This view of the future, professedly derived from the 
 word of God, I carefully and prayerfully compared with the 
 Scripture record. And there, as I believe, I found it ; and so 
 plainly set forth, I could but wonder that I had so long over 
 looked it. I had been blinded, as I believe we all are, by the 
 idea that immortality must be a necessary attribute of every 
 soul, and so the truth had heretofore lain concealed. But 
 with the sweeping away of that error, a clearer light is shed 
 upon the Holy Word itself, which I can now understand as it 
 was written, not as it is explained for me by commentators. 
 
 "Rejecting the traditional dogma of the soul's essential 
 immortality, denied, it would seem, if anything can be, in the 
 Bible, our doubts and difficulties vanish with it. The justice
 
 22 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 of God, and the question of the origin and end of evil, no 
 longer now need the unsatisfactory explanation of theologic 
 essayists. 
 
 "The popular theory that 'every soul is immortal,' is the 
 original lie of our sinful world. It was first uttered in Eden 
 when Satan declared to our tempted parents 'Ye shall not 
 surely die ' ; in the same words it is repeated by the Univer- 
 salist of our day ; and it is repeated still, though it be unwit- 
 tingly and in other words, by every orthodox religious 
 teacher, when he proclaims 'Ye shall live forever in your 
 sins,' . . The arch-deceiver has for centuries persuaded the 
 Christian Church that his lie was not far from the truth. . . 
 Sad that our Protestant forefathers, when they took their 
 stand upon the Bible, and rejected the many errors of a cor- 
 rupted Church, had not also recognized and rejected this 
 early device of the Old Serpent. " 
 
 ORTHODOX SOPHISTRY CONTEMNED. 
 
 Here again we see that the old view, though 
 firmly held as Bible doctrine, was beset with doubts 
 and difficulties, and that to meet these Dr. Ives had 
 found only " the unsatisfactory explanation of the- 
 ological essayists." It is a sweeping sentence of 
 contempt against the masters of New England 
 divinity, to brush them aside in this way, as theo- 
 logical essayists ; but Dr. Ives is evidently sure of 
 his ground, though it be in high disrespect to Tay- 
 lor and Dwight, who were masters in New Haven, 
 and to still greater names, with whom has rested 
 the credit of having placed the orthodox system 
 upon a foundation of impregnable reasoning. Prof. 
 Park said in the great Boston Council of Congre- 
 gationalists a few years since, that an educated 
 ^ who was not a Calvinist, was not a respecta-
 
 THE Q UESTION OF HELL. 23 
 
 ble man ; and this rough witticism Dr. Taylor, the 
 New Haven dogmatist of some years since, who 
 fills a large place in American theological history, 
 would have echoed, at least in its spirit. But here 
 conies a voice from the very camp of Park and Taylor, 
 a voice that must be deemed at least respectable, to 
 stigmatize the very key of the orthodox position as 
 unsatisfactory theological essaying. There is all 
 the more force in the thrust, from the fact that the 
 author of it evidently had no purpose to be con- 
 temptuous. He simply breaks out wi:h lervent 
 satisfaction at being delivered from the cruel mer- 
 cies of a sophistical dogmatism. 
 
 A FALSE USE OF SCRIPTURE CONFESSED. 
 
 It is from Bible to Bible, from text to text, nay 
 from sense to sense within the same texts, that Dr. 
 Ives has made this journey out of the old into the 
 new. The spectacle is an instructive one. Dr. 
 Ives confesses that he has read the Bible with 
 blinded eyes. He charges this blindness in part 
 upon the use of commentators ; in part upon 
 ideas instilled^ into him from childhood. He has 
 doubtless avoided heterodox commentators, and 
 has studiously used such helps as he knew would 
 confirm his traditional faith. This is the common 
 course of lay, and even of clerical study, so that 
 most are in precisely the position which Dr. Ives
 
 24 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 says- that he was in until lately ; they read what 
 they believe and believe what they read, and are 
 mere devout parrots of orthodox tradition, no more 
 grounded in thorough intelligence than if mind 
 had been given us to be suppressed, and confession 
 were truest as a service of the lips, irrespective of 
 the motion of the heart. 
 
 UNCERTAINTIES OF ORTHODOX INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Dr. Ives is now confident that he has heretofore 
 rested in a plainly erroneous and exceedingly per- 
 verse interpretation of Scripture. If this be in- 
 deed so, who is to assure us that average orthodoxy 
 is not equally plunging into the ditch, not merely 
 as it must be, if Dr. Ives is now right, but on 
 other momentous points of faith ? How does Dr. 
 Ives know that his eyes are even now open to the 
 very truth of God, even on the topic to which Jiis 
 new views relate ? 
 
 A mere shifting of the kaleidoscope of texts is 
 alone a very uncertain ground to go upon. Dr. 
 Ives must be aware that even the Mormon delusion 
 is, in its own way, mighty in the Scriptures. IJe 
 sees, in Mr. Constable's admissions, that the logic 
 of Universalist argument with orthodoxy has been 
 legitimate, if all souls, as orthodoxy assumes, are 
 indeed immortal. Many a hasty disputant, or 
 even wild fanatic, has prayerfully compared his
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 25 
 
 view with the word of God, and found pegs enough 
 to hang his notions on. So it is hardly as cheer- 
 ful for Dr. Ives's readers as for himself, to find how 
 entirely the aspect of Scripture teaching has 
 changed in his mind, and how very sure he is that 
 he was until lately quite blinded by false notions, 
 and now sees holy writ as it really is. 
 
 WHY NOT A STEP FURTHER ? 
 
 May it not be that he who lately saw not at all, 
 now barely sees men as trees walking, and that 
 another point of view would occasion a further rev- 
 olution in his belief? It by no means follows that 
 one touch, even of the hand which is miracle itself, 
 leaves nothing more to be done. Dr. Ives no lon- 
 ger believes in the eternal torture of souls in hell. 
 If he were to go and wash in the waters of a purely 
 spiritual reading of Scripture, he might see the 
 lost, not as cinders of damnation, but as brands 
 snatched from the burning, saved as by fire, after 
 some method worthy at once of perfect justice and 
 absolute mercy. 
 
 A SUSPICIOUS FOUNDATION. 
 
 It is a curious circumstance that the turn which 
 orthodoxy has taken in the convictions of Dr. Ives, 
 hinges on absolute denial of the great doctrine of 
 the immortality of the soul. And we must say 
 that this seems a very suspicious circumstance.
 
 26 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 Blinded by this idea of the soul's immortality, are 
 all men, says Dr. Ives. If this were a mere dogma 
 of the creed, and not at once an instinct and a 
 reasoned conviction of natural religion, it would be 
 less difficult to consent to the account which Dr. 
 Ives gives of it. 
 
 Or, if we take the other ground, that immortal- 
 ity is a doctrine of special revelation, what is to 
 become of the claim that through Christ this great 
 hope was brought to light ? There has been a 
 grand confidence in the Christain mind because of 
 this claim, and if we are now to learn that this 
 confidence was not just, the situation becomes ex- 
 ceedingly painful. There has seemed to be a di- 
 vine magnanimity in this beam of light out of 
 eternity, touching with bright promise the head of 
 every creature, and to withdraw this, and say that 
 by nature we were never meant to be any more 
 than the beasts that perish, and that only to such 
 as find Christ does there open any the least pros- 
 pect of continued existence, seems like a shabby 
 deception. Doubtless theology has been in some 
 respects a shabby deceiver, but this great tenet of 
 human expectation and Christian confidence, has 
 so risen on the world with immeasurable splendor, 
 and has had such a career of inextinguishable 
 brightness through" mid heaven, that we reluct- 
 antly assist as docile spectators while Dr. Ives and
 
 ,THE QUESTION OF HELL. 27 
 
 another excellent gentleman show us that the 
 beaming eye of Godhead is only a lantern after all, 
 and to that man as man the path of existence has 
 never known, and never can know, the light of day. 
 
 THE OLD SERPENT IN ORTHODOXY. 
 
 The terms in which Dr. Ives tenders us his as- 
 surance of knowledge on this subject, add to the 
 perplexity with which we listen to him. The idea 
 of immortality he pronounces " the original lie of 
 our sinful world/' and this lie he finds in the mouth 
 of "every orthodox religious teacher," disguised a 
 little, but identical with the primal satanic false- 
 hood. The blood of all Christendom is poisoned. 
 on this theory, with the virus of the Old Serpent, 
 and where theology has most thought that its work 
 was divinity, it has really blundered into diabolism. 
 
 It may be so. The heart of man is unquestion- 
 ably deceitful, and desperately perverse, in nothing 
 more than in its dogmatic conceits, its raw opinion 
 consecrated by long tradition under the name of 
 religion. The candid scholar, once that his atten- 
 tion is called to the subject, must confess that it is 
 quite possible that some of our most cherished 
 dogmas are really no better than survivals of hea- 
 thenism, handed down from age to age, in a more 
 and more disguised form, as elements of revelation. 
 But if this is the case, and especially if it has been
 
 28 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 the case in respect of one of the great points of 
 orthodoxy, can we rest so easily as Dr. Ives does in 
 qualified orthodoxy ? May it not bo that the sat- 
 isfaction with which he reflects on the loss, by ex- 
 tinction, of a large part of mankind, is just as much 
 from the Old Serpent as the view on that subject 
 which Christians generally hold ? 
 
 FAITH IN HELL BADLY SHAKEN. 
 
 Dr. Ives has some remarks on the condition of 
 the Christian mind on the question of eternal pun- 
 ishment, which merit a moment's consideration, 
 before we proceed to the larger field of Mr. Consta- 
 ble' s argument. Dr. Ives says : 
 
 "A candid, not dogmatic and bitter, review of the grounds 
 of our belief regarding future punishment is greatly needed 
 at the present day. I speak for the laymen as one of them, 
 and I know also, that not a few of our devout and thoughtful 
 clergymen have Serious difficulties on this point Hear this 
 testimony from that -well-known preacher and Bible expos- 
 itor, Rev. Albert Barnes. Speaking of sin's entrance into the 
 world, and of that eternity of suffering he felt constrained to 
 teach, he declares : 
 
 1 ' ' These are re;'?, not imaginary difficulties. . . I confess, 
 for one, I feel them, and feel them the more sensibly and 
 powerfully the more I look at them, and the longer I live. 
 
 . I do not know that I have a ray of light on this subject, 
 which I had not when, the subject first flashed across my soul. 
 I have read, to some extent, what wise and good men have 
 written. I have looked at their various theories and expla- 
 nations. I have endeavored to weigh their arguments, for 
 my whole soul pants for light and relief on these questions. 
 But I get neither ; and 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
 
 THE Q UES1ION OF HELL. 20 
 
 why man must suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a 
 particle of light thrown on these subjects that has given a 
 moment's ease to my tortured mind. . . It is all dark 
 dark dark, to my soul, and I cannot disguise it.' 
 
 "' In the midst of this gloom,' as he styles it, Mr*. Barnes 
 comforts himself with the belief that, it must be that the 
 Judge of all the earth will do right, though appearances are 
 so much against it; it seeming never to occur to him that his 
 own theology, and not the revealed truth, is here at fault. 
 Others of our religious teachers live on in silence, seeking 
 relief from these felt difficulties in a smothered hope in uni- 
 versal salvation, or at least a final restoration of the wicked, 
 or else they fancy a probation beyond the grave ; in either 
 case failing to give decided utterance ot that future woe, so 
 solemnly enforced by the Great Preacher." 
 
 NO LIGHT IN ORTHODOXY. 
 
 That neither light nor relief are ever found by 
 a deeply thoughtful mind in strict orthodoxy ; that 
 they are very commonly found in a smothered hope 
 of universal salvation, or of final restoration, or at 
 least of a probation beyond the grave ; and that in 
 this state of the case doctrinal teaching has become 
 hesitating and reticent, and almost imbecile, are 
 things which any one may see for himself after 
 some good degree of acquaintance with the move- 
 ments of the orthodox world. 
 
 THE NEW CHRISTIAN HOPE. 
 
 About the only thing that discreet and instruct- 
 ed thinkers now pretend to say is that it must be 
 that the Judge of all the earth will do right ; and 
 very few of these can deny that appearances, on 
 the orthodox theory, are anything but right. We
 
 30 Till-: QUESTION Of HELL. 
 
 may feel pretty sure, therefore, that some great 
 overturning is in preparation, some sweeping round 
 to a new base of the deathless energies of our faith, 
 and that we perhaps who live may be even now 
 hearing the first signals of the greatest change 
 which providence and spirit have yet prepared for 
 Christian mankind. Let us then with unflinching 
 courage trim and refill the sacred lamp of inquiry 
 after God, and wait Avith patience for the glorious 
 appearing which is to bring a new heavens and a 
 new earth. 
 
 THREE OPINIONS ABOUT HELL. 
 
 Mr. Constable's treatise, to which reference has 
 been made, is a very able plea for a peculiar view 
 of eternal punishment. We propose to follow him 
 through the more striking points of his statement, 
 and to make the course of his argument a point of 
 departure for such suggestions as we desire to 
 offer. The initial statement of Mr. Constable's 
 position is in the following passage : 
 
 " There are three main opinions relative to this punish- 
 ment. One of these makes it to be essentially of a purgative 
 nature, to be temporary in its deration, and to have as its issue 
 the restoration of all to God's favor and eternal happiness. 
 This was the opinion of Origen. The second is that which 
 has long been most commonly received. It makes punish- 
 ment to be eternal in its duration, and supposes it to consist 
 in an eternal life spent in misery and pain. This was the 
 theory of St. Augustine. According to the third opinion, 
 punishment is also eternal, but death, i. e. the loss of life,, is its 
 essence, attended and preceded by such various degrees of
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 31 
 
 pain as a just and merciful God, for wise reasons, sees fit to 
 inflict. The third of these opinions is the one here main- 
 tained. Its establishment will of course set aside the others. 
 Its eternal duration will overthrow that oT Origen ; its char- 
 acter, involving a state of death, will overthrow alike that of 
 Origen and Augustine." p. 1. 
 
 HELL AS PURGATION OF EVIL. 
 
 Rearranging for our own purposes the course of 
 the discussion, we will first hear more explicitly in 
 regard to the view here connected with the great 
 name of Origen. Mr. Constable has this to say, in 
 further explanation, and in qualified defence, of 
 this view : 
 
 " Origen converts hell into a vast purgatory, and sends men 
 and devils forth from it purified and humbled to the feet of 
 the Great Father and to the joys which are at his right hand 
 forevermore." p. 59. 
 
 " In one grand feature of his theory he commands our 
 entire sympathy. He looked forward to the extinction of 
 evil. His yearning for it was true, was but following out the 
 judgment and reason as well as the longing of every right 
 heart. -We cannot look at evil its hatefulness, its misery, its 
 pollution and think that with such a God as ours this evil 
 will be permitted to extend or to exist forever. So thought 
 Origen, and Scripture bears him out." p. 03. 
 
 "Evil is not to be eternal . . . God has pledged his 
 word and his power that it shall be abolished and destroyed. 
 He has promised a ' restitution of all ik'nys' by the mouth of all 
 his holy prophets since the world began." p. 43. 
 
 GOD ETERNALLY AGAINST EVIL. 
 
 Here doubtless is the deepest foundation on 
 which faith can build, the thought of God as 
 against all evil forever. If we can tell what this 
 against all evil -forever should really mean, and
 
 32 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 what it should not mean, we solve the problems of 
 divinity. The great thing, therefore, is to discover 
 how to keep true to this thought, how to get and 
 to apply the real meaning of it. 
 
 HOW TO BE WITH GOD AGAINST EVIL. 
 
 As far as we know, one of the simplest and most 
 exact rules for this momentous business of keeping 
 true to God, as the perfection of resistance to evil, 
 is the old Hebrew rule " To do justly, to love 
 mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." If 
 our concern about justice is practical rather than 
 speculative ; if from it we proceed to active love of 
 our fellow-man, after the manner of mercy, which 
 dictates help, redemption, and good hope ; and if 
 we bow our heads in simple worship before God, 
 not attempting to read, much less to judge, his 
 plan of the government of the universe, we may 
 expect to find ourselves becoming rooted in a true 
 faith in God. 
 
 ORTHODOX DIVINITY BEGINS EXACTLY WRONG. 
 
 This is the exact opposite of the usual method 
 in divinity. Commonly our teaching puts a slight 
 upon mere doing justice on our part, and demands 
 rather that we consider what is the infinite justice, 
 and its bearing upon our own fate. So far from 
 being urged to rest in loving mercy, and to make
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 33 
 
 this the vestibule, as it were, of approach to God, \ve 
 are bid take heed to the Divine wrath and our own 
 selfish need of mercy, and to look out for our own 
 salvation, and rest not one jot in trying to live for 
 others. And as for humility as the ground and 
 rule of our coming to God, we are rather summoned 
 to inordinate ambition to enter familiarly into a 
 comprehensive acquaintance with the mind and 
 ways of Deity, quite as if our salvation depended 
 on our knowing a fair proportion at least of the 
 secrets of the universe, and on our taking a hand, 
 at least by proxy, in keeping up the dignities of 
 Godhead. This scheme of obsequious attention in the 
 presence of God, of studying mercy as from God to 
 ourselves instead of from ourselves to our fellows, 
 and of slurring righteousness of conduct as " filthy 
 rags" in the sight of God, exactly reverses the 
 prophet's rule, on no ground whatever of real 
 truth. 
 
 THE SIMPLEST DUTIES OUR CHIEF CONCERN. 
 
 It is both clear reason and evident revelation 
 that our chief concern is with our nearest and 
 simplest duties, those of common justice, of right 
 conduct of man with man ; and with that zvork of 
 good will, of kindness and love, of tenderness of 
 heart, which has grown more and more upon the 
 Christian and the human conscience as a divine
 
 34 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 task ; and that when we have thus put ourselves 
 to use, and have done with our might whatever 
 our hands find to do, there only remains to us the 
 loyalty of humble reliance on God, submission' 
 without question or doubt, the submission of peni- 
 tence, of trust, of unspeakable peace, as becomes 
 children taught by providence and spirit, by law ? 
 prophecy, and gospel, to say, simply and sincerely, 
 " Our Father." 
 
 SYSTEMATIC DIVINITY A DISTURBER. 
 
 So far as systematic divinity has turned men 
 away from this faith and practice of justice, mercy, 
 and humble confidence in G-od, so far it has done 
 wrong, after the manner, alas ! of human conceit, 
 which is not the manner of grace and truth. The 
 religious world is filled with the noise of loud pre- 
 tension, the thousand voices of ambition to stand 
 high before God, instead of to walk humbly with 
 him, and mercy and justice are thought no rules at 
 all for redemption, but only incidents of that pride 
 of near approach to God which is miscalled faith. 
 
 NO EXCUSE FOR PHARISAIC PRETENSION. 
 
 The putting all this upon the name of Jesus 
 makes it no better. To be ready and confident 
 through Jesus in no way excuses the mistake. We 
 may mean to honor Jesus in professing an exten- 
 sive personal acquaintance with the plans of the
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 35 
 
 Eternal Mind, and in attaching ourselves famil- 
 iarly to God, assuming for ourselves a special dig- 
 nity of peculiar sonship, and we may think we 
 have great warrant, in Scripture for example, for 
 doing this, but the solemn fact is that no possible 
 warrant can justify such departure from simple 
 humility before God. 
 
 HUMILITY BEFORE GOD AN ABSOLUTE DUTY. 
 
 Let us hear what we may, or think what we 
 may, our place remains the same, that of humble 
 confidence. God is Infinite King and Father ; 
 and loyalty of trust and love is our absolute, our 
 eternal, duty. What we can have of this, is our 
 whole concern ; what we cannot have, we can mend 
 only by what we have, protesting to God with all 
 our might our utmost belief, and with our equal 
 might praying and trusting him to help our unbe- 
 lief. This is that fear of the Lord which is the 
 beginning of wisdom, and that faith in God which 
 is the perfection of wisdom. 
 
 FIDELITY BEFORE ORTHODOXY. 
 
 It may seem difficult to reconcile Scripture and 
 Christ with this, but not for that are we warranted 
 in plunging into the bog of a still greater difficulty, 
 that in which Dr. Barnes, as we have seen, con- 
 fesses that he had floundered, without hope or help, 
 all his days the difficulty of making our interpre-
 
 36 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 tation consistent with the faith and practice of jus- 
 tice, mercy, and humble reliance on God. If we 
 cannot arrive at both a true fidelity and an ortho- 
 dox belief, we must defer the latter rather than the 
 former, until by fidelity we grow up unto faith, 
 according to the method of coming to know the 
 doctrine, by doing the will. 
 
 Custom is the other way, in consequence of the 
 perverse conceit with which men take hold of the 
 matter. But we must be born again from custom 
 and conceit, in order to reach our place as children 
 of God, which is not that of exegetes, or dogma- 
 tists, or ecclesiastics, but that of humility, of loyal- 
 ty, of trust, devotion, and obedience. 
 
 FILIAL FAITH IMPERATIVE. 
 
 The method of thrusting Bible and Christ be- 
 tween the soul and God, and of fixing selfish inter- 
 est on these, as means of our redemption, has 
 profoundly disturbed the natural order of religious 
 experience. No means of grace, no agent of divine 
 power, no person even of Godhead, can properly cut 
 off our souls from the Infinite Fount, or rightly 
 intercept our filial trust. 
 
 It is better that we wholly confine our attention 
 to Jesus teaching his disciples to pray, than that 
 we permit ourselves to wander from this pattern of
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 37 
 
 simple dependence on God Our Father, simple sub- 
 mission to him, and childlike trust in his care. 
 
 NO REAL NEED OF MUCH DOGMA. 
 
 We ought continually to think how apostles 
 even had to be brought back, as when a little child 
 was set in their midst to be a lesson to them of the 
 right method of faith ; and how inevitably the 
 pride of opinion has carried belief into far too much 
 dogma, and along paths of questionable and use- 
 less interpretation. 
 
 Suppose that we cannot read the Bible aright 
 in all its parts, and cannot justly weigh the prob- 
 lems which are become a jungle of theories about 
 the person of Jesus. We can at least wait on the 
 spirit and providence of God for guidance in the 
 matter, and meanwhile attend with all our might 
 to the simpler, yet not smaller, nor less significant 
 task, of doing justly, loving mercy, and walking 
 humbly with God after the instruction of Jesus in 
 the " Our Father." And if to us so occupied there 
 come any wild heathen fear that the Father will 
 murder the children that cry unto him in simple 
 trust, we can say to such fear, even if it wear the 
 mask and boast the dignities of a theological sys- 
 tem, Get thee behind me SATAN. 
 
 FAITH IN UNIVERSAL PURIFICATION IS CHRISTIAN. 
 
 To apply this view to what Mr. Constable tells
 
 38 THE QUESTION Of HELL. 
 
 us that Origen taught of the fate of souls, we need 
 but mark the terms of the teaching in question, as 
 these are put by Mr. Constable. It " sends men 
 and Devils forth from purgatorial hell purified and 
 humbled to the feet of the Great Father." We 
 omit the mention of " restoration to God's favor 
 and eternal happiness," us not part of the main 
 point of the theory. That point is candidly ex- 
 pressed in the words just quoted ; and we presume 
 no one can question that filial fear of God must 
 rejoice to think of the possibility that all the evil 
 shall be made good. It may not be necessary to 
 humble trust in God to assume that this will be 
 so, but such trust can hardly help looking forward 
 to it with very considerable, if not with very strong 
 faith. And the fact actually is, that simple faith 
 in God very commonly grows into a good degree of 
 expectation that all souls will be purified and hum- 
 bled by all discipline, here or hereafter, and so 
 made true children of God. 
 
 DOGMATIC HORROR OF REDEMPTION. 
 
 Mr. Constable is very far indeed from having 
 this faith ; for he breathes fury almost against the 
 large hope to which it leads. Thus he says : 
 
 "This view would, we firmly believe, if commonly be- 
 lieved, in a single generation reduce the morals of the world 
 to a level with those of Sodom."
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 30 
 
 Again he says : 
 
 " In Origin's view of the future, a view now fast spread- 
 ing, we see the real cause of the emphatic, repeated, awful 
 declarations of the eternity of future punishment. That view, 
 so pleasing to fallen human nature, was the view against 
 which the Spirit of God laid down in Scripture the warnings 
 of everlasting destruction, of unquenchable fire. Experience 
 has proved the necessity of this. Even in the face of these 
 Scriptures men are found to advocate the hope of a restora- 
 tion from hell. Far more than Augustine's theory does the 
 view here maintained root out this false delusive hope. So 
 !ong as men believe that life is not extinguished in hell, so 
 long they will nourish hope. They will cherish the idea that 
 somewhere down through the ages, when .the groans of hell 
 have been beating sadly, ceaselessly, at the gates of heaven, 
 the message of mercy find deliverance may again be sent 
 down, even as God used to send it of old to Israel groaning 
 beneath the bondngo of Egypt, Philistia, and Canaan. Death 
 extirpates all such hopes. "' Corruption has a hope of a kind 
 of removal, but death has everlasting ruin,'" p. 35. 
 
 Mr. Constable knows a great deal too much of 
 the purpose and meaning of Scripture. The lan- 
 guage "emphatic, repeated, awful declarations of 
 the eternity of future punishment/' is his own pri- 
 vate invention. But if such a text were in Scrip- 
 ture, it would yet become us to pause before it, 
 and by no means to look through it into bottomless 
 horror. Mr. Constable advances a rather crazy 
 opinion when he tells us that faith in the divine 
 recovery of all souls to obedience, would in a sin- 
 gle generation reduce the morals of the world to a 
 level with those of Sodom. Frantic exclamation 
 of this sort shows a habit of mind the very oppo- 
 site to that of iaith. To call it infidelity would
 
 10 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 be harsh, and yet it has the tone of desperate un- 
 belief. 
 
 INFIDELITY OF DOGMA. 
 
 What a lack .of faith in man, to assume that 
 but for the fear of hell we should have Sodom at 
 once ! What frightful doubt of God's control, to 
 suppose that it hangs on human opinion on this 
 subject ! But no sane man really has this lack of 
 faith in man and in God. It is without stopping 
 to think, and out of a wild fervor of mere feeling, 
 that Mr. Constable says that he "firmly believes." 
 It is an orthodox exclamation, not a Christian con- 
 fession. 
 
 NO ASSURANCE OF HELL NEEDED. 
 
 Mr. Constable is aware that a hopeful view of 
 future existence is " now last spreading." He ad- 
 mits that " men are found to advocate a restoration 
 from hell." Indeed, he candidly avows that this 
 must be so ; that, so long as the lost continue to 
 exist, some one will nourish hope for them. And 
 he claims it as a grand merit of his theory that it 
 cuts off such trusting hope, as no other theory 
 does. Here again he runs before he is sent. The 
 children of God do not require insurance against 
 the redemption of the lost. 
 
 AN INFINITE OPEN HOPE. 
 
 On the contrary, they do require an infinite open
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 41 
 
 hope. They may fear the worst on many grounds, 
 and may really" hope and believe only where their 
 affections are engaged, or after they have reached 
 a profound knowledge of faith working by love, 
 but in no case do they require, or should they per- 
 mit, hope to be closed and trust to be cut off. 
 When, therefore, Mr. Constable, or any other dog- 
 matist, undertakes to put everlasting ruin at the 
 end of faith's prospect of the destiny of all souls, 
 he does exactly the wrong thing. If the books of 
 hope are ever closed, it will be by no hand other 
 than that of final divine purpose. Anticipation of 
 that purpose is contrary to the law of Christian 
 faith. 
 
 DOGMATIC RAGE. 
 
 Origen's handling of Scripture excites the ire 
 and scorn of Mr. Constable, as the following sen- 
 tences will show : 
 
 " Origcn never found any difficulty in Scripture. If it was 
 for him, well and good [f it was against him, he made it 
 without any ceremony speak as he wished." 
 
 " Every reader of Scripture knows that its solemn warn- 
 ings are addressed to the sinner in person : ' wicked man, thou 
 shall surely die.' Death, Destruction, Perdition, Loss of Life 
 all the multiplied phrases and illustrations of the Bible are 
 there directed against the persons of the wicked. Origen's 
 simple mode of neutralizing their force is by directing them 
 against their sin A.nd so his point is gained. Their force 
 cannot be too strong for him, so he does not attempt to di- 
 minish it. The Augustinian, directing them against the sin- 
 ner, robs them of their meaning : Origen directing them 
 against the sin, leaves them their proper sense. Both pervert
 
 42 THE Q UESTION OF HELL. 
 
 Scripture, and it is difficult to say against which the charge 
 is the heaviest. 
 
 We meet with Origen's free and easy method of Scripture 
 everywhere throughout his writings. Whatever be our opin- 
 ion of Origen personally, of his learning, his brilliancj', even 
 of the truth of much of his teaching, his teaching here places 
 him among those prophets condemned by Ezekiel for 
 4 strengthening the hands of the wicked, that he should not 
 return from his wicked way, by promising him life." p. 62. 
 
 INADVERTENT FALSEHOOD. 
 
 The last word of this quotation is one of those 
 inadvertent untruths which crowd the history of 
 theological controversy. Neither Origen, nor Ori- 
 gen's hopeful theory, aim in the slightest degree to 
 strengthen the hands of the wicked, that he should 
 not return from his wicked way. The sole aim of 
 this theory is to strengthen right, and bring man 
 back to God. To threaten severe, sin-crushing 
 discipline, with the minatory promise that it will 
 be insisted on to the bitter end, and made as ef- 
 fectual as the very furnace of fire is to gold in the 
 refiner's hands, is the exact opposite of giving aid 
 and comfort to the wicked. 
 
 PURGATION THE TRUE SEVERITY. 
 
 The reaction against violent orthodoxy has per- 
 haps worn an appearance of getting the sinner off, 
 of rescuing him from penalty, of breaking down 
 the tremendous severities of discipline, but this is 
 no part ol a wise hope in the redemptive efficacy 
 of the divine justice. On the contrary, such a
 
 THE Q UES2ION" OF HELL. 43 
 
 hope, held with humility not less than confidence, 
 affords the best possible ground on which to build 
 a thorough, irresistible doctrine of the divine se- 
 verity against sin. It has no appearance of injus- 
 tice, yet lacks no rigor of infinite regard for law, 
 ;;ince it at once asserts law effectually over all the 
 disobedient, and makes this assertion a perfect 
 moral benefit to the sufferer, as well as to creature 
 society in general. If searching rebuke of sin is 
 to come back to our pulpits, it must be when the 
 stroke of severity is at once weighted and steadied 
 by the certainty that we may justly have good 
 hope of the perfect, the universal and absolute, 
 efficiency of the divine discipline. 
 
 ETERNAL DEATH TO SIN. 
 
 It is wholly untrue, then, that hope promises 
 life to the wicked, that he should not return from 
 his wicked way. It promises death rather, and a 
 death more significant and effectual than extinc- 
 tion. Our spirits can resist torrnent, especially 
 when we distinctly anticipate a final end of pain. 
 Milton obeyed a just instinct in making the cour- 
 age and greatness of Satan more than a match, in 
 a moral point of view, for the wrath of Jehovah. 
 'It is a petty and vulgar -justice which deals in vin- 
 dictive torment, and against such a justice even the 
 breast of mortal man is triply armed. And if such
 
 44 THE Q UESTION Of HELL. 
 
 a justice proposes to kill as well as to injure, it is 
 not very difficult for the creature to accept the 
 chance, and make the most of its defeat of God. 
 It will at least have an end, extinction, and he that 
 tortures and kills will make nothing out of it, un- 
 less it be a pleasure in working torment, which 
 hardly a devil would be so devilish as to take. 
 
 But death to desires, to purposes, to that in our 
 very nature which works evil, is a visitation worthy 
 the name of death. Not only is it a death which 
 avenges law upon us and in us, but it is a death 
 Avhich steals upon our false choice, our wrong will, 
 our darkened thought, with terrors whose hue is 
 indeed that of eternity. . * 
 
 NOT THE TEXTS BUT THE FAITH. 
 
 Mr. Constable thinks it a free and easy method 
 which the advocate of hope uses in his handling of 
 Scripture. It may be so, but it is at least the 
 method of faith. We are not required to digest 
 the promiscuous letter of Scripture. On the con- 
 trary, we are free to take and eat as we can, ac- 
 cordinging to our laith, never going against faith 
 merely to swallow a text. Some of us may under- 
 stand much, and some of us may understand very 
 little, of Scripture ; that does not so much matter, 
 if, so far as we go, we keep the rule of faith.
 
 THE Q ITESTION OF HELL. 45 
 
 IN SPIRIT AND TRUTH. 
 
 We cannot keep two rules at once ; we cannot 
 serve the spirit and yet be slaves to the letter. If 
 .we bind ourselves to the letter then we must stand 
 largely free from the spirit ; while if we bind our- 
 selves to the spirit we must stand largely free from 
 the texts, until we learn how to see the spirit in 
 them. Common orthodox service is in the letter, 
 but the truer Christian service is in spirit and in 
 truth. So it must be easy for faith to evade the 
 text, not by denial, but by patient expectation of 
 a new light in it. And Christianity especially se- 
 cures to us the fullest freedom to confine our wor- 
 ship to spirit and truth in the inner man. Dog- 
 matists who thrust upon us either this mountain 
 or that, offend against the distinctive character of 
 Christian doctrine. To all their systems faith 
 says, " Be ye taken up, and be ye cast into the 
 depths of the sea," and it shall be done. 
 
 ORTHODOXY A HUMAN INVENTION. 
 
 Mr. Constable is unsparing in his criticism of the 
 way in which the current orthodoxy makes out its 
 case. One of his exclamatory statements, intrin- 
 sically worthless as it is, will yet serve as a sugges- 
 tion to our reflections upon the intellectual condi- 
 tion of the average orthodox mind. It is as 
 follows :
 
 46 THE QUESTION OF HELL, 
 
 "Ah ! may we not well enquire whether the Church of 
 to-day is not, like the Pharisees of old, ' teaching for doc- 
 trines the commandments of men ?' " 
 
 As Mr. Constable makes this enquiry, it amounts 
 only to an exaggerated expression of his hostility 
 to hell with a dum rather than hell with a dee. In 
 itself, however, and on broad general grounds, the 
 question is one which forces itself upon Christian 
 attention. The long career of orthodoxy, Catholic 
 or Protestant, has borne fruits which compel faith 
 to precisely this inquiry, whether men have not 
 put their own notions in place of the divine word ? 
 And taking the verdict of each class of believers 
 separately, we find the opinion universal that this 
 has been done. 
 
 HEADY HUMAN OPINION. 
 
 No sect accuses itself, but every one accuses an- 
 other, with a degree of judgment which is itself 
 manifestly contrary to faith. The Catholics ex- 
 clude all Protestants, as no better than aliens and 
 infidels, and support their exclusion by a majority 
 vote of Christendom. The Protestants in their 
 turn exclude the Catholics, and sustain their judg- 
 ment by the undoubted weight of the more intel- 
 ligent class of believers. Among Protestants 
 every sect without exception lies under the ban of 
 other sects on some grave point of faith and pracr
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 47 
 
 tice, to the extent of actually being voted clown by 
 a majority of Protestants on the point or points 
 which it individually cherishes. 
 
 Thus it is the common charge everywhere that 
 human notions have intruded upon divine truth. 
 And the spirit of this charge is, to a very large ex- 
 tent, a spirit of anxious superstition, of intense 
 self-will, no more Christian than a similar spirit 
 among heathen. Men act as if they were afraid 
 God would kill them if they exercised charity, and 
 they push their objections to their brethren with a 
 heat which has far more assertion of will in it than 
 love of truth, of man, or of God. 
 
 BAD IlEPUTE OF ORTHODOXY. 
 
 The brand on all the theologies of Christendom 
 is "odium theologicum /" the just reflection of 
 mankind is, " How these dogmatists hate one an- 
 other ! " And with such an appearance it is fair to 
 presume that there has been, to some degree, and 
 however unwittingly and innocently, a comprehen- 
 sive "teaching for doctrines the commandments of 
 men." 
 
 " Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees," and 
 " Get thee behind me," and similar short and sharp 
 methods with the tendency to this very mistake, 
 were necessary in the beginning, and seem not less 
 necessary now. Nor can it surprise us, when we
 
 48 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 reflect how nearly impossible simplicity of alle- 
 giance, by justice, and mercy, and humble trust, is, 
 and how natural it is to want some great place, 
 even of penitence and humility, and some conspic- 
 uous ground and lofty standing, even though it be 
 for shame and punishment, or for redemption by 
 rescue out of the very burnings of wrath. 
 
 ORTHODOX LOUDNESS AND DIVINE SILENCE. 
 
 The dogmatic mind swells with a sense of the 
 spectacular importance of sin, and punishment, 
 and atonement, and sniffs at the thought of a silent 
 operation of God with his creatures, and of a quiet 
 return of the soul to holiness and heaven. It is 
 not in any of the great theologies that the spirit 
 bloweth as it listeth, or that God comes to the 
 heart of man with still small voice. Neither 
 Catholicism, nor Calvinism, nor Methodism, nor 
 Unitarianism, will ever have it said of its mean- 
 ing, " Thou canst not tell whence it comet h nor 
 whither it goeth." If there were not a Christian- 
 ity which doth not cry in the creeds, and a Christ 
 whose voice is not heard in the proof texts, and a 
 power of God working in us above all that we ask 
 or profess, all that we think or pretend, it would 
 be to little purpose to prefer the Christian name 
 to a heathen, or to imagine that religion has en- 
 during and redeeming power.
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 49 
 
 SURVIVAL OF HKATHEN METHOD AND FAITH. 
 
 On very broad grounds, then, we think it very 
 pertinent to inquire " whether the church of to- 
 day is not, like the Pharisees of old, l teaching for 
 doctrines the commandments of men ;' " and of 
 heathen men at that. The result of such an in- 
 quiry would bear very materially upon the solution 
 of the problems brought before us in Mr. Consta- 
 ble's pamphlet, since it seems highly probable that 
 the blackness of darkness which rests upon the or- 
 thodox solution of those problems, is directly due 
 to a survival of heathen methods and beliefs, and 
 since also we may reasonably surmise that even 
 Mr. Constable's variation of the doctrine of perdi- 
 tion has no warrant beyond the same shadow of 
 heathen terror and heathen opinion. 
 
 FEEBLE WITNESS OF BIBLE TO HELL. 
 
 ^ 
 
 Mr. Constable takes in hand the orthodox ap- 
 peal to the Bible, with as little reserve as if he had 
 not lately held an orthodox view himself. It 
 would be interesting to know how commonly 
 preachers of the eternity of future misery meet 
 the difficulty described in the following : 
 
 "Has it never occurred to the reader, as to myself, when 
 searching for biblical language in which to present and en- 
 force the eternity of future suffering, to be surprised and 
 puzzled to observe how unsatisfactory and feeble seem all the 
 Apostolic references to future unending woe ? "
 
 50 Tim QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 THE BIBLE DOES NOT CUT OFF HOPE. 
 
 Mr. Constable catches but a glimpse of a very 
 large and very significant fact, enough for his 
 small purpose of shifting the stage scenery of hell, 
 but not enough for securing a just view of the mo- 
 mentous topic under discussion. That fact is 
 that we have no firm ground in either evangelist or 
 apostle for cutting off the operation of Christian 
 faith, in the case of the lost, and hence are not 
 warranted in doing this. 
 
 NO DEMONSTRATION OF HELL. 
 
 Faith issues in hope at least, if not in trust, or 
 even in the perfect love whose covenant cannot be 
 broken, and only the strongest demonstration could 
 stop this action of faith. Such demonstration 
 does not exist. Whatever does exist is simply 
 matter for reserved inquiry, without perplexity, 
 least of all doubt and despair. If we cannot dis- 
 pose of it we can at least let it alone, and go about 
 the business of faith, trusting that by doing what 
 is practical we shall in due time wholly under- 
 stand. 
 
 The case which Mr. Constable finds feeble and 
 unsatisfactory, was never meant to be anything 
 else, and even the case which Mr. Constable sticks 
 in, that of his own idea of hell, would seem no
 
 THE QUESTION OF IiJJLL. 51 
 
 less weak and unimportant, if due heed were paid 
 to the point of view of pure and simple faith. 
 
 A "BASELESS AND HORRID CREED." 
 It is easy for Mr. Constable to see how foolishly 
 the orthodox mind falls into the ditch of a "base- 
 less and horrid creed.'' For example, the follow- 
 ing are some of his sentences : 
 
 " The ordinary Greek Lexicon, not lexicons of the New 
 Testament, colored and tainted by theological opinion, is the 
 true guide to the Greek of the New Testament. p. 14. . . 
 
 . . Dictionaries of the New Testament, and commenta- 
 tors on it, may, if they please, put upon the phrase the sense 
 of ' Iwppincfia' in the numberless passages where it occurs, but 
 we deny 10 them the right to alter the meaning of a well un- 
 derstood Grecian word for the sake of bolstering up their 
 
 baseless and horrid creed. p. 10 That is what 
 
 the holders of Augustine's theory have done. They put an 
 insufficient, and inapposite, an unnatural, or a positively false 
 meaning on the most important terms of the Tsew Testament. 
 "With them death means life, and life means happiness, and 
 so on. Having put these convenient meanings on the phrase- 
 ology of Scripture, interpreted as they would not dare to 
 interpret the code of a human legislator, they can look placidly 
 on a thousand passages which contradict what they tench 
 from platform, and pulpit, and press, and instil into children's 
 minds almost with their mother's milk." p. 59. 
 
 "We now come to the famous passages in the Book of 
 Revelation. Driven hopelessly from the plainer parts of 
 Scripture, the advocates of eternal life in bell think that they 
 have in this obscure, mysterious, and highly-wrought figura- 
 tive book, at least two passages which authorize them to change 
 numberless passages in the rest of Scripture, and some even 
 in the Book of Revelation itself, from their plain and obvi- 
 ous meaning to one thr.t is forced, unnatural, and often false 
 to all the laws of the interpretation of language." p. 30. 
 
 HOW TO BOLSTER UP HEATHENISM. 
 
 If Mr. Constable unwittingly held, or deliber-
 
 52 IHE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 ately held, not long since, a baseless and horrid 
 theological opinion ; if he did this by altering the 
 meaning of well understood words, and by putting 
 a positively false meaning on most important proof- 
 texts ; if he dared to interpret the Bible any way 
 and every way to suit the exigencies of a heathen 
 dogma, and all this he brings against his recent 
 self and his orthodox brethren, we may well as- 
 sume that the method which leads to such results 
 is a very doubtful one. 
 
 THE SACRIFICE OF TRUTH AND RIGHT. 
 
 Oar own observation had prepared us for Mr. 
 Constable's confession of orthodox want of verac- 
 ity and exegetical rectitude. It seems quite right 
 to the orthodox mind to accept as from God a hor- 
 rid opinion, however baseless simple faith may find 
 it. The idea is that by so doing the mind makes 
 a suitable sacrifice to God. And who is to tell the 
 deluded worshipper, that every such sacrifice is es- 
 sentially heathen. 
 
 SERVING GOD WITH LYING LIPS. 
 
 The heathen habit of mind, panic fear before 
 God, and the heathen opinion, that God demands 
 the flow of blood, figurative if not literal, some 
 sacrifice of the best, remain in full vigor with the 
 average orthodox pietist. And with God looking 
 on to damn him if he flinch or fail, why should he
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 53 
 
 not hustle texts into any convenient form, regard- 
 less of their individual significance, and only at- 
 tentive to the exigencies of his sacrifice ? Is a 
 man to heed the probable individual purpose of a 
 verse of Scripture, when, if he should be misguided 
 by evident appearances, he may have to go to hell 
 for his blunder ? Is he not more likely, under the 
 influence of fear and of concern for self, to make a 
 safe use of a text, rather than an apparently true 
 one ? What is the appearance of truth but that 
 reflection of reason which superstition delights to 
 sacrifice ? The common plea to this day of aver- 
 age orthodoxy is that we should bow reason to 
 God, and that it is safest to see God in the dogma 
 which Mr. Constable has found courage to call 
 baseless and horrid. 
 
 HOPELKSS DISHONESTY OF ORTHODOXY. 
 
 So long therefore as concern for safety is the first 
 motive to religion, and the opinion that God is 
 pleased with anything but truth and right holds 
 full sway, so long will pietists twist evident facts 
 to support horrid opinions. Mr. Constable him- 
 self is not yet out of the meshes of this false and 
 selfish method. 
 
 THE PRACTICAL FAILURE OF HELL. 
 
 The practical failure of the doctrine of hell is 
 sketched by Mr. Constable in the following terms :
 
 54 THE Q UESIION OF HELL. 
 
 " It has often beea remarked that where a punishment felt 
 to be excessive is threatened, it wholly fails of its effect. 
 The criminal is satisfied that it will not be executed. It is 
 thus with the theory of everlasting misery as a punishment 
 for human sin. It is practically disbelieved. The sinner takes 
 refuge from it in a thousand ways. The greater portion of 
 the professing Christian Church has adopted purgatory as an 
 escape for them from this hell. Even for those who cannot 
 accept a purgatory the vulgar notion of hell has no practical 
 terrors. Even if they dp not reject it altogether as a mere 
 bugbear, they do not believe in it for themselves. A change of 
 life, a word of penitence at the last, a sigh of sorrow for the 
 past as the soul is leaving its tabernacle, .will surely avert 
 from them a fate too terrible for a merciful God to inflict 
 And so the very transcendent terrors of the vulgar hell defeat 
 the object of threatened penalty, for few, if any, believe in 
 its infliction on themselves." p, 64. 
 
 FAITH CASTS OUT FEAR. 
 
 It is a significant illustration of the doom of the 
 dogmatist to blindness of mind, that Mr. Consta- 
 ble does not see that every word of this tells just as 
 forcibly against one sort of eternal perdition as an- 
 other. Does Mr. Constable suppose that "the 
 greater portion "of the Christian Church" will be so 
 pleased at the idea of burning people all up in 
 hell, as to give up a hope of purgatorial discipline, 
 and that too when this hope is in the strictest anal- 
 ogy with simple faith? Or is it to be presumed that 
 the great mass of unbelievers, who put aside the 
 common idea of hell, on various grounds, will not 
 just as readily evade any other idea of terrible 
 damnation? It does not rob perdition of all its 
 terrors to make it a death of the soul after a season
 
 r !HE Q UE8TION OF HELL. 55 
 
 of torment. This also is too incredible to be prac- 
 tically believed by any one who would not believe 
 the orthodox notion. Timid pietists will creep 
 away from the shadow of either terror ; venture- 
 some doubt will face either exactly alike ; while 
 clear faith knows no more of- the one horror than of 
 the other. 
 
 ORTHODOX TEACHING STIGMATIZED. 
 
 Mr. Constable uses great vigor and courage in 
 his denial of the orthodox theory of hell. He 
 says: "We abhor Augustine's theory." He 
 speaks of the arguments used in its support as 
 " arguments which we feel unworthy of a child." 
 The course which it ascribes to God he denounces 
 as a " procedure which our heart whispers to us 
 is only worthy of hell." He stigmatizes the or- 
 thodox teaching of Augustine on the subject as 
 " Semi-Manichaeism," and pronounces it " at di- 
 rect issue with, the authority of Scripture." He 
 declares that "the theory of eternal life in hell 
 contradicts the whole tenor of the Bible." Speak- 
 ing of those who l( sinned without law," he says 
 that " Augustine's sentence against such is one of 
 the blackest tyranny and injustice." The idea 
 that all souls are immortal has, he asserts, " led 
 good men, under the specious pretext of exhibit- 
 ing the Divine justice and holiness as infinite, to
 
 56 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 paint God as a monster of unutterable cruelty." 
 
 A SPECIOUS PRETEXT. 
 
 For a confession from the bosom of orthodoxy 
 this is surprisingly exact. The last sentence just 
 quoted touches the quick of the orthodox argu- 
 ment. The plea for hell in orthodox dogmatism 
 is indeed based on the " specious pretext of ex- 
 hibiting the DivinS justice and holiness." It is a 
 mere pretext. No man, directly anxious to honor 
 the justice and holiness of God, will turn his mind 
 to the damnation of other people as a means there- 
 to. He may leave himself in the hands of God, 
 for better or for worse ; and he will do so rather 
 than make.it his first business to find some means 
 of escape from the Divine discipline. 
 
 SIMPLE SUBMISSION ALONE HONORS GOD. 
 
 If the soul awakened to desire the glory of 
 God, and moved to faith in him, seems to itself 
 worthy of hell, it will say so submissively, and 
 leave the matter entirely to God. If redemption 
 comes to such a soul, it will come of the free grace 
 of God, not through any scheme of begging off 
 and paying up and getting quit, either with or 
 without intervention of a second party. To set 
 the soul upon pushing its part in any such scheme, 
 as if loyalty to God could be shown by concern
 
 I HE QUESTION OF HELL. $7 
 
 for one's own safety, and it were honor enough to 
 God to let us off, on the basis of a good scheme, is 
 absurdly contrary to a just idea of regard for the 
 character of Deity. If we honestly desire honor 
 to the Divine justice and holiness, we have no 
 choice but to submit ourselves absolutely, trusting 
 that God cannot do wrong, not even to a sinner, 
 and willing that he should do right, though he 
 slay us. 
 
 THE ORTHODOX SCHEME NO HONOR TO GOD. 
 
 The theory, therefore, which affects to honor 
 God by according to him the right to inflict the 
 pains of hell, provided that we may in good time 
 dodge the infliction, has no rectitude or veracity in 
 it ; it is a trick of human conceit and selfishness, 
 as mere a pretext as ever superstition suggested to 
 the mind of man. Any sincere mind, once brought 
 round from the orthodox to the Christian point of 
 view, from selfish fear to unselfish faith, will see 
 this without difficulty. It, is remarkable that Mr. 
 Constable should see it while still holding on to a 
 modified orthodoxy. 
 
 A PEDIGREE OF DISHONOR. 
 
 In disposing of the orthodox dogma of hell, 
 Mr. Constable looks up its historical appearance 
 On this point he remarks :
 
 68 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 11 The first known holder of the theory of eternal life for 
 the reprobate was the author of the writings known under 
 the title of ' Clementina,' and falsely attributed to Clemens 
 Romanus. .... This namelesa forger Is, so far as is 
 known, the first inaintainer of the doctrine of eternal life 
 in hell. . . Here in these shameless forgeries, and these 
 vagaries of unhallowed fancy, lies the mean ofigin of a dog- 
 ma which, now overshadows the Christian Church. 
 
 "UNHALLOWED" AND "SHAMELESS.** 
 
 We need not pause to weigh the historical value 
 of this statement. It is sufficient to consider its 
 significance as a confession. The author of it is 
 in full sympathy with the dogmatic system of or- 
 thodoxy, except on the one point of the duration 
 and nature of future punishment. He rests his 
 faith on Scripture alone, and he shrinks with hor- 
 ror from any really liberal conception of dealing 
 with sin. In fact he thinks his notion of hell 
 more terribly effective than any other. He thinks 
 that he believes that we should have universal 
 Sodom within one generation if the fear of hell 
 were removed. There is no liberal taint in his 
 pietism. He has simply hit upon a particular in- 
 terpretation of sacred texts, and he pushes this 
 with precisely the average dogmatic spirit. As 
 near as possible, therefore, he is a witness from the 
 midst of orthodoxy. And the ability, dignity, and 
 learning with which he writes, assure us that he 
 is more than a common witness. When then he
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 59 
 
 tells us that vagaries of unhallowed iancy, dis- 
 guised in shameless forgeries, were the origin of a 
 doctrine which now overshadows, and which for 
 more than fifteen hundred years has overshadowed, 
 the Christian Church, we may very properly re- 
 gard so damaging a statement as a grave additional 
 reason for pushing from us the whole structure of 
 orthodox dogmatism, and for resting in the simple 
 faith and practice of Christian principle?. The 
 mere possibility that such a thing has happened, 
 through excess of human opinion in Christian the- 
 ology, should send us back to the simplest faith. 
 
 THE SHAME UNDENIABLE. 
 
 We are born under a vast dogmatic system ; ed- 
 ucation and custom press it upon us ; persuasion 
 and persecution hold us back from going out of it ; 
 and, behold, a credible witness, who has no hostile 
 motive, who wishes only a slight readjustment of a 
 single conception, breaks out with the declaration 
 that the conception which he wishes to displace 
 was the invention of unhallowed fancy, and was 
 originally palmed upon the church by a shameless 
 forger. Can an indignant church reply, not 
 merely that it was not so in this case, but that it 
 could not have been so ? Alas for a Church which 
 certainly cannot so reply, and to which no candid 
 scholar can give credit in such a matter without go-
 
 60 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 ing into court, and hearing unquestioned evidence. 
 And when all the evidence is heard, we fear that it 
 will only show to what an enormous extent the au- 
 thoritative dogmas of Christendom are an in- 
 trusion and a fraud upon Christian faith. 
 
 HORRID FEATURES OF THE DOGMA OF HELL. 
 
 That Mr. Constable, once able to stand back 
 from the dogma of eternal torture of souls, and to 
 take in all its hideous aspects, regards it as an out- 
 rage upon every humane and godly instinct of ra- 
 tional man, is made very plain in the following 
 vigorous statement : 
 
 " What is our question ? It is this. Is pain, inflicted 
 through eternity, endured without any hope of an end, no 
 nearer to its close when numberless cycles have passed than 
 when the first groan was uttered, is such a just punishment 
 for any conceivable amount of sin committed by the worst of 
 men? Man did not ask for life: it was given him without 
 his knowledge or consent. Can any abuse of this uuasked- 
 for gift justify the recompense of an existence spent in un- 
 ending agony ? 
 
 " We must put the question on its proper grounds. The 
 ablest modern defenders of eternal life in hell have put it on 
 a false issue. They have done so in two main respects, urged 
 on by their inability to justify their theory in its naked light. 
 The first of these we will give in the words of William 
 Archer Butler, whcse view is adopted by Dr. Salmon, Pro 
 fessor Mansel, and others. ' The punishments of hell, 1 says 
 Butler, ' are but the perpetual vengeance that accompanies 
 the siim of hell, An eternity of wickedness brings with it an 
 eternity of woe. The sinner is to suffer for everlasting, but 
 it is because the sin itself is as everlasting as the sufferintjS 
 
 "It may fairly be questioned whether, according to any prin- 
 ciples of Divine or human law, the lost in hell are capable of 
 sinning. We do not believe they are. Out of and beyond all
 
 THE QUESTION Ol< HELL. 01 
 
 law, they arc incapable of transgressing law. But independ- 
 ently of this, it is sufficient to say of the above fearful view 
 that it contradicts the Scriptures. Not once or twice, but 
 over and over again, it tells us that the punishment of the future 
 is for the sins of the present times. If we think it too great, we 
 are not at liberty to throw in the sins of the future, real or 
 imaginary, to justify the punishment of the future. If we 
 cannot defend man's future treatment as being a just award 
 for his present conduct, we cannot justify it at ail. It is a 
 piece of the coolest effrontery for us to present as a reason 
 for God's conduct what God has not Himself presented when 
 explaining to man His judicial conduct. Just fancy an earthly 
 judge sentencing a criminal to a punishment too severe for the 
 offense committed, and then gravely justifying his sentence 
 by the observation that the criminal would be sure to deserve it 
 all by his conduct in gaol! Yet such is the judicature, unwor- 
 thy of a Jeffreys, which learned professors of theology and 
 doctors of divinity ascribe to the Judge of the whole earth ! 
 
 " Nor does it relieve God in the smallest measure from the 
 charge of injustice to say that future punishment will but 
 follow that law of nature which inextricably links together 
 sin and misery. The laws of nature are the laws of God. 
 For all their consequences, after they have worked their uni- 
 form work for ages, lie is just as responsible as when He first 
 ordained them, or as when He departs trom them by an alter- 
 ation of law or a miraculous interference. So Bishop Butler 
 argues in the place above referred to. If the laws of nature 
 were to bring on the sinner a punishment greater than his 
 sin deserved, it is God Himself who would be doing so. 
 
 " The simple question then is, could man by any conduct 
 here deserve to suffer throughout eternity pain and torment 
 to which only the worst pain he suffers here can afford a true 
 parallel ? Would the agonies to which the martyr was sub- 
 jected for an hour be only sufficient for the sinner if drawn 
 out through the eternal age ? Would it be just in God to in- 
 flict this on any single creature of his hand, on any being 
 who would never have had life at all if the Maker had not 
 called him from his clay ? The verdict of the human Heart 
 in its fierce denial in its secret recoil answers No. 
 ' Eternal pain,' says Augustine, ' seems harsh and unjust to 
 human sense.' l With the majority of men of the world,' 
 says Butler, ' this doctrine seems, when they think at all about 
 it, monstrous, disproportioned, impossible.' It seems so, in 
 the same writer's mind, to others besides men of the world,'
 
 62 THE QUEST. ION OF HELL. 
 
 to men who do not fear this doom foi themselves ; ' it would 
 blanch the intellect,' reduce the mind of the Christian to a 
 state of idiotcy, deprive him of life weie he but ' adequately 
 to conceive it. If God were now to ask man whether his 
 conduct on this hypothesis were just, man would with one 
 Toice reply that it was not. 
 
 "The history of human religious thought shows man's inera- 
 dicable sense of the burning wrong of this fearful theory. It' 
 Plato, deriving hia inspiration from Egypt, taught a Tartarus 
 with its fiery streams whence none could come forth, he 
 taught it for an infinitesimally small portion of men. For 
 most even for the homicide, the parricide, and the matri- 
 cide he had his Acherusian Lake, whence, after a purgative- 
 process, they issued forth again to the upper air. If Augus- 
 tine adopted his great master's abode of unending pain, he 
 adopted also hi3 purgatory, from whence there was a way to 
 heaven. If the Church of Home has sanctioned the theory 
 of Augustine, she practically holds out its terrors only to 
 those without her pale of safety : for her own millions she 
 has, at the worst, the fires of a finite period. The assertion 
 of Augustine's hell did but drive the gentler mind of Qrigen 
 to the notion of a wider purgatory than Rome's or Augus- 
 tine's, where even devils should be prepared to resume their 
 place in heaven. The Churches of the Reformation have 
 generally followed Augustine in his hell and denied his pur- 
 gatory, but at all times within their bosom has been a strug- 
 gle against the dominant doctrine, and, even from those who 
 maintained it, it has generally commanded only a sullen, un- 
 cheerf ul assent. Such men a's Tillotson, Robert Hall, Isaak 
 Taylor, Albert Barnes, while they accepted the theory, loved 
 it not. We constantly find its recent defenders candidly 
 confessing that with all their heart they would wish 
 that it was a lie. The modern mind, shaken in reli- 
 gious faith, denies the inspiration of a book which is 
 supposed to teach the monstrous creed. With those who 
 will not throw away their faith in man's future, the 
 theory of Origen, with all its consequences, bids fair, if only 
 confronted with the fearful nightmare of Augustine, to take 
 the plase which the authority of the latter father has given 
 to his views. The modern defenders of Augustine's theory 
 shrink from putting forward a vindication of it in its plain 
 and hideous aspect. One after another of the arguments on 
 which it has heretofore been defended they have abandoned 
 as unworthy of their reason, or abhorrent to their sense of 
 justice."
 
 THE q UEST10N OF HELL. 03 
 
 "Hell ii not the eternal abode of evil, concentrated in in- 
 tensity, deepening and darkening in line throughout eternity. 
 It is not the everlasting exhibition of a scene with whose 
 moral horrors all the sensuality, and deviltry, and hate, and 
 despair that has been exhibited in earth's foulest dens could 
 not compare. . . . Thank God, it is not true. God does 
 not contemplate this hell. 
 
 ''The hell of Scripture is the very counterpart to that fearful 
 scene which Augustine has depicted. The very thought of 
 this latter is too horrible to think. However ancient, it is no 
 part of ' the failh once delivered to the saints.' We therefore 
 reject it as a fable, a novelty, a monstrous doctrine worthy of 
 the Koran, where it takes its fitting place unworthy of the 
 Gospel, where it finds no place. We leave it to the disciple 
 of Mohammed, lying on his couch of sensuality, to look 
 down with cruel delight upon a scene of unutterable and end- 
 less misery. This is not the consummation which the disci- 
 ples of Christ, or the worshippers of the Father of mercies 
 are called on to rejoice in. They could not look on it and 
 rejoice ; they could not regard pain as endless without feel- 
 ing that unalloyed joy could never be their wn." pp. G5, C6. 
 
 HELL A MORAL HORROR. 
 
 It is quite just to leave the expectation of hell 
 to the most utterly sensual, or the most thoroughly^ 
 selfish of moral creatures. The dogma belongs in 
 the lowest and basest types of religion. No de- 
 cently moral nature can contemplate the merest 
 chance of such a gathering into one of vile energies 
 and detestable horrors without feeling unutterably 
 moved to resist it, to overcome it, to suppress and 
 exterminate it. People may well be shy of arguing 
 for hell in clear and cool reason, apart from the 
 heat of dogmatism, or the blindness of supersti- 
 tion. Undoubtedly the mere progress of virtue,
 
 04 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 the most ordinary experience of elevation of char- 
 acter, is blotting out faith in the plague of eternal 
 woe, and preparing the way of a distinctly con- 
 trary doctrine. There is no authority which can 
 long stand up against this irrepressible moral ad- 
 vance of Christian mankind. If the Bible teaches 
 the dogma of hell, faith will be thereby convinced 
 that it is not the book which is divine, but the 
 word of holy truth which the book may prove to 
 contain. An inveterate divinity in every good 
 man's heart forbids, as with the voice of indwell- 
 ing God, the admission of the hateful doctrine into 
 the holier place of the heart, where love dwelleth ; 
 nay more than this, decent human instinct keeps 
 it, like a leper, at a distance. The more souls 
 grow into the likeness of God, the more they grow 
 away from this looking for of poison and fire and 
 all hell torment. 
 
 THE PROTESTANT DOGMA WORSE THAN THE CATH- 
 OLIC. 
 
 It is something astonishing that the Protestant 
 dogma should be so much harder and blacker than 
 the Catholic. Perhaps it is chiefly due to the fact 
 that Protestantism is really a bolder departure 
 from living inspiration than Catholicism is. The 
 latter possesses a respectable faith in the presence 
 of deity in a general communion of mankind,
 
 THE Q VESTION OF HELL. 65 
 
 though it falsely limits this communion to her own 
 mankind. Protestantism is a long way more ex- 
 clusive and Pharisaic than the olderform of churck 
 and creed. She thanks God that none of her chil- 
 dren are as other men are, while Home uses the 
 Christian rule far more thoroughly, and receives 
 into her fold, not those who are already Christian, 
 but all who are willing to come to her to be made 
 Christian. If God does as well by his children as 
 Rome by hers, then is no soul shut out from hope. 
 
 BOTTOMLESS EVIL IMPOSSIBLE IX A MORAL UNI- 
 VERSE. 
 
 This is a true paternal as well as maternal in- 
 stinct, to hold on to all, with courage and hope to 
 recover all. The purging away of evil belongs in 
 a just conception of discipline. No philosophy of 
 the universe is so much as respectable which does 
 not lend to divine law this disciplinary efficacy. 
 Right and wrong would cease to mean anything if 
 we should once really apprehend a tide of uncon- 
 trolled wrong setting forever towards a gulf of 
 bottomless evil. Right is the way the divine law 
 makes things go, and if it makes things go wrong, 
 then is wrong right, and our philosophy is crazy. 
 Crazy ! It would be hell itself to really know of 
 hell, or adequately to conceive the horrors of per- 
 dition.
 
 66 THE QITE&1ION OF HELL. 
 
 A THEOLOGICAL WHOPPER. 
 
 God speaks conclusively in the breast of man to 
 give the lie direct to all assertion of horrible tor- 
 ture in the universe. If such were the effect of 
 Godhead working through natural law, then were 
 it better that unpitying force be our mother, for 
 this at least is not positively malignant, does not 
 poison the wound as well as crush. Earth has 
 never seen judgment such as the orthodox dogma 
 ascribes to God ; to speak of it as based in jus- 
 tice, this exceeding weight of horrible injury, 
 which will never let up to all eternity, is truly a 
 theological whopper. 
 
 A WICKED PROPHECY. 
 
 No wonder that the dogmatists are anxious to 
 turn prophets, and to tell us what they know about 
 the eternal future occupation of those who have 
 not here found life. They bear down with great 
 confidence on this point, the apparent certainty 
 that souls once swallowed up of sin will go on sin- 
 sing forever, and will only get the deserts of eternal 
 sinning. Such prophecy is a crime, a blasphemy, 
 a deep ungodliness and horrible infidelity. By it, 
 if we venture it, we consent to the going on for- 
 ever of wickedness, and are really in an attitude to 
 desire that this may be. We deny, also, in this
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 67 
 
 vaticination, the efficient control of God, the infi- 
 nite persuasion of divine moral government, the 
 just certainties of law and order in the universe. 
 There is no unbelief so deep, so godless, so faithless, 
 so profane and mad, as that which says to the des- 
 perate sinner, the outrageous wrong-doer, the 
 hardened wretch, there is no effectual remedy of 
 divine discipline, no ample restoration of injury, 
 no perfect bringing to rights again, no insurance of 
 good against evil which ivill be paid. 
 
 SUPREME DEITY IS SUPREME RESPONSIBILITY. 
 
 Not only have we been cast on this stream of 
 existence without wish or will of our own, but all 
 the chief conditions of our career have been so far 
 ordered that for nothing whatever can we be held 
 alone responsible. There is no moment of creature 
 existence without the finger of God, no incident or 
 accident of man without the effectual providence 
 of the Divine Father. Neither in creating us with 
 mind, nor in placing us under freedom, has Deity 
 abrogated Godhead, the core of which is living 
 law, and the necessity of which is the living con- 
 trol, the spiritual subjection, of all things that 
 are. 
 
 FREE WILL CANNOT BAR GOD'S WILL. 
 
 If we do not see how to have this faith in God 
 without a sacrifice of our notion of human free-
 
 68 THE % UESTION OF HELL. 
 
 dom, we must make the Christian choice, not the 
 heathen, and keep our faith whatever may become 
 of our notion of free will. It is of no importance 
 that we find out how the Lord works to will and 
 to do ; it is only necessary to believe that he does, 
 and to make that belief an integral part of our 
 own devotion to the divine service. No more here 
 than anywhere else is the speculative belief of any 
 value without the practical doing going before and 
 following after ; so that even the belief becomes 
 the worst of lies if we make it mean that deity is 
 dead fate, and that we have only to let all go as it 
 will, without care or conscience of ours. It is the 
 intimate union of divine purpose with human, of 
 our working with God's, which Christian iaith pro- 
 claims to us on the part of the Divine Father, and 
 demands from us as the Father' s children. To set 
 free will apart from God, and to make divine will 
 fate irrespective of man, are alike contrary, the one 
 to fidelity, and the other to trust, towards the 
 Father in heaven. 
 
 TERTULLIAN AND THE DOGMA OF HELL. 
 
 The greatest early master of the dogma of eter- 
 nal torture of souls was. the African Latin Father, 
 Tertullian, whom a candid history of the rise of 
 orthodoxy will show to have been a heathen rhetor- 
 ician still, in the Christian church, as well as bo-
 
 r lUE QUESTION OF HELL. G9 
 
 fore he was converted. Tertullian, as godfather to 
 the intrusive diabolism of the dogma of hell, has 
 become sufficiently hateful to Mr. Constable, now 
 that his dogmatic motive is changed from damna- 
 tion which lasts forever to that which burns out by 
 burning everything up. Thus he says of the pa- 
 ternity of the orthodox view, and of its character : 
 
 " In Athenagoras, Tatian, and the \vriter of the spurious 
 works attributed to Clemens Komanus, A\e have then the earli- 
 est known advocates of the theory of eternal life in hell. But 
 this theory required a more powerful advocate than any of 
 the above writers, and it found it somewhat later in the per- 
 son of Tertullian. A master of the Latin tongue, a powerful 
 reasoner when not led away by his peculiar errors, of a vehe- 
 ment nature and a vivid imagination, he was well suited to 
 impress an idea on an age disposed to accept it, and, spito of 
 his heresies, spite of his strange hallucinations, he left the 
 lasting impression of his mind upon the church of succeeding 
 times. He uses to their utmost possible latitude' of meaning 
 most of Plato's terms for the soul. It is, even in the case of 
 the wicked, not subject to death, but must ever continue im- 
 mortal. It is ever indissoluble, indivisible, an eternal sub- 
 stance, having the very same immortality "which belongs to 
 Deily. But it is in the description of the endless agony of 
 the lost that Tertullian surpassed his predecessors, and threw 
 them into the shade. He does not draw any discreet veil over 
 his scene of punishment. Without sa_^ ing that he took a 
 positive delight in the contemplation of it, he depicts its fan- 
 cied circumstances with a minuteness and a force that have 
 only been surpassed by the imagination of a Dante, or the 
 agonizing details of a Jesuit or a Redemptorist preacher. 
 Nor can we say that ho was wrong, if his theory were but 
 true. No amount of terror, horror, disgust, that could pos- 
 sibly be awakened here in the human mind could be too 
 great, if only by it a single soul could be persuaded to fly in 
 time from this wrath to come. The delicacy that tells us that 
 there is such a hell, but that good manners, or regard for feel- 
 ing, should lead us to conceal its naked and terrible aspect, is 
 a talse delicacy which risks eternity rather than give pain for
 
 fo THE QUE8IION OF HULL. 
 
 a moment. Tertullian certainly was not guilty of this fnlsc 
 delicacy. lie believed in eternal torments, and lie drew faith- 
 ful pictures of them. With him hell was a scene where end- 
 less slaughtering (celerna occisio) was being enacted, where 
 the pain of dying was to be ever felt, but never the relief 
 which death could bring, for death according to him could 
 not enter into that region of endless life. And God was the ' 
 author and inflictor of this ! " 
 
 DIABOLISM OF TEllTULLIAN's DOGMA 
 
 Mr. Constable continues : 
 
 " Let us look fairly and boldly at this. It was the root, 
 and basis, and. justification of the theory of Origen. No man 
 can deny that God is able to destroy what He was able to 
 create. No man can deny that God had a power to choose 
 whether He would inflict death upon the sinner or an endless 
 life of agonj r . Which would He choose the gentler or the 
 more fearful doom ? Will you say the latter ? Why ? There 
 must be a reason. Is it to please Himself ? He repudiates 
 wholly this kind of character ! His mode of dealing here 
 contradicts it ; where pain is sharp it is short. Is it to please 
 his angelic or- redeemed creation ? They are too like himself 
 to take pleasure in such a course. Did no pity visit the Crea- 
 tor's bosom, they would look up into his fare and plead for 
 mercy. Is it to terrify them from sin ? Would it ? Whnt is 
 sin? Is it not pre-eminently alienation from God? What 
 would alienate from Him so completely as the sight or the 
 knowledge of such a hell as Tertullian taught ? P.ty, horror, 
 anguish, would invade every celestial breast. Just fancy a 
 criminal with us. He has been a great criminal. Let him 
 be the cruel murderer ; the base destroyer of woman's inno- 
 cense and honor ; the fiendish trafficker in the market of lust ; 
 the cold-blooded plotter for the widow's or the orphan's in- 
 heritance. Let him be the vilest of the vile, on whose head 
 curses loud and deep have been heaped. He is taken by the 
 hand of justice. All rejoice. lie is put to death ! No. 
 That is thought too light a punishment by the ruler of the 
 land. He is put into a dungeon ; deprived of all but the nec- 
 essaries of existence ; tortured by day and by night ; guard- 
 ed lest his own hand should rid him of a miserable 
 life ; and this is to go on till nature thrusts within the prison 
 . bars an irresistible hand, and frees the wretch from his exist-
 
 THE qUEMION 0V HELL. 71 
 
 ence. Now what would be the effect upon the community of 
 such a course ? The joy at the criminal's overthrow, once 
 universal, would rapidly change into pity, into indignation, 
 into horror, into the wild uprising of an outraged nation to 
 rescue the miserable man from a tyrant, and to hurl the infa- 
 mous abuser of law and power from his seat. And this is but 
 the faintest image of what a cruel theology would have us to 
 believe of God ! Nature steps in, in the one case, and says 
 there shall be an end. Omnipotence in the other puts forth 
 its might to stay all such escapes. Forever and forever ! Mil- 
 lions of years of torment gone, and yet torment no nearer to its 
 close ! Not one, but mryiadd to suffer thus ! Their endless 
 cries ! Their ceaseless groans ! Their interminable despair t 
 "Why Heaven and Earth and Stars in their infinite number 
 all worlds that roll through the great Creator's space would 
 raise one universal shout of horror at such a course. Love 
 for God would give way to hatred. Apostacy would no 
 longer be partial but universal. All would stand aloof in ir- 
 repressible loathing from the tyrant on the throne, for a 
 worse thing than Manichseism pictured would be seated there 
 the One Eternal Principle icouldbe the Principle of Evil." 
 
 EVIL NOT AN ETERNAL PRINCIPLE. 
 
 It does certainly seem a very direct and simple 
 conclusion that if the life of the creatures is only 
 evil it must be because 4he creator is an eternal 
 Principle of Evil. If that life is in part good, it 
 will be from the life of God in the soul, and this 
 divine cannot but prevail over that human. If 
 there be even one dead and damned soul, and eter- 
 nally lost spirit, we must see in that single ruin 
 even, that God lacks Godhtad, and is himself 
 tainted with evil. If there be no spiritual quick 
 to the creative and sustaining energy, no divinity 
 of eternal life in the power which upholds exist- 
 ence, then is it idle for us to inquire after God.
 
 72 THE QUESTION 01 HELL. 
 
 GODHEAD NOT ABORTIVE. 
 
 And so sure as there is the force of deity in 
 whatever beings exist, so sure must it be that this 
 force will strive against sin as long as sin does not 
 yield, and that to this struggle there can be only 
 an end worthy of the power and wisdom of Grod- 
 head. Any result other than the cure of evil by 
 the greater divinity of good, would be a root of 
 bitterness and poison of fear to all created being. 
 A hell full of cinders even, which is the hope set 
 before us by Mr. Constable's confident and cheerful 
 variation from orthodoxy, would penetrate with 
 horror the very core of creature existence, and 
 deepen fear to hatred, and hatred to madness, as 
 far as ever the thought of such divine abortion 
 should come. 
 
 THE CURE OF EVIL ESPECIALLY DIVINE. 
 
 The one thing which is divine on earth is the 
 cure of evil help for fault, deficiency, infirmity, 
 sin and shame, and the one assurance of heaven is 
 infinite help for souls, infinite cure of evil, in the 
 natural force of divinity in the creation. The purest 
 and largest human* sympathy goes increasingly 
 in this direction; this is the leaven, which may 
 be seen pure in the "Our Father" and the com- 
 mandment of perfect love after the manner of Our 
 Father in Heaven, and which has been a lively
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 73 
 
 presence of divinity in the mass of historical Chris- 
 tianity, long hid, yet effectual to establish under 
 the thick darkness of the world the irrepressible 
 light and life of God with us. 
 
 TERTULLIAN'S PICTURE HEATHEN. 
 
 The picture which Tertullian drew, of the tor- 
 ment of souls under the consuming preservatives 
 of the divine wrath, was composed by a heathen 
 hand, from heathen colors, and commended to 
 heathen eyes eyes not yet annointed by the spirit 
 and life which are the grace and truth of Christ. 
 To continue that picture in Christian use to-day, 
 or to permit even the smooch of the faded canvas 
 to offend Christian sight, bespeaks a persistency 
 of tradition, and a weakness of the consciousness 
 of inspiration, which ought not to be. 
 
 THE LAST MOMENTS OF HELL. 
 
 But the end of this draws very nigh ; the Chris- 
 tian heart is too full of light, too profound in the 
 love of God, too quick with humane justice, and 
 too powerful in tender mercy, to continue respect 
 for the profane and hateful horrors of the old dog- 
 ma of infernal means to divine ends, of hell an 
 underlying necessity to heaven. It comes at last 
 to be understood that the Sun of Righteousness 
 indeed has healing in its beams, and that the Infi-
 
 74 THE QUESTION' OF HELL. 
 
 nite Holiness shines with eqiial grace on just and 
 unjust alike. 
 
 HEBREW SCRIPTURE AN ETERNAL EXTINCTION. 
 
 The dogma of qualified orthodoxy for which 
 Mr. Constable contends, he first supports by an 
 appeal to the Jewish Scriptures concerning the 
 doctrine of which, on the punishment of the 
 wicked and the particularities of eternal dam- 
 nation, he remarks as follows : 
 
 " We need go no further in order to ascertain the clear, 
 distinct, oft-repeated testimony of the Old Testament. By 
 every unambiguous term it has pointed out the punishment 
 of the wicked as consisting, not in life, but in the loss of life, 
 not in their continuance in that organized form which con- 
 stitutes man, but in its dissolution, its resol'ition Into its 
 original parts, its becoming as though it had never been 
 called into existence. While the redeemed are to know a life 
 which has no end, the lost are to be reduced to a death which 
 knows of no awakening for ever and ever. Such is the testi- 
 mony of the Old Testament." p. 13. 
 
 THE FAITH IS ABOVE HEBREW SCRIPTURE. 
 
 It may be presumed, in view of this statement, 
 and of the conflicting orthodox belief, that evident 
 and exact doctrine can with difficulty, if at all, be 
 made out from any Hebrew Scripture references to 
 the subject. But, be this as it may, we must judge 
 any apparent or explicit doctrine by its relation to 
 faith. If it helps us to think that we have eternal 
 life ; if it testifies of spirit and truth made evi- 
 dent and powerful for our redemption ; if it is
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 75 
 
 profitable for the building of goodly service, and 
 the furnishing of godly ministry ; if by it are 
 brought the deep sanctities of Divine righteous- 
 ness, and the kingdom of peace from the conflict 
 with evil, then may we know it as divine truth, 
 and ascribe it, but not the earthen vessel which 
 contains itr, to the Living Word and Holy Spirit 
 of God. Mr. Constable appeals to Old Testament 
 word merely as such, and with very plain disregard 
 of the analogy of our faith. In this he builds for 
 the fire, not for a refuge of the believing soul. 
 
 HEBREW TEACHING, PURELY HUMAN. 
 
 It is astonishing that any honest student in our 
 day, knowing the facts in regard to the Hebrew- 
 Scriptures, can appeal to them as a sacred caaon, 
 or ever use so much as a single text from them, 
 except on the simple ground of its evident and sep- 
 arate truth. Every respectable scholar in Christ- 
 endom knows that it is Jewish tradition alone 
 which delivers to us the Hebrew writings, and that 
 this tradition is conspicuously human and fallible, 
 from its origin to the present moment. 
 
 CHRISTIAN WITNESS TO ETERNAL EXTINCTION. 
 
 From the Christian writings including the New 
 Testament Mr. Constable draws the following 
 testimony :
 
 76 THE Q UESTION OF HELL. 
 
 "And what did the Christian preacher declare, and tho 
 Christian writer write, to that world-wide community which 
 was ruled and bound together, not merely by the power of 
 Roman will, but by the sceptre of the Grecian tongue * In 
 Sermon and Disputation, in Gospel and History and Epistle 
 and Revelation, the propagators of the new religion, asserted 
 of the persons of the wicked i. e. of souls and bodies re- 
 united at the resurrection that which Plato had denied could 
 happen to any soul. ... In Jesus Christ was that ' life ' 
 which Plato fancied might exist in the soul itself. This life 
 lie would bestow upon his people, realizing more than the 
 conception of Plato. But away from Him there was no life. 
 On those who would not come to Him for life there would 
 come finally after stripes few or many the end pictured for 
 all by Epicurus. The Gospel brought together the fragments 
 of truth scattered throughout human systems. Those who 
 would soar it raises to God ; those wno would revel in the 
 sty of sensuality it sinks to the level of the beasts that per- 
 ish." pp. 20/21. 
 
 NO TKUTH OF CHRIST IN IT. 
 
 The Gospel of God's sinking of souls to the 
 level of the beasts that perish ! The gospel of 
 compliance with the sty of sensuality, judicial 
 complicity with degredation ! The Gospel of a 
 divine falling back from Christ to Epicurus, from 
 life and immortality disclosed in the creature, to 
 extinction inflicted on the sinful ! It is truly a 
 piecemeal construction of human systems, and no 
 revelation of faith. Drawn where it maybe, there 
 is no truth of Christ, no gospel of grace, in it. 
 Is Jesus Christ^ a bodily enclosure containing all 
 that there is of the living power of Godhead ? la 
 he not rather a sacrament of infinite grace, a sym-
 
 Tim QUESTION OF HELL. 77 
 
 bol of the power that worketh in us beyond all that 
 we can ask or even think ? 
 
 A STINGY AND SHALLOW CONCEPTION. 
 
 Is it some coming in a formal manner, by a mo- 
 tion of assent, or desire, without which no energy 
 of divinity will so much as stir to help the soul of 
 the wanderer ? The conception is as stingy in di- 
 vinity as it is shallow in spirituality. The turning 
 of the soul to Q-jd is no formal act, which now one 
 has not done and now one has ; it is a life, contin- 
 uous as being, and permanent as existence. God 
 does not keep apart in a place for us to look him 
 up and come to him ; The Divine nature is ever 
 supernaturally present to human, in an order and 
 a law of influence, of providence, of redemption. 
 It is not possible to make any terms of pure faith 
 speak, as Mr. Constable's statement speaks, of the 
 separation of man from Grod. The notion is not 
 divinity ; it is stark atheism. 
 
 ANtJLING WITH HEATHEN BAIT. 
 
 As for souls and bodies reunited at the resur- 
 rection and committed to literal destruction, 
 with various degrees of torture^ the prey of de- 
 vouring hell, one must angle in the deep waters of 
 gospel teaching with heathen bait to bring out 
 even an incidental or accidental word of that sort.
 
 78 I HE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 Words enough there may be, on the surface of tent 
 and record, which reflect some remaining fragment 
 of the great shadow of darkness which the pure 
 gospel broke up and scattered, but no eye that is 
 single and full of light can possibly read, in any 
 part of the substance of sincere gospel, any such 
 dogma of diabolism. 
 
 LUGUBRIOUS MYTHOLOGY. 
 
 Mr. Constable does in fact look through Hebrew 
 and heathen mythology to discern the gospel, as 
 the following lugubrious summary of angelic and 
 human fortunes sufficiently indicates : 
 
 "Angels fell. No saving hand was stretched from the 
 throne to raise them up. . . . Man fell. . . . How 
 many left behind ! How many voices silent ! How many 
 pulsations of life stilled forevermore ! " p. 48. 
 
 AN ECHO FROM THE FOOL'S HEART. 
 
 This is not the voice of Christ ; it is the echo 
 of heathen tradition. The whole pernicious tale 
 of war in heaven, and angels cast out helpless and 
 homeless, has no more to do with Christian faith 
 than any other dark figment of superstition. 
 Equally remote from gospel verity is the fable of a 
 fall of the race. The matter could have no sig- 
 nificance if we were able to arrive at some sure 
 knowledge about it ; the gospel does not under- 
 take to investigate the history of our crippling,
 
 TILE QUESTION OF HELL. 79 
 
 but to summon us to rise and walk ; and, whether 
 in or out of scripture, speculation about the fall is 
 quite as uncalled for as anything which the rec- 
 ord represents as apostolic blunder and folly; 
 Peter's dissimulation, for example, or the carnal 
 ambition of John and James. As for that actual 
 failure of will which is so much in the way of our 
 living to God, it cannot be a matter in which we, 
 or any other moral creatures, are left without help 
 sufficient for our whole need. To say " no saving 
 hand " is to import into theology what the psalm- 
 ist says that the fool said in his heart. How does 
 the gospel perpetually cry unto all who thus doubt 
 of God, " ye of little faith ! " 
 
 GOD'S EXTINGUISHING WRATH ARGUED. 
 
 Mr. Constable further argues, from heathen as- 
 sumptions, the wrath of God in the extinction of 
 all unbelievers, in the following extraordinary 
 terms : 
 
 " 'But,' it might be suggested, 'at least we shall not, if we 
 fall, find ourselves ushered into a doom of which we know 
 little beyond what some faint indistinct fears and misgivings 
 may darkly insinuate.' Yet even such God's dealings with 
 our race show us may be the case. For ages He left the gen- 
 erations of the -world to themselves. A glimmering tradition, 
 a darkened conscience, nature's indications of a Great Being 
 in whom love, and justice, and judgment, and power had 
 each a place ; these were all myriads had to guide them to 
 the brink of that last step which each one must take for 
 himself, and by himself, into the dark world beyond. We 
 do not affirm or believe of the heathen that all are lost ; but
 
 80 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 we do know from Scripture that, a* a rule, their future is 
 without hope. Light enough to condemn, but not enough to 
 save. Light so little as to reduce their guilt to its minimum, 
 but not to make them guiltless ; and yet with this small 
 amount of light and of guilt they endure the second and 
 endless death. And who dares say, with Christ's words in 
 his cars, that none of these lost ones would have heard and 
 hailed to life eternal the words of Christ's Gospel, if they had 
 been addressed to them by the Master or by his disciples. 
 From Sodom and Gomorrha, from Tyre and Sidon, He tells 
 us. souls would have sprung forth to the living call which 
 was heard and unheeded by the callous hearts of Chorazin 
 and Capernaum. But no such call was heard amid the vice 
 of Sodom: no such call mingled with the din of the marin- 
 ers of Tyre, or with the beating of its waves. They sinned r 
 without law, and they perish without law ; for them it will 
 be more tolerable than for others in the day of judgment, 
 but they will not for all that escape its endless sen- 
 tence." p. 49. 
 
 SODOM AND CHORAZIN THEOLOGY. 
 
 Perhaps we might profitably know more than 
 we do about Tyre and Sidon, Sodom and Gomor- 
 rha, and even Chorazin and Capernaum ; or else 
 assume that we know nothing about them with 
 such certainty as to warrant theological inference. 
 It is much safer to argue from the highest view 
 we can rise to of the character of God, and from 
 those undoubted precepts which accord with this 
 view. The Sodom and Chorazin school of theolo- 
 gy misapprehends the relative value of obscure 
 human as compared with evident divine facts. It 
 is entirely possible that the story of the former 
 ought to stand aside for the revelation of the lat- 
 ter, and that if we searched the Scriptures for eter-
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 81 
 
 nal life rather than for odor of brimstone it would 
 be more to the purpose of humble service to God. 
 
 WITH GOD IS NO DARKNESS AT ALL. 
 
 Mr. Constable is quite sure that we know from 
 Scripture that the future of the heathen is for the 
 most part without hope ; he does not doubt that 
 eternity is a " dark world beyond" to average man ; 
 and his eyes discern no companion for the human 
 soul on the way into that gloomy infinite. So 
 much comes of not having an eye single to the 
 revelation of faith, which casts a flood of light on 
 this subject by simply teaching us to build our 
 lives on a rule of absolute love to all souls, and our 
 theology on absolute confidence in the perfect 
 fatherhood of Deity. 
 
 IS THERE A LIMITED SUPPLY OF GOD? 
 
 That God emphatically left the generations of 
 the world to themselves, with but a darkened con- 
 science and a glimmering tradition by which to 
 guide themselves, is an assertion which comes 
 more by orthodox reasoning than by Christian be- 
 lieving. If there be no Godhead other than that 
 which appears in the Hebrew and Christian writ- 
 ings, and no care of mankind other than that con- 
 nected with these writings, it is quite likely that 
 the supply of spirit and life to the creatures has 
 been on the stingy scale suggested by Mr. Consta-
 
 82 THE Q UESTION OF HELL. 
 
 ble. But if all that penmen have written and 
 prophets said be but an earnest of the infinite Liv- 
 ing Word and Holy Spirit, we may trust that God 
 has in no case so shabbily neglected his offspring. 
 Just light enough not to help, but enough to 
 make guilty, were incredibly diabolical. 
 
 ORTHODOX INTIMACY WITH THE ALMIGHTY. 
 
 The elaborate acquaintance of orthodox dogma- 
 tists with the divine theory and practice of law is 
 a curious, as well as a scandalous, negation of that 
 humility before God which is the Christian basis 
 of theology. Mr. Constable has found out the 
 mind of the Lord, ortherwise than by simple trust 
 and devotion, and he speaks for God as follows : 
 
 "We are satisfied that the divine jurisprudence regards 
 the welfare of the great numbers as its paramount con- 
 sideration. "We see the important bearing of future punish- 
 ment as it is revealed in Scripture, severe but never unjust, 
 on this widely stretching interest of unbounded space, of eter- 
 nal duration. We see how every shade of severity tells on 
 some vast destiny of the future, from the severity which pun- 
 ishes where t lie hands had been vainly stretched out all the 
 day long, and the pleading voice had been mocked at, to the 
 severity which punishes where no clear voice had ever spok- 
 en, and where, if such a voice had spoken, it would have 
 been heard." p. 50. 
 
 SOULS BURNED UP TO MAKE AN EXAMPLE. 
 
 If this be true, that God sacrifices individuals to 
 the mass, and even does not mind visiting with 
 doom some who would have escaped if they had 
 clearly understood the way and the necessity, what
 
 THE q UESTION OF HELL. 83 
 
 further is needed to vindicate the atrocious doings 
 of the persecutor? The practice in the one case 
 would be no different from that in the other. 
 Jesuit and Jehovah alike make necessary examples 
 for the large benefit of the great number. It 
 may seem very hard on those who suffer at the 
 stake, and on those who are burned up in hell ; 
 but then it is useful ! The breadth of this use, 
 according to Mr. Constable's imagination, is the 
 grand point. But for diffusing through the uni- 
 verse the impression of one spectacle of souls re- 
 duced to cinders for not doing, or for not knowing, 
 the divine will, Mr. Constable thinks things might 
 have gone very differently. Thus he says : 
 
 " We are by no means prepared to say that if fallen man, 
 aye, and even fallen angels, had alone been in question, their 
 treatment by God might not have been widely different. Had 
 they alone been in question we dare not confine the efforts at 
 their recovery to those which have been actually made. 
 Christ might in that case have taken hold of angels, instead 
 of putting forth redemption only for the sons of Abraham. 
 Man's day of grace might not in that case have been con- 
 fined to his life here from the cradle to the grave, but grace 
 might have followed him on from age to age, and world to 
 world ere it ceased to strive to win back those who had once 
 offered to God the pure incense of ~\ creature's praise, who 
 had onco felt the ennobling emotion of the heart's love and 
 worship of God." 
 
 ALMOST PERSUADED TO TRUST GOD. 
 
 Evidently, simple faith came near making Mr. 
 Constable a Christian thinker on this subject. How 
 nearly he comes to feeling constrained to have con-
 
 84 1HE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 fidence in the universal and eternal urgency of the 
 Divine Love ! If he had been, in the humility of 
 total ignorance, prepared to say nothing at all 
 about the universe outside of man, and had leaned 
 to humane rather than heathen justice, and to 
 'God is Love' rather than to 'Behold Chorazin and 
 Sodom" what might not have been his hope that 
 God would not confine his efforts, at future recov- 
 ery of the lost, to doing nothing at all ! 
 
 THE PURE HEART AND SINGLE EYE, WHICH 
 TRULY SEE GOD. 
 
 It may be assumed that an eye single to the 
 service of God, not engaged with distant and dis- 
 tracting speculation, and not perplexed with anx- 
 iety to assist the Almighty to maintain the digni- 
 ties of universal dominion, but rather bent in pure 
 desire, and holy purpose, and fervent prayer, upon 
 the simple duties of a humble walk and conversa- 
 tion, justice, charity and humility, would have 
 disclosed to Mr. Constable the descent of the , 
 Divine Word to every lowest depth of creature 
 existence, and redemption put forth, without re- 
 spect of persons, on a scale worthy for breadth, 
 and a scheme worthy for sufficiency and effectual 
 perfectness, of the alone supreme and blessed God. 
 It is not given to dogmatists, full of heady opinion, 
 to gain the vision of peace, in which mortal nature
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 85 
 
 reads immortal fate, and the troubled clod becomes 
 instinct with the hope of eternal good ; but to sim- 
 ple faith, studying quietness at the feet of Divine 
 Love, it is given to have prophetic expectations of 
 grace following the creature with the persistency 
 and the power of eternity, not lasting beyond fit 
 persuasion, but not resting, forever, until the word 
 of the Lord accomplish that whereto it was sent, 
 and the creature's praise put a crown upon the 
 Creator's perfection. 
 
 GOD'S CARE FOB INDIVIDUALS DENIED. 
 
 The particular discovery, upon which Mr. Con- 
 stable has emphatically rested his denial of abso- 
 lute redemption in the universe, he states in the 
 following confident terms : 
 
 11 Mere individual life is not precious in God's si<jM. If he 
 scatters it with a prodigal hand, lie removes it with a hand 
 that is just as free. In the myriads of human beings reduced 
 in hell to death, in the extinction of the fallen angels, we do 
 but find a particular application of a universal law. Lower 
 creatures know not God, and fade away out of life. Higher 
 intelligences knew Him, turned from Him, made them- 
 selves like the beasts, and like beasts are treated. Hell will 
 add its fossil remains to those of the quarries of the earth." 
 p. 39. 
 
 SPIRIT TO SPIRIT, NOT DUST TO DUST. 
 
 What does the author of this argument "know of 
 the disposition which universal law makes of the 
 living part of the lower creatures ? And how does 
 he know, supposing that the very life of these crca-
 
 86 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 tures is extinguished, that man was not made at a 
 higher level of destiny ? Fossil remains are of the 
 form only, not of spirit and life. The only correct 
 comparison would be to say that earth adds her 
 mummies and her urns of human dust to t he fossil 
 remains of lower creatures. If these creatures had 
 had souls, and their souls had been damned all to 
 cinders for not knowing and serving God, the fact 
 would afford analogical proof that God may not 
 hesitate to inflict perdition on human souls, alien- 
 ated through ignorance from his life, and sunk into 
 profound degradation. But as the question is of 
 the fate of spirit and life in man, of the extinction 
 of divinity in the nature of the creature, it will 
 hardly answer to argue from "the beasts that per- 
 ish." It is not true that moral beings " make 
 themselves like the beasts" by not knowing and 
 serving God ; it is in a figurative sense only that 
 degradation brings down man to the level of the 
 beast ; his spirit remains, if he be indeed born in 
 a higher image, and we are bound to find a destiny 
 for that according to laws of spirit and life, not ac- 
 cording to the law of " earth to earth and dust to 
 'dust." 
 
 MAN CANNOT EXPEL GOD. 
 
 I 
 
 And this brings up the point to which the argu- 
 ment for damnation always retreats, that of the
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 87 
 
 supposed power of man to expel good from the 
 very constitution of his being and to adopt evil in 
 its ijlace. Mr. Constable says: " The free creature 
 can defeat Divine goodness for itself. . . The sinner 
 has, no doubt, defeated God's goodness for him- 
 self;" and consistently with this he speaks of God's 
 "utter failure to save in unnumbered instances." 
 (p. 52). But this is directly contrary to faith. 
 It is absolute doubt of God. It is faithless unbe- 
 lief, no matter how we may justify it. 
 
 THE DOGMATIC LAST DITCH. 
 
 The assertion of free will, or the explanation of 
 it, is of no account whatever in comparison with 
 loyalty to the highest and purest conception of 
 God which has been revealed to us. If we cannot 
 reconcile free will and efficient fatherhood, we can 
 postpone the former matter until by obedience we 
 come to more adequate comprehension. But we 
 can reconcile it if we choose ; it is in dogmatic 
 stubbornness only that sensible men refuse to as- 
 sume that efficient fatherhood in God is as simple 
 and natural as it is on earth, and as much surer 
 as divine wisdom and power exceed human. There 
 is a criminal perversity in standing desperately in 
 this last ditch, with the absurd claim that man is 
 more than a match for God in the matter of moral, 
 discipline.
 
 88 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 MOKK ARGUMENT FOE HELL. 
 
 It is time to gather into a single quotation 
 what remain of our selected pertinent sentences 
 from Mr. Constable's peculiar argument for hell. 
 They are as follows : 
 
 "'Better not to be than to live in misery,' was the judg- 
 ment of Sophocles, and we ever find the wretched, when suf- 
 fering has become excessive, calling upon death as a friend. 
 So the close of each agonized life in hell would be longed for 
 here ; would send a thrill of relief through the inhabitants of 
 heaven." p. 3. 
 
 "Their fire is not quenched. It preys upon them with relent- 
 less force. No cries of the. damned arrest it; no prayers as- 
 cend from the redeemed for the sin. which they know to be 
 eternal death : no feelings of pity in God's bosom interfere 
 to check its course. It burns on, consuming, preying, re- 
 ducing, until it has consumed and burnt all. When it has 
 spent its force it dies out for want of food, leaving behind it 
 the endless sign of destruction which it has brought on fall- 
 en archangel, and angel, and man. This is the second death. 
 But we can bear to look upon it because it is death. We are 
 not looking upon a picture which would overturn reason and 
 banish peace from all who beheld it. Life has left the 
 realms of the lost. The reprobate felt, but do not continue 
 to feel the consuming flames. These prey upon the dead un- 
 til dust and ashes cover the floor of the furnace of hell."- 
 p. 34. 
 
 ' ' To some this death may be an instantaneous process, a mo- 
 mentary transition from one state to another, like the infant 
 w ho opens his eyes on this world and then closes them for evei . 
 Here may be the amount of conscious pain for the myriads 
 upon myriads of young and old who, in heathen, and even 
 in Christian countries, from the inevitable moral darkness 
 with which their circumstances had surrounded them, scarce 
 knew wrong from right. To others the process of the second 
 death may be more or less lengthened until we arrive at the 
 case of the greatest human offenders, or that more aggra- 
 vated one of the spirits who fell from Heaven and drew 
 weaker man along with them in their fall. In our theory 
 we see how it may be, as it certainly will be, more tolerable 
 for some than for others in the day of judgment ; how
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 89 
 
 while stripes many and sore fall on some, on others they 
 may fall so few and so light as scarcely to be felt at all." 
 p. 37 
 
 " OofPs ?F7y.9 with the sinner are equal. They are severe, but 
 they are just. They are full of awe, but they can be con- 
 templated with calmness. They show the award of a jus- 
 tice in whose consequences we can rejoice. Their issue in 
 eternal death, if it brings the sight of sadness, brings also the 
 deep full breathing of infinite relief. We require ndtlier the 
 ' pnrgatory ' of Augustine nor the ' universal restoration ' of 
 Origen. Looking on the calmed face of death, we will say, 
 'it is well.' The woes, the agony, the despair of life are 
 passed away from its features with the sin that produced 
 them." p. 43. 
 
 "He will indeed gather into it all things that offend all 
 the foul rakings of hate, and pride and falsehood, and selfish- 
 ness, and lust. But it is with the ominous purpose of Jehu, 
 when he said, ' Gather all the prophets of Baal, and all his 
 priests; let none be wanting,' and 'the house of Baal was 
 full from one end to another.' So will hell enlarge her 
 borders, and the evil of the universe shall descend into it, and 
 fill its wide domain, to be extirpated and blotted out for 
 ever." p. 66. 
 
 "According to their deserving is their chastisement. The 
 time for each one's suffering over, he is wrapped in the slum- 
 ber of eternal death. Gradually life dies out in that fearful 
 prison until unbroken silence reigns throughout it. They 
 who would not find life have found death. But the scene 
 remains for ever. As Sodom and Gomorrha have exhibited to 
 every succeeding generation of men the Divine vengeance 
 upon full-blown iniquity, so will the charred and burnt-out 
 furnace of hell afford its eternal lesson to the intelligences of 
 the future. As angels wing their way from world to world, 
 as the redeemed touch with fresh delight their harps of gold, 
 as new orders of spiritual life are called into being, so the 
 nature and end of sin are always remembered in that scene 
 where so many of the inhabitants of heaven and earth had 
 bid an eternal farewell to the life of God which is so full of 
 joy. That lesson of awe is read and pondered on by all. 
 But it wilt be a lesson read without the shudder of anguish. 
 They have drunk the waters of Lethe, 'the silent stream,' 
 and forgotten long ago their miser}-. There is no eternal 
 antagonism of good and evil, no eternal jarring of the notes 
 of praise and wailing ; evil has died out, and with it sorrow ;
 
 90 I HE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 throughout God's world of life all is joy, and peace, and 
 love." p. 67. 
 
 THE ONLY REAL END OF EVIL. 
 
 Mr. Constable's idea of the death of sorrow and 
 the end of evil is the selfish and sensual one, not 
 the spiritual and Christian one. It is in the frui- 
 tion of love, the success of good, the completion of 
 every pure purpose, that Christian faith teaches 
 us to look for final blessedness, while vulgar dog- 
 ma, following the pattern of heathenism, only asks 
 for the removal of anything painful to saintly sen- 
 sibilities. On Mr. Constable's theory a mother 
 may twang her golden harp with ever fresh de- 
 light after her offspring are entirely burned up, and 
 when she sees nothing but the cinders of them on 
 the floor of the furnace of hell. In Christ, on the 
 contrary, there availeth nothing for her celestial 
 bliss but the fulfilment at last of her maternal 
 love, through the infinite succor of the Divine Or- 
 der, no covenant of which can ever pass away. 
 
 HELL THE FAILURE OF MORAL RULE. 
 
 There is no possible manner in w-hich eternal 
 memory of the nature and end of sin, as portrayed 
 by Mr. Constable's theory, could be other than a 
 shadow of irremediable horror to beings decently 
 sensitive to the distinction between good and evil. 
 The "charred and burnt-out furnace of hell"
 
 THE Q UESTION OF HELL. 91 
 
 could only bear eternal witness to imbecile moral 
 sway in the universe, however much it might tes- 
 tify of physical omnipotence and the crude ven- 
 geance of merely formal law. Happily it is a piti- 
 ful and beggarly evidence on which Mr. Consta- 
 ble's cheerful hell is promised. If the everlasting 
 Sodom is as hard to find, and as easy to explain 
 away, as the legendary cities of the plain, to which 
 Mr. Constable makes absurd appeal, the scene of 
 ashes and cinders will prove no more than the pic- 
 ture in a forgotten story. 
 
 DIABOLIC DIVINITY. 
 
 It is a singular circumstance that a nominal 
 Christian should suppose himself writing respecta- 
 ble divinity, when he makes " the ominous pur- 
 pose of Jehu," a vulgar and bloody wretch in He- 
 brew story, a type of the dealings of the Divine 
 Father with his children, and represents the Di- 
 vine Order, not as remedying whatever may go 
 wrong, but as gathering into everlasting smash 
 and conflagration a large part of the creation. Such 
 a diviner may not require either the purgatory of 
 Augustine or the universal restoration of Origen, 
 but he does require to understand the first princi- 
 ples of the Christian religion, the sure order of 
 effectual fatherhood in God, and the perpetuity 
 forever of fraternal covenant between the children
 
 92 THE QUES1ION OF HELL. 
 
 of God. It certainly ought not to be difficult for 
 a sane mind, decently awake to evident considera- 
 tions of human feeling, to see the lunatic character 
 of a proposal which should make a mother, we will 
 say, call upon one or two children in this fashion : 
 " Let us be happy now with our harps in the par- 
 lor ; Tom, and Jennie and Dick are all burned up 
 in the sitting-room, and father is a heap of ashes 
 in the woodshed." Yet with such infernal toot 
 does Mr. Constable propose to sound the Harvest 
 Home of heaven ! 
 
 THE MASSACRE OF INNOCENTS. 
 
 The nice appointment of preliminary torture 
 promised by Mr. Constable's theory might have a 
 fascination for a Turkish executioner, used to pull- 
 ing off thumb nails, gouging out eyeballs, pulling 
 joints apart, and otherwise contriving the utmost 
 agonies of slow death. One thing, however, would 
 puzzle the interested Turkish observer of Mr. 
 Constable's scheme, and that is the indiscriminate 
 slaughter of myriads upon myriads of moral in- 
 fants, persons born and bred under unhappy cir- 
 cumstances, who barely gasp with a first breath of 
 moral life before they find themselves about to be 
 murdered and thrown into the fire. There has 
 never been on earth any monster so brutal in pas- 
 sion, so degraded in character, as to be fully ready
 
 THE QUESTION Of HELL. 93 
 
 to sympathize with such wholesale slaughter of 
 moral innocents. Can it be that the naked atrocity 
 of inflicting eternal capital punishment on " the 
 myriads upon myriads of young and old who, in 
 heathen, and even in Christian countries, from the 
 inevitable moral darkness with which their circum- 
 stances had surrounded them, scarce knew wrong 
 from right," should not be perfectly evident to 
 every thoughtful person ? That it is not is dis- 
 tressing proof how little cunent dogma has to do 
 with real thinking, or with any proper activity of 
 moral feeling. 
 
 THE QUESTION OF QUESTIONS. 
 
 To conclude this discussion, we will IOOK for a 
 moment at the way in which Mr. Constable is 
 compelled to dispose of the great doctrine of hu- 
 man immortality. His recognition of the preval- 
 ence and power of this doctrine is in the following 
 terms : 
 
 "Neither a future life, nor judgment and punishment to 
 come, were ideas novel to man. Heathen poetry and prose 
 perpetually discussed them before the preaching of the Gos- 
 pel.''-^. 14 
 
 " Before the preaching of the Gospel the highest order of 
 heathen philosophy had framed for its satisfaction a theory 
 of the immortality of the soul. While far the greater num- 
 ber taught that death was for all, sooner or later, an eternal 
 sleep, there were ' high spirits of old' that strained their eyes 
 to see beyond the clouds of time the dawning of immortality. 
 They framed the idea of an immortality self-existing in the 
 soul itself. Plato, in his ' Phaedo,' has given us the marvel-
 
 94 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 ous reasoning of Socrates, and Cicero has exhibited the ar- 
 gument in his 'Tusculan Questions.' According to it, the 
 soul Is possessed of an inherent immortality. It is of neces^ 
 sity eternal. It could have no end : no death. What was 
 true of one soul was true of all souls alike, whether good or 
 bad. They must live somewhere, be it in Tartarus, Cocytus, 
 Piriphlegthon, or the happy abodes of the purified. This 
 sublime philosophical idea passed readily and early into the 
 theology of the Christian Church. We find it running 
 throughout the reasoning of Athenagoras and Tertullian, of 
 Origen and Augustine," p. 4. 
 
 "The immortality of the soul was not a question for Jew 
 ish and Christian thought alone ; it was the question of 
 questions for the universal human mind. In particular, it 
 was the question of questions in the various schools of Gre- 
 cian Philosophy. One of the noblest specimens of human 
 reasoning, building its lofty superstructure on uncertain da- 
 ta, that has ever charmed, exalted, and, for our part, we 
 must add, bewildered the human intellect, is found in the 
 dying discourse of Socrates to his frieLds, handed down to a 
 deathless fame in the ' Pha?do ' of Plato. Its object was to 
 prove the immortality of the soul that it could never cease 
 to be that through whatever changes it might pass, whatever 
 pollutions it might suffer, whatever fearful torments it might 
 endure, there was the deathless principle of the human soul 
 which asserted an eternal life and utterly refused to die. It 
 could never be, according to Plato, a thing of yesterday, an 
 existence of the past but not of the present, a figure once 
 jotted down in the book of life and then blotted out of it for 
 ever. In what terms is the denial of its mortality conveyed ? 
 In the very terms in which the punishment of the wicked is 
 asserted in the New Testament. Where the latter says the 
 soul shall die, Plato says it shall not die; where the latter 
 says it shall be destroyed, Plato says it shall not be destroyed; 
 where the latter says it shall perish and suffer corruption, 
 Plato says it shall not perish and is incorruptible. The 
 phrases are the very same, only that what Plato denies of all 
 souls alike, the New Testament asserts of some of the souls 
 of men. But the discussion of the question was not confined 
 to the school of Plato or to his times. Every school of phi- 
 losophy took it up, whether to confirm Plato's view, or to 
 deny it, or to heap ridicule upon it. All the phrases we 
 have been discussing from the New Testament had been ex- 
 plained, turned over and over, handled with all the power
 
 'I HE QUESTION Of HELL. 95 
 
 of the masters of language* presented in every phase, so 
 that of their sense there ooald be no doubt, nor could there 
 be any one ignorant of their sense before Jesus spoke, or 
 ;in Evangelist or Apostle wrote. The subject had not died 
 out before the days of Christ. It never could and never will 
 die out. In every city of the Roman world were schools of 
 Grecian thought in the days of the Apostles. In every 
 school the question before us was discussed in the phrases 
 and language of the New Testament." p. 19. 
 
 IMMORTALITY " A MERE' FANCY." 
 
 Statements such as these are calculated to ex- 
 cite reflection. There is no denial that the ques- 
 tion is of supreme significance to the universal hu- 
 man mind, nor that the answer of Plato is one of 
 the nohlest conceptions that ever came to the heart 
 of man. It is the marvellous reasoning, thedeath- 
 lessly famous discourse of Socrates, and the sub- 
 lime philosophical idea which readily passed into 
 Christian theology, which Mr. Constable proposes 
 to brush aside to suit his theory of hell. He pro- 
 ceeds to the business in the following fashion : 
 
 " The expression ' immortality of the soul,' so common in 
 theology, is not once found in the Bible from beginning to 
 end. In vain do men, bent on sustaining a human figment, 
 ransack Scripture for some expressions which may be tor- 
 tured into giving it some apparent countenance." p. 6. 
 
 " At an early period, however, doctrine on this point be- 
 gan to be corrupted, and the corruption grew with a rapid 
 growth. Of all the systems of philosophy in vogue at the 
 time, the most sublime was that of Plato. Of a part of hu- 
 man nature, the soul, it took a very lofty and captivating 
 view. It abandoned the body willingly and forever to its 
 dust, but it ascribed to the soul a life which should have no 
 end.
 
 90 TIIE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 The reader of Scripture knows how earnestly and fre- 
 quently Paul warned the Church against philosophy. He is 
 the only one of the Apostles who has especially done so, as 
 he was probably the only one of them who had any ac- 
 quaintance with philosophical systems. In his warnings he 
 does not make any exception. He does not condemn the 
 Stoic or Epicurean schools, and exempt that of Plato, as 
 some of the Fathers expressly affirm of him. He prohibits 
 with all the weight of his authority the introduction of any 
 philosophical system or dogma into the Church. He warned 
 that it would spoil and corrupt, not elevate or strengthen 
 truth. 
 
 Many of the early Fathers forgot this warning of the Apos- 
 tle, and it is among these precisely that we find the origin of 
 error in the Christian Church upon the great doctrine of fu- 
 ture punishment. Educated in Plutonism, they did not like 
 to renounce it, and flattered themselves that they might, with 
 great advantage to the cause of Christianity, bring at least a 
 portion of their old learning into its service. Some brought 
 less, some more, according as they were more or less thor- 
 oughly acquainted with Christianity. But on one poi:,t they 
 were substantially agreed. All of them, with Tertullian, 
 adopted in the sense of Plato Plato's sentiment 'Every soul is 
 immortal.' On this point Plato took rank, not among prophets 
 and apostles, but above all prophets and apostles. A doctrine 
 which neither Old Testament nor New taught directly or in- 
 directly, nay, which was contrary to a great part of the teach- 
 ing of both, tnese Fathers brought in with them into the 
 Church, and thus gave to the old Sage of the Academy a 
 greater authority and a wider influence by far than he had 
 ever attained or over dreamed of attaining. It was in effect 
 Plato teaching in the Church, under the supposed authority 
 of Christ and his Apostles, doctrine subversive of, and con- 
 trary to, the doctrine which they had one and all maintained. 
 This dogma of Plato was made the rigid rule for the inter- 
 pretation of Scripture. No Scripture, no matter what its 
 language, could be interpreted in a sense inconsistent with 
 Plato's theory. Christ, and Paul, and John, all were forced 
 to Platonise. The deduction of reason, half doubted by 
 Plato himself, was by these Platonising Fathers palmed off 
 on men's minds as the teaching of revelation." p. 55. 
 
 "Connect the immortality of the soul with the Scriptural 
 doctrine of the eternity of punishment, and you inevitably 
 create the dogma of eternal life in misery, i. e. of Augustine's
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 97 
 
 hell. Connect it with the other great truth of Scripture, the final 
 extinction of evil and restoration of aU things, and you as in- 
 evitably create Origerfs Universal Restoration. For each of these 
 opposing theories there is exactly the same amount of proof, 
 viz : Plato's dogma and a dogma of the Bible ; and, if Plato's 
 dogma could be proved to be a Scriptural doctrine, then by 
 every law of logic Scripture would be found supporting two 
 distinct and absolutely contradictory theories. 
 
 "Accordingly, this, philosophical idea of Plato is found per- 
 vading and influencing the interpretation of Scripture from 
 the second century down to our own day." 
 
 In a subsequent chapter we will show the actual influ- 
 ence of this dogma upon the doctrine of the Church leading 
 first to Augustine's fearf'il theory of everlasting misery, and 
 then, in the revulsion of human thought from this, to Ori- 
 gen's theory of universal restoration. We here merely note 
 t'io f set that the dogma of the inalienable immortality of the 
 human BOU! was from a very early period of the Christian 
 Church accepted generally as true. 
 
 No'.v the immortality of the soul, whether as held by Plato, 
 by O'.-iren, or by the Fathers in general, was a mere fancy of 
 the hut&an mind." p. 5. 
 
 THE FOOL'S DENIAL. 
 
 The energy and audacity of this denial are 
 worthy of a better cause. ' A mere fancy of the 
 human mind/ says Mr. Constable, of a belief 
 which ranks in significance with belief in the ex- 
 istence of God. If our thought of the dignity of 
 the soul can be summarily snuffed out in this fash- 
 ion of rude unbelief, the way is wide open to the 
 feet of whoever may choose to say unblushingly 
 that there is no God. It is by the suicide of rea- 
 son that we take such a step as Mr. Constable is 
 tempted to by a dogmatic necessity. Mr. Con- 
 stable terribly errs from a wise method of con vie-
 
 98 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 tion in supposing that he justly degrades the 
 thought of immortality by calling it " the human 
 dogma of the immortality of the soul," or "the 
 dogma of Plato, creation of human reason, tradi- 
 tion of men." If the idea were from unregenerate 
 and heathen man, as the false and degrading theo- 
 ry of hell is, there would bo justice in stigmatizing 
 it. Mr. Constable's dogma of hell is evidently of 
 the earth earthy, and of the pit infernal, but the 
 idea of immortality, born of the higher reason and 
 purer imagination of man, soars above the deceits 
 of fear and the uncertainties of passion, equally 
 with the thought of God. It is an upward 
 thought, and cannot ba made to givo way to tho 
 base conception of a nature in man no better than 
 that of the beasts that perish, or are supposed to 
 perish. If Mr. Constable chooses to browbeat hu- 
 man faith in the manner of scoffing scepticism, on 
 any point of its ideal anticipations, he should be 
 consistent, and deny at once both the exist- 
 ence of God and the life of God in the soul of 
 man. To sniff at the latter as a mere fancy of the 
 human mind, is no better than to dismiss the for- 
 mer with cheerful contempt. In the one case as 
 in the other, the method is that of naked and 
 abominable unbelief, as repugnant to the Chris- 
 tian consciousness as it is subversive of Christian 
 divinity.
 
 Q UESTION OF HELL. 
 
 THE BCRIPTUKES SEARCHED FOR SUGGESTIONS OF 
 HELL. 
 
 The point of relation to scripture teaching from 
 which Mr. Constable takes leave of the two sub- 
 liraest truths of religion, the immortality of the 
 soul, and the universal restoration of all to good, 
 sufficiently indicates the heathen, character of his 
 method. Instead of fastening on such a thought 
 as that of the final extinction of evil and restora- 
 tion of all things, and working it out to its deep- 
 est moral application, the restoration of good in 
 all souls, hj attaches himself most closely to the 
 notion of eternity of punishment, and bands 
 everything to the preservation of this scripture pit- 
 hole, as if the chief desire of his heart were to 
 sniff the smoke of the torment of the damned. It 
 doss not seem to occur to him that the doubtful 
 scrip ture suggestions of hell may be to Christian 
 truth pure and simple as the old dispensation to 
 the new, not meant for everlasting remembrance, 
 but only for terror to men of hard hearts and per- 
 verse and froward minds ; or that in any one of a 
 dozen other ways an enlightened faith may learn 
 to rise above this bog of perplexities, the crude 
 doctrine of hell. He considers the logic of texts 
 the rule of faith, when none has bsen proved more
 
 100 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 unfruitful and untrustworthy, except for delusion, 
 distraction, and deceit. 
 
 PHILOSOPHY MADE AWAY WITH. 
 
 It may well be considered necessary to make 
 away with philosophy altogether, not merely with 
 that falsely so called, but with every fruit of rea- 
 son and product of understanding, to make it at 
 all sure that Christianity will not unfold a clear 
 doctrine of the life of God in the soul of man, an 
 eternal and universal gift from the Creator to his 
 moral creatures. But Mr. Constable's warning is 
 twenty-five hundred years too late to take effect. 
 He should have been on hand with his small cord 
 of concern for damnation to strangle Socrates in 
 his cradle, and to watch with every generation 
 against the birth of sages and saints, to whose il- 
 lustrious faith has been due so grand a career of 
 the expectation that man shall not prove dust to 
 dust alone, or cinders to cinders, but spirit of 
 Spirit, life of Life, while eternal ages roll. 
 
 CHRIST AND ETERNAL LIFE. 
 
 The proposal to regard eternal life as "given 
 only through Christ," proceeds upon a totally false 
 conception of Christ, if it is made to mean that wo 
 are mortal in soul as well as body until we, by an 
 act of our own, enter into a formal relation to
 
 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 101 
 
 pick themselves up by faith, but that, by the Rea- 
 son and Spirit of the Divine Father, we have 
 Jesus, and that only those who thus enter 
 into this relation, become capable of immor- 
 tality. The theory is confused and absurd too 
 to start with. It really should mean that we are 
 mere animals, without a spiritual part, until we 
 earn this, or secure this by the act of faith in 
 Christ ; but it actually does mean that the Crea- 
 tor reserves the paternal right to kill off all who 
 do not get an insurance from Christ. In one as- 
 pect the doctrine seems to be that we are not en- 
 dowed with immortality until we get it from Je- 
 sus ; while in the other it is that we have no 
 right to expect to keep our immortality unless we 
 put it under the protection of Christ. The error 
 either way is in assuming that man has no saving 
 relation to the Reason and Spirit of God, apart 
 from some earthly manifestation of that relation. 
 The handling of the whole matter of the revelation 
 of God to man has been so bunglingly carnal that 
 average divinity does habitually assume that re- 
 demption is a matter of our individual relation to 
 an historical Christ, much as if a crop of apples 
 were expected to grow by dead germs picking 
 themselves up from the ground and attaching 
 themselves properly to the living tree. But this 
 is not of Christian faith. The truth in Christ is
 
 102 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 
 
 not that the blossoms all fell off in Adam, and 
 living and saving connection with Infinite Being 
 and Eternal Life, and cannot escape the develop- 
 ment, discipline, and destiny of living souls. We 
 are in Christ whether or no, in the divine sense, 
 and only in the human sense are out of Christ, 
 until providence and spirit persuade and guide us 
 to faith and fidelity. 
 
 THE REFINER'S FIRE. 
 
 The question of hell settles itself the moment 
 we appreciate our subjection to the moral order of 
 the universe, and the end of that order to bring us 
 unto a perfect man. Then we comprehend that 
 there is no other hell than the furnace of discipline; 
 that from that torment no wrong-doer can possibly 
 escape; but that out of it every moral creature 
 will come a son of God without spot or stain, AN- 
 
 NOINTED OF GrOD-WITH-US.
 
 I
 
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