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ETERNAL PUNISHMENT.
AN EXAMINATION OF THE DOCTRINES
HELD BY THE CLERGY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
ON THE
SUBJECT OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT.
WITH
SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE TEACHING OF BISHOPS PEARSON AND
BUTLER, ARCHBISHOP WHATELY, THE BISHOP OF OXFORD, THE
BISHOP OF NATAL, THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN,
DR NEWMAN, AND THE REV. F. D. MAURICE.
BY
PRESBYTER ANGLICANUS.
[Reprinted, with Additions, from the "National ReviewNo. XXXI, for January, 1863.]
WITH
AN APPENDIX,
CONTAINING
A
REPLY
TO THE
ARTICLE
ON
UNIVERSALISAT
AND
ETERNAL-
rUNISHMENT IN THE “ CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER,” NO. CNN, FOR
APRIL, 1863, AND SOME REMARKS ON A SERMON ON
EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT, BY THE REV.
E. B. PUSSY, D.D.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY CHARLES W. REYNELL,
LITTLE PULTENEY STREET, HAYMARKET.
�ê
�CONTENTS.
--------------SECTION I.
State
or
Beliee with Regard to the Doctrine
Punishment.
oe
Eternal
PAGE
Belief of the Clergy of the Church of England
.
.
Tendency of Modern Thought .
.
.
.
Practical Difficulties of Missionaries
.
.
.
Their Bearing on the History of the Old Testament
.
Tacit Rejection of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment
»
Necessary Inferences from this Doctrine .
.
.
Differences in the Expression of this Doctrine
.
.
Its Repulsive Character, as admitted hy the Dean of St Paul’s
The Appeal to Authority .
.
.
.
.
The Denial of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment not necessarily
Result of Lax Practice and General Unbelief .
.
Foundation ofWIie Doctrine of Endless Punishment
.
..
Extent of Belief in this Doctrine
.
.
‘ .
. 1
.3
. 4
.5
. 6
.6
.
7
7
. 8
a
.9
. 9
.12
SECTION II.
Teaching
of the
Clergy of the Church of England
of Eternal Punishment.
on the
Subject
Two-fold Division involved in this Doctrine as drawn out by Mr
Newman
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 13
Practical Effects of this Division
.
.
.
.15
Statements of the Bishop of Oxford
.
.
.
. 15
Inferences from these Statements
.
.
.
.18
Their Bearing on the Proportion of Punishment
.
.
. 20
The Idea that Sin may be Compensated by a Fixed Penalty
.
. 21
The Victory of Righteousness over Sin .
.
.
.22
Pictures of Pandemonium
.
.
.
.
. 23
Relation of the Saved to those who are Lost
.
.
.24
Necessity of Maintaining that the Lost become wholly Evil
.
. 25
Theory of Archbishop Whately that the Good can shake off all thoughts
of the Lost .
.
.
.
... 26
�IV
Bishop Copleston’s Inference from the Wide Prevalence of Evil
. 27
Season of Probation .
.
.
.
... 28
The Archbishop of Dublin on the Parable of the Pich Man and the
Beggar .
.
.
.
.
.
.29
Dr Trench’s Reference to the Opinion of Bishop Sanderson on the Rich
Man’s Good Things .
.
.
.
.
. 31
Dr Trench’s Judgment on those who do not admit his Theory of
Punishment
.
.
.
.
.
.31
Bishop Pearson on Endless Punishment
.
.
.
. 33
Mr Maurice on the Meaning of the Word Eternal
.
. 34
The Theory that Moral’ Obligation rests on the Conviction of Endless
Punishment .
.
.
.
.
.
. 35
Experience of Human Legislators
.
.
.
.37
Archbishop Whately on the Idea of Civil Penalties
.
. 37
SECTION III.
Philosophical Arguments Alleged in Depence
Endless Punishment.
of the
Dogma
of
The Argument from Analogy as Treated by Bishop Butler .
. 38
Butler’s Theory of Human Nature .
.
.
.
. 39
Contradictions between the Ethics of Butler’s Sermons and his Argu
ments from Analogy
.
.
.
.
.40
Butler’s Formal Notion of Government
.
’ ♦
.
. 41
His Argument from the Besults of Sin in this Life
.
. 42
Butler’s Beference to the Doctrines of Heathen Writers
.
. 43
Argument from Human Law .
.
.
.
.45
SECTION IV.
Present State of the Controversy as Bearing
Duties of the Clergy of the Church
Position and
England.
on the
of
Beal Reason for the Popular Theories of Inspiration .
.
Contrast between Belief and Practice in the Present Day .
Recent History of Beligious Belief in England
.
.
Its Effects on the Clergy of the Church of England
.
Duty of the Clergy
.
.
.
.
.
Judgment of the Court of Arches in the Case of Fendall r. Wilson
Charges of Evasion
.
.
.
.
.
Present State of the Controversy
.
.
. 46
. 47
. 48
. 49
. 49
. 50
. 51
.52
�ETERNAL PUNISHMENT.
--------- ♦---------
SECTION L
State of Belief with regard to the Doctrine of
Eternal Punishment.
HE Church of England has not declared expressly that
the probation,
defi
Tnitively with thetrial, orofeducation of man is endedmembers,
close
the present life. Her
therefore, are free to entertain the hope or affirm their
■assurance that hereafter, as well as here, the good and the
bad alike are in the hands of a righteous Father, who will
so deal with them that, when the last enemy has been
destroyed, God shall be all in all. Such is the decision
which has roused the wrath and indignation of certain
parties in the English Church, who wish to make the
acceptance of their own dogmas the exclusive test of
Church membership. Legally, their opponents have made
good their standing ground, and may afford to pass over in
silence the imputations of dishonesty or want of orthodoxy,
which are thrown out against them. But they have pro
voked a contest on the most vital of all questions : they
have undertaken to do battle with popular conceptions of
the Divine Nature ; and it would ill become them to take
shelter under legal bulwarks, as though these alone consti
tuted the strength of their cause. They may be safe from
legal prosecutions, but they have to convince the people
that, on the momentous subjects of Eternal Life and Eternal
Death, a number of propositions are still commonly main
tained, which are not sanctioned by the English Church,
�1
Eternal Punishment.
which are utterly opposed to the whole spirit of Chris
tianity, and which obscure or obliterate all distinctions
between right and wrong. Theological writers, who profess
to define the limits of historical criticism, find it convenient
to represent their position as the only foundation for
Christianity itself: and it becomes indispensably necessary
to declare that the real question at issue is one which will,
not be set at rest, even though the history of the Exodus,
were proved to be in every particular true. Behind all
discussions on the authority of the Bible lies the oneabsorbing subject of human destiny. It is better and more
honest to declare at qnce that on this question only one
answer will ultimately satisfy the English people ; and it
is no light thing that we are enabled now to assert thatthe Church of England has returned this answer. In herinterest, next only to that of truth and justice, we desireto speak. She is facing a great danger; but that danger
arises from the spread, not of historical criticism, but of a
feeling of doubt whether her voice is raised to proclaim
unreservedly the absolute righteousness of God. Her
authority is falsely claimed for a vast scheme of popular
theology. Amongst her ministers, some few openly de
nounce parts of this scheme, many practically ignore it,
while.others uphold it by arguments which would make it
indifferent whether we worship God or whether we worship
Moloch. It bodes no good to a Church when the great
body of its lay members suspect that the Clergy are up
holding a system of dogmas, in some part of which at
least they do not believe. It is a still darker sign if they
come to think that these dogmas impute what, amongst
men, would be called the worst injustice to a Being who is
represented as infinitely merciful and loving. It becomes,
therefore, a question of paramount importance to ascertain
what is, in fact, the practical teaching of the Clergy on the
subject of Eternal Punishment, and whether that teachingis consistent with itself and with the religion on which it
professes to rest.
It is impossible to put aside a subject which forces
itself upon all at every turn. The course of thought and
criticism at home, the practical and more urgent needs of
missionaries abroad, will again and again demand answers
�Eternal Punishment.
3
to questions which, all feel to be of greater moment than
any other. The age which has fearlessly scrutinized the
histories of Greece and Rome, which has laid down the
laws by which these are to be judged, and has applied these
laws with rigid impartiality to all researches or speculations
whether they tell for or against the orthodox belief, will
*
hot be hindered from examining the grounds of the
doctrines which fix the destinies of all mankind. If these
doctrines seem to be opposed to ordinary human morality,
little stress may for the present be laid on the inconsistency ;
but when they claim to be part of a Divine Revelation
which is contained in an infallible Book, it becomes a mere
question of fact whether they really belong to that Revela
tion, and whether the records, on which they rest, are
absolutely true. It may be long before these questions are
answered: but in the meanwhile the signs become daily
more and more apparent, that the thoughts of men are
running in this direction. The clergy, generally, are well
aware of this. The old language on the subject of hell
torments is not often heard at the present day; and the
passing reference to them is commonly followed by the
tranquil announcement of a just retribution for all sin.
While the clergy in this country feel that anything more
would be practically thrown away, they find it at once an
easier and a more worthy task to insist on those truths
which neither they nor their people in their secret hearts
deny. From time to time men of greater honesty and
greater courage give utterance to what is working in the
minds of others, and plainly show that not merely the
course of modern criticism, but- our first religious instincts
make the subject of Eternal Punishment the great, question
of the age.
Twice, at least, within the last twelve years, something
like a plain answer has been given to this question. The
* The criticisms of Sir Cornewall Lewis are directed with equal severity
against the reconstructed Assyrian History of Mr Rawlinson and the Egyp
tology of Baron Bunsen. The former is supposed to corroborate the His
tory of the Old Testament, the latter to upset it. To the historical critic
either issue is wholly beside the question; but, of course, his weapons may
strike that which he had no conscious intention of assailing. Minucius
Felix never thought of the labours of Samson when he thrust aside those of
Hercules by the famous criterion : “ Qute si facta essent, fierent; quia fieri
non possunt, ideo nec facta sunt.”
�4
Eternal Punishment.
Theological Essays of Mr Maurice roused an opposition
scarcely less vehement than ‘ Essays and Reviews ; ’ but
it was comparatively an easy thing to say that the former
lost half then- force by the writer’s seeming love of paradox;
while the latter have been commonly regarded as the
ambiguous utterances of men who felt more than they
dared to put down in words. The practical needs of the
missionary are not so easily set aside. It is one thing to
speak in this country of heathens as being destined to
torments which shall have no end, and another to insist
before the heathen themselves that all sin not repented of
at the hour of death will plunge the sinner into endless
misery. The inconceivable fearfulness of the penalty
deprives it, with many, of its force and meaning; and the
greatest vehemence in depicting its terrors is followed by a
deeper unbelief. It is a moral difficulty under which the
missionary may console himself with reflections on the
hardness of the human heart. There are other difficulties
of an intellectual kind, with which, if he is an honest man,
• he will find it more difficult to deal. But whether of the
one kind or the other, it is far better that they should be
forced on our attention from the actual wants of the heathen,
than by writers whose words may be attributed to a love
of restless speculation. In his commentary on St Paul’s
Epistle to the Romans, the Bishop of Natal admits that the
task of teaching Christian doctrine “ to intelligent adult
natives, who have the simplicity of children, but withal the
earnestness and thoughtfulness of men .... is a sifting
process for the opinions of any teacher who feels the deep
moral obligation of answering truly and faithfully and
unreservedly his fellow-man looking up to him for light
and guidance, and asking, 1 Are you sure of this ? ’ ‘Do
you know this to be true ? ’ ‘ Do you really believe that ? ’ ”
The Zulus of Southern Africa are not slow in drawing the
logical inferences from the dogma of Eternal Punishment,
as ordinarily understood and set before them: but they are
more ready to question its justice than to adopt the belief
which drove Antony and Macarius into the Nitrian desert.
Many a wife in England has asked her husband in anguish
of heart, how it could be right to bring children into a life
which may be followed by a doom so unimaginably dreadful;
�Eternal Punishment.
5
the Zulu knows well how to appreciate the sophistry which
seems to satisfy the mothers of Englishmen.
*
Thus far his questions concerned chiefly his own per
ceptions of the justness and fitness of things ; but it was
impossible that they could stop short here. Bishop Colenso
has had to answer others, not less searching, on the origin
and earliest condition of man ; and he has answered them
with equal truth and candour. He may have spoken to
them, in past years, of the Fall of Man as a time when
“ the vessel which God had fashioned for Himself” became
polluted with sin, and when His purpose seemed “ blighted
by the cunning of the Tempter;” but the questions of his
people have not failed to lead him in due time to a closer
scrutiny of the book from which these notions have been de
rived. He had come to the plain conclusion that the Ever
lasting Fire does not necessarily mean a punishment which
is endless ; the same earnest examination of the popular
belief respecting the Fall has led him to an equally clear
conviction that no such lapse from a state of perfect
goodness and purity ever took place. It is not merely that
modern science has set aside statements in the Book
of Genesis, and shown that physical death was not the re
sult of Adam’s sin, that the serpent from its creation moved
as it moves now, and that thorns and thistles sprang up
from the ground ever .since vegetable substances came into
being.f The fabric falls more .from its own want of cohe
sion than from any assaults of modern science. If the
second chapter of Genesis in almost every respect contra
dicts the first, if the whole chronology of the book simply
brings up a mass of insuperable difficulties, an inquiry is
opened which must be followed to its results, and of which
one result atTeast must be to dispel the idea that any texts
* At the least, the latter can be silenced by being told that the married
state has been pronounced holy, and that their children will be brought into
a world where they will have full opportunity of attaining to life unless
they deliberately choose death. The Zulu would probably think no answer
satisfactory which did not reverse the conclusion of Sophocles :
fii] (pvva.i
top airavTa vitca Xtyov.
t See Professor Owen’s-Lecture “On Certain Instances of the Power
of God,” delivered before the Young Men’s Christian Association at Exeter
Hall. Longman and Co.
�6
Eternal Punishment.
of the Bible can be suffered to override the plainest dictates
of the human heart.
These are things on which the nation at large will
soon have to make up its mind. But while the doctrine
of an Endless Punishment for all men dying with un
repented sin is still asserted by many to be the doctrine
of the Church of England, and while from time to time we
have explanations of its nature which leave us in doubt
of the speaker’s meaning, how are we to explain the fact
that it should be less and less frequently brought before
the people ? A real conviction of its truth would lead men
to dwell on it to the exclusion of almost every other, to
enforce it by night and by day with a vehement and
untiring energy. Instead of this, the Bishop of Natal
asserts, and asserts truly, that the dogma is “ very seldom
stated in plain words in the presence of any intelligent
congregation.” If prominently brought forward, it is
generally before the ignorant and before children.
Put in the simplest way, this doctrine asserts that the
condition of every man is irrevocably fixed at the moment
of his death, that owing to the Fall of Adam the natural
doom of all his children without exception is an unending
eternity of torments, that the death of Christ has, indeed,
redeemed mankind, but procured salvation only for those
who believe the Gospel and are baptized into His Church,—
that, further, every Christian must die in a state of peni
tence, and that any sin not repented of at the moment
of death consigns him to endless flames. Thus a sharp
line is drawn which divides all mankind into two classes,
while from the number of those who are saved not
only all openly evil-livers are cast out, but all heathen who,
having not the Law, have not been a law to themselves,
and among Christians all who have not died in the faith
of Christ. Thus, again, the gates of hell close on all who
may be set down as careless and indifferent, or as mere
moralists, or sceptics, or philosophers,-—all, in short, who
do not at the hour of death with true penitence place their
conscious trust in the Great Sacrifice of Christ. This
doctrine knows nothing of shades of character or degrees
of guilt; it may admit the salvation of really good heathen
men to whom the Gospel has never been preached, and
�Eternal Punishment.
7
possibly of all children dying before the commission
of natural sin. Ignorant Christians it regards as heathen,
and there can be no reason to exempt them from a doom
which awaits the vast mass, nay, almost the whole of the
latter.
This dogma may, of course, be enforced in ways indefi
nitely various. It may be so put as to make God’s hatred
of all sin the prominent idea, or it may be clothed with
the coarseness of the most vindictive passion. It may be
urged with the earnestness of the saint who is ready to
die for others, or with the horrible selfishness of the blas
phemer who professes to “ see the mercy of God in the
damnation of infants.” But, in whatever form it may be
put, the doctrine is in itself repulsive. Human nature
shrinks from a penalty which it cannot comprehend, and
of which it certainly cannot see the justice or purpose. In
the words of Dean Milman, “ To the Eternity of Hell
torments there is, and ever must be—notwithstanding the
peremptory decrees of Dogmatic Theology, and the reve
rential dread of so many religious minds of tampering
with what seems the language of the New Testament,—a
tacit repugnance.” * Doubtless there are many truths of
Christianity which may at first shock or startle those who
have grown up in a different philosophy. The cross of
Christ may be to the Jews a stumbling block and to the
Greeks an offence, but it is possible to mistake the nature
of this antagonism, or to exaggerate it until it becomes a
fiction. But there is no other doctrine which leaves on
the mind and heart an aching sense as of irremediable
pain—no other of which the real belief must throw a dark
shade over all human life, and tempt the believer to gird
himself with the cord of Dominic and Francis, and go forth
to snatch if but a few brands from the burning. There is
no other which sets the purest and most natural of human
affections in direct conflict with what is held to be the
Revelation of the Divine Will. If on the night of the
Passover there was not a house in Egypt in which there
was not one dead, there must be many dead in almost
■every Christian home, unless the terms of this dogma are
iP.
* Milman’s History of Latin Christianity. Book xiv., ch. 2, Vol. 6.
"Rd. TT
�8
Eternal Punishment.
set at nought. There is no man living who has not loved
those of whose conscious faith he can say nothing; there is
not one who does not still love some, perhaps many such,
on whose bodies the grave has closed. There is not one
who will not continue to love them till he himself comes
to die; and, in the meanwhile, he will vainly seek to under
stand how, after that time, he will become indifferent to
the doom of those whom he has loved and feels that ho
must love on earth.
It is clear that only the most stringent authority will
bring men to believe such a doctrine as this. Their own
conception of Divine Qualities and Attributes will neverguide them to it; they can only receive it on the express
revelation of God Himself that it is really true. Christians
have come to believe that God has actually revealed it,
and that the statement of this doctrine is found in the
Bible. They are conscious that it rests on nothing else,
and they feel that its hold on the human mind will be lost
if the authority of the -Book is assailed. They have to
believe that all morality falls to the ground if the endless
ness of hell torments is called in question; and hence to
all such doubts, however faint and however calmly urged,
the great barrier prescribed is the bulwark of Plenary
Inspiration. The very vehemence with which all doubts
are denounced as impious, seems itself to show that there
must be something which can only be maintained by the
exclusion or suppression of all doubts. The Roman Church
is under no necessity to assert the absolute truth even of
all doctrinal statements in the Old Testament or the New ;
she has not shown her wisdom when she has done so. The
dogmatic Protestant, who does not admit the existence of
any living infallible expositor of Truth, is compelled to rest
everything on the authority of a book ; and on this he must
take his stand the more obstinately, if he feels that there
is any one doctrine which only on such authority he would
himself maintain. The tendencies of modern thought are
sufficiently clear. Wild notions receive utterance and are
abandoned in rapid succession. The Positivist may look
forward to something not quite so attractive as the Nirvana
of the Buddhist. New schools of Psychology may main
tain that conscience and morality are the mere result of
�Eternal Punishment.
9
education and experience ; but it is manifestly against the
truth of facts to suppose that the tendency to a general unbe
lief is greater now than it was fifty years ago, or so great.
But although it may be true that the wants and
yearnings of the human heart are leading or will lead
men to a belief in the Incarnation, the Trinity in Unity, or
any other Truth flowing out of these, there are other
dogmas from which the very same wants and yearnings,
the same perceptions of the essential agreement between
Divine and human goodness, will altogether repel them.
The strong arm of Ecclesiastical authority, or the dictates
of temporal interest, or a dread of public opinion may lead
men to profess belief in them ; but if the doctrine of End
less Punishment were suffered to rest on the grounds which
have led some, who denied it before, to believe that Jesus
Christ is God and Man, no one can doubt that the great mass
of Englishmen would thankfully and indignantly reject it.
Nor would this rejection arise simply or at all from
merely selfish fears. Undoubtedly a doctrine which makes
the eternal doom of man dependent on the accident of his
condition at the time of death, and by which the sin of a
day, not repented of, nullifies the earnest obedience of a
whole life, may well make every man tremble for himself.
Still the main thought in the minds of the most sincere
believers will be not for themselves but foi’ others; nay,
the feeling of thankfulness at being rid of the dogma will
be the more intense, because now they can really and
without any sophistry or equivocation “ vindicate the ways
of God to man.” The charge that they who will not allow
the Everlasting Fire and Endless Punishment to mean and
to be the same thing, do so because they wish to introduce
a wild licence and crush all sense of law and duty, is an
idle slander or a childish dream. The Roman Catholic
consigns to the remedial fires of purgatory all who, though
dying penitent, have made little advance towards Chris
tian perfection; the Protestant, who in theory condemns
to endless perdition all but the few of whose faith and
goodness there can be no question, can hardly in practice
bring himself to speak of any as undergoing the pains of
hell. At the least he cannot so think of those whom hehas himself known and loved. He may have misgivings
�IO
Eternal Punishment.
as to the depth or sincerity of his friend’s faith and the
earnestness of his religious life ; but very large proofs of
actual vice will be needed to repress the confident assertion
that he has “ gone to Heaven.” Each Protestant, at least
in England, is loud in maintaining that all sinners are con
signed to Endless Punishment; each is equally anxious to
express his belief that his own friends are not to suffer
such a doom. Clearly then he, and not they who reject
his doctrine are making the laws of God of none effect,
and tampering with His absolute and unswerving justice.
By his system, they who are utterly unfit for so immediate
a change are transferred from the feeblest and most im
perfect Christian life here to the full blessings of the Saints
who have surrendered their will wholly to the will of God.
It is the orthodox Protestant and not his opponent who is
undermining the convictions of men that God is of a truth
the righteous judge. There is not the faintest evidence
that they who insist on gradations of punishment are
lessening “ the terrors of the Lord,” far less that they
are upholding any theories of what is called Univer
salism.
They have learnt, and their hearts tell them
that God hates all sin, and that all sinners must sooner
or later be brought face to face with his Everlasting
Wrath. They know that a man may shut his ears
to the voice of conscience here, but that the Undying
Worm, “ which writhed at times within him,” even in this
life, will then “ be commissioned to do thoroughly the work
which is needed.”* With the question of amount or
duration they resolutely decline to deal. The Wrath
of God must burn so long as there is any resistance to
be overcome; and to say that the soul will be delivered
after undergoing simply a certain fixed amount of painf is
to defeat the Justice of God and to impugn his Righteous
ness almost as much as it is impugned by consigning all
sinners to one and the same lot. They cannot in terms
deny that the resistance of the sinner may be infinite, or
presume in such case to determine the issue ; but they
maintain most strenuously that the Wrath of God will be
felt by all who need it without exception. “ The most
saintly character, when viewed in the light of God’s
* Colenso on the Epistle to the Romans.
P. 216.
f lb., p. 262.
�Eternal Punishment.
ii
Holiness, will have manifold imperfections, spots, and
stains, which he himself will rejoice to have purged away,
though it may be ‘by stripes,’-—by stripes not given in
anger or displeasure, but in tenderest love and wisdom, by
Him who dealeth with us as with sons.”* Nay, it would
seem impossible that the condition even of the sincere
penitent should have no reference to the condition of
others. “ When we consider how many of those who have
died in penitence may have been guilty themselves of cor
rupting and ruining others who have run a short course
of sin and been cut off in impenitence, have we no reason
to believe that, in some way or other, those who were once
the cause of this defacement of God’s image in the
persons of their fellow men or women, may likewise have
a share assigned to them in the work of restoration,—may
never attain (and, indeed, it is inconceivable that they
should attain, if the things of this world are at all remem
bered in the next, as we suppose they will be) their own
full joy, until the evil they have done shall have been, by
God’s Mercy, undone, and the powers of Hell vanquished
and swallowed up in life ?”f
Thus, in the present aspect of theological controversy,
we have a strange sight. Almost every science wins
ultimately into collision with some one or more state
ments of the Bible, and so calls into question indirectly its
general authority. The science of geology seems utterly
to contradict the cosmogony of the Book of Genesis;
astronomy knows nothing of any pause in the course of the
earth round the sun. The science of language appears not
altogether to favour the idea of an original unity of mankind, while the analysis of the speech and still more of the
mythology of the great Aryan race furnishes no proof
whatever that man started with high blessings which he
forfeited by sin.
Meanwhile, they, who uphold the
■orthodox belief, know well that these sciences, carried to
their utmost limits, are not likely to set aside, to use
Dean Milman’s words, “ the primal and indefeasible
truths of Christianity.” J They know that the keenest
* Colenso on the Epistle to the Romans. P. 202.
t lb., p. 218.
j Latin Christianity. Book xiv, ch. 10.
�12
Eternal Punishment.
scientific criticism cannot endanger the doctrine of that
Eternal Life, which belongs to all who do the will of God.
If these were the only truths to be defended, perhaps the
questions of Justification and Authority might be discussed
more calmly.
But there remains the one dogma of
endless punishment, which, if any flaw is found in the
popular theory of inspiration, must straightway fall; and
its defenders fight therefore with a vehement intolerance
only to be excused by their strange conviction that a denial
of it removes the ground-work of all morality.
In a few years the contrast will be more startling than it
is now. There yet live many who do not shrink from
putting forth this doctrine in its extremest and most un
compromising form. Men of great power, the spell of
whose eloquence has not yet been broken, draw out the
picture in its minutest outlines, well knowing that its
strength lies in concrete images and not in unsubstantial
generalities. There yet remain some, who seem (it can
scarcely be that they really are) eager to maintain that
“ utter unspeakable misery shall be the portion for endless
ages, for ever and ever ; alike for all, who are not admitted
at first into the realms of infinite joy,—that there shall be
no hope in the horrible outer darkness, for the ignorant
young child of some wretched outcast, who has been noted
by the teachers of the Ragged or the Sunday school as
having contracted some evil habit, it may be, of lying,
stealing, swearing, or indecency, any more than for the
sensual libertine, who has spent a long life in gratifying hislusts and has been the means of that child and others like'
it being born in guilt and shame, and nursed in profligacy.”*
Such, of course, are the logical results of the dichotomy
which severs all men at the hour of death into two
classes, and fixes accordingly their irrevocable doom. But
when Bishop Colenso asks, “ In point of fact, how many
thoughtful Clergy of the Church of England have ever
deliberately taught, in plain outspoken terms, this doctrine,
-—how many of the more intelligent laity or Clergy do
really, in their heart of hearts, believe it ?” the answer mustbe given that some whose names stand among the highest
in the land have set it forth in more glaring colours and
* Colenso on the Epistle to the Romans.
P. 207.
�Eternal Punishment.
*3
with more terrific minuteness than he has himself ventured
to imagine. It becomes nothing less than the duty of any
who know this from their own experience to show simply
under what forms this doctrine is presented to English men
and women, and still more to children, and what are the
conclusions boldly drawn and vehemently denounced from
axioms which utterly contradict them. The examples
shall be either from published works or else from oral
teaching, which doubtless the preacher would not care to
disavow.
SECTION II.
Teaching of the Clergy of the Church of England on
the Subject of Eternal Punishment.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the severance of all men into two
fixed classes at the hour of death more clearly and forciblv
stated than in a Sermon of Dr Newman on the Individuality
of the Soul.
*
Even over a dogma, to which, in Dean
Milman’s words, all have “ a tacit repugnance,” his singlehearted earnestness sheds some light and comfort, if not
for the dead, yet for the living. Knowing well that for the
good and the wicked Eternal Life and Eternal Death are
already here begun, he insists that the sinner is at present
under God’s Eternal Wrath, and not merely that he will be
so at some future time. Yet he shrinks not from complying
with the inexorable demands of his system. The invisible
line divides all mankind into these two classes ; and at the
moment of their death all who die unsanctified and unre
conciled to God pass at once into a state of endless misery.f
But he did not fail to see how little men generally believed
“that every one who lives or has lived is destined for
endless bliss or torment,” J and how the popular convictions
of Protestants opened the door of hope far more widely
than the purgatory of the Church of Rome. “Let a
person who is taken away have been ever so notorious a
sinner, ever so confirmed a drunkard, ever so neglectful
* Parochial Sermons. Vol iv., Serm. 6.
f Ib.} p. 103.
J lb., p. 100.
�14
Eternal Punishment.
of Christian ordinances, and though they have no reason
for supposing anything hopeful was going on in his mind,
yet they will generally be found to believe that he has gone
to heaven; they will confidently talk of his being at peace,
of his pains being at an end, and the like.”* If a theology
so lax rises in part from their inability to “conceive it
possible that he or that they should be lost,” he does not
forget that it is partly accounted for by natural affection.
“Even the worst men have qualities which endear them
to those who come near them;”f and therefore they
cling to the memory of the past and derive from it a
vague hope, which they do not care to sift too strictly.
But death not merely fixes the doom of the sinner; it
changes his nature, not in degree only, but in kind.
“ Human feelings cannot exist in hell.” J Others have not
shrunk from drawing out the many inferences involved in
their axiom; Mr Newman drew from it simply a warning
to fight the Christian’s battle more earnestly, and to hate
the sin against which the wrath of God is eternally burning.
In that Church, where he professes to have found both
refuge and solace, he has to propound a more merciful
doctrine. The two classes § remain, but the way of peni
tence and of hope is opened to vast numbers who, in the
strict belief of Anglicans, would be shut up' with the
sinners. Thus far in his new home he has been removed
some steps at least from “ the house of bondage.”
* Parochial Sermons. Vol. iv., Serm. 6. P. 103. f lb. 103. J lb., 104.
§ The tests laid down by Mr Newman, the Bishop of Oxford, and others,
are clear enough. The only question is as to their application. This
exhaustive classification has reference to the tares and wheat, the sheep and
the goats, in the parables of Our Lord. Mr Jowett (on the Epistle to the
Romans, &c., vol. i., p. 416, Essay on Natural Religion) will not say in which
of these two divisions we should find a place for the majority of mankind,
“ who have a belief in God and immortality,” but “ have nevertheless hardlv
any consciousness of the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel,” who “have never in
their whole lives experienced the love of God or the sense of sin, or the need of
forgiveness,” but who are often “ remarkable for the purity of their morals,”
for their “strong and disinterested attachments,” and their “quick human
sympathies,” and of whom “ it would be a mistake to say that they are
without religion.” The orthodox theologians would not share his hesitation.
These men confessedly, although members of the Church outwardly, do not
die consciously in the faith of Christ; and they must therefore be shut out
for ever from the presence of God. But they are just the men of whom
Protestants speak as having gone to Heaven, although their theory
consigns them to a very different doom.
�Eternal Punishment.
*5
The full meaning of Dr Newman’s axiom cannot be
comprehended until we bring before ourselves the various
shades of character which are included under the class of
impenitent sinners. One effect of such theology is to
paralyse the will for action where action is most of all
needed. If such a line of severance exists, there must be
those in heaven who were very nigh to hell, and some in hell
who were very near to heaven. To tell the young that
there are thousands in endless torment who have failed in
sight of the goal, thousands who have only not won the
prize, thousands who have been all
saved, is not likely
to supply the readiest motive to be up and doing. The
hardness of the conflict is yet further increased by theories
on post-baptismal sin, which tend practically to put it
almost beyond the reach of pardon; and faults which, if
committed before receiving the Sacrament of Regenera
tion, would be of but little moment, avail to crush down
the soul of the baptized for ever. But as long as the
exaggeration consists in making still more narrow the
strait road which leads to Life, no other difficulty arises
than the thought that God, who is All-merciful and Loving,
lays on his weak creatures a burden which they are scarcely
able to bear. When, however, we compare the teaching
of one man with that of others on the subject of Eternal
Punishment, we begin to see that tlieir doctrines not merely
represent the Divine Being as implacably revengeful and
utterly unjust, but rest on axioms which entirely contradict
each other, as well as certain articles of faith in which
all alike profess their belief. Dr Newman grounded his
description of the doom of sinners on the maxim that hell
is not the habitation of any human affections ; the teaching
of the Bishop of Oxford on this subject rests or rested on
a very different idea. Both would, of course, admit that
God awards to every man according to his work.
In a Sermon preached in the Parish Church of Ban
bury, on the 24th of February, 1850, the Bishop of Oxford
dramatised the Day of Judgment. He was preaching
especially to the young, to the boys and girls who had on
that day been confirmed by him; and he judged rightly
that nothing could enable them to realise the state of the
lost more vividly than a series of portraits representing
�i6
Eternal Punishment.
the several classes of impenitent sinners in judgment.
*
But, inasmuch as the example of the worst sort of mankind
would be of little practical use, he sought his warnings
•chiefly from those on whom the world would be disposed
to look favourably. The poet, the statesman, the orator,
the scholar and philosopher, the moralist, the disobedient
child, the careless youth, were in their turn described as
standing before the judgment seat. No touch was wanting
in each case to complete the picture ; and if the object was
to arouse the passion of fear, the preacher’s effort could
fail of success only with those who saw that that picture
was inconsistent with the constantly recurring statement,
that Hell contains nothing but what is simply and utterly
bad. As addressed to the young, it was, of course, neces
sary that his words should not do violence to a sense of
right and wrong, probably in most of them sufficiently weak,
or tend to lower or confuse ideas respecting the Divine
Nature, which were already sufficiently inadequate. How
far the Sermon was likely to produce such a result, may
perhaps be determined by taking a few of the examples
brought forward. After describing the death of the im
penitent, sometimes in torment, sometimes in indifference,
more often in self-deceit, the Bishop depicted them before the
judgment seat still possibly deceiving themselves until the
delusion is dispelled for ever by the words which bid them
depart into the lake of fire. “What,” he asked, “will it
be for the scholar to hear this, the man of refined and
* A discourse, addressed specially to children on their confirmation,
may be more fitly alleged as a specimen of ordinary parochial teaching than
a Sermon preached before a University audience. Yet the two Sermons oil
“ The Revelation of God the Probation of Man,” preached by the Bishop of
Oxford before the University in 1861, are entitled to all the credit due to
the Sermon at Banbury for plainness of speech. We cannot even enter on
an examination of the equivocal sophistry which runs through these
Sermons. We content ourselves with remarking that, on evidence which
has been much called in question, he makes a young man of great promise,
and much simplicity of character, die “ in darkness and despair''' before he
had reached the fulness of earliest manhood. The alleged cause is indul
gence in doubts,—of what kind, we are not told. Yet there is some difference
between the promulgation of an impure Manicheism and doubts on the accu
racy of the Mosaic cosmogony. Unquestionably, the Bishop is referring to
doubts of the latter kind ; and we need only say, that to condemn to endless
torments a young man of good life because he doubted whether the sun and
moon really stood still at Joshua’s bidding, is far worse than to consign to
the same fate the school-girl of the Banbury Sermon.
�Eternal Punishment.
17
elegant mind, who nauseates everything coarse, mean, and
vulgar, who has kept aloof from everything that may annoy
<or vex him, and hated everything that was distasteful.
Now his lot is cast with all that is utterly execrable. The
most degraded wretch on earth has still something human
left about him; but now he must dwell for ever with
beings on whose horrible passions no check or restraint
shall ever be placed.” 11 How, again is it with many, of
whom the world thinks highly, who are rich and well
to do, sober and respectable, benevolent and kind ?
Such an one has been esteemed as an excellent neighbour ;
he has had a select circle of friends whom he has bounti
fully entertained: he has prided himself on discharging
well the duties of a parent, host, and neighbour; and when
he dies there is a grand funeral and it is put upon his
tombstone that he was universally lamented, and that
society had suffered in him a real loss. What is the
ScriptufA comment on all this ? ‘ In hell he lifted up his
eyes being i\~? torments.’ ” He placed his hearers by the
death bed of the rfpk nian. “ See in the house of Dives
there are hurrying step,? and anxious faces; Dives is sick
and his neighbours are son’/ because he has been a good
neighbour to them, polite and nCsPdable and ever ready to
interchange the amenities of life. J’ives is sick, and his
brothers are sorry, because he has been & kind brother to
them, and now they must lose his care and ^assistance and
see him no more. Soon all is over. The b^ 'd^ bes in
state. His friends come together and attend it
tomb, and then place the recording tablet stating him to
be a very paragon of human virtues. Tor some months
they speak of their poor neighbour, how he would have
enjoyed their present. gaiety, how they miss him at his
accustomed seat; until at length he is forgotten. And
while all this is going on upon the earth, where is Dives
himself ? Suffering in torments because in his life time
he had received his good things.” But more terrible still,
and chiefly as being addressed to children, was the picture
of a school-girl cut off at the age of thirteen or fourteen.
In her short life on earth she had not seldom played truant
from school, had told some lies, had been obstinate and
disobedient. Now she had to bid farewell to heaven and
c
�18
Eternal Punishment.
to hope, to her parents, her brothers, and sisters ; and thenfollowed her parting words to each. What was her agony
of grief, that she should never again look on their kind and
gentle faces, never hear their well known voices ? All
their acts of love return to her again,—all the old familiar
scenes, remembered with a regret which no words can
describe, with a gnawing sorrow which no imagination can
realise. She must leave for ever that which she now knew
so well how to value, and be for ever without the love for
which she had now so unutterable a yearning. She must
dwell for ever among beings on whom there is no check or
restraint, and her senses must be assailed with all that is
utterly abominable. The worst of men are there, with
every spark of human feeling extinguished, without any
law to moderate the fury of their desperate rage. To com
plete the picture, the lost angels were mingled with thisb
awful multitude, in torment themselves and the instyd.
ments of torturing others. They stood round their auman
victims, exulting in their misery and increasing perpetually
the sting of their ceaseless anguish. T^e bodies of men
as well as them souls were subjected 'w their fearful sway,
and had to suffer all that fiend; ^ hatred.could suggest.
, .e /y11 ar iey seized
tortured by the instrument
? • ?S
?eran?eK
lustful man by the instrument of
hrs lust, the tyrant > the instrument of his tyranny.”
ver consi to' xP^ons involve some curious, and not
o-es't th^18
conclusions ; but chiefly, perhaps, they sugteent1 J ^ie (H®}rences between the ninth and the ninea centuries are not very great after all. The dsemono,gy of the Bishop of Oxford is almost more minute and
elaborate than that of Bede or William of Malmesbury.
'
*
But, leaving this, we have to mark that in this scheme, asin that of Mr Newman—
1. All mankind are divided into two classes at the hour
of death.
2. That hell is the abode of nothing that is not utterly
abominable.
* Bede, iii. 19; Malmesbury, ii. 2. It must be remarked that the details
of personal bodily torment imply physical contact of daemons, and run into
images which have their ludicrous as well as their fearful side.—See Mil
man’s Latin Christianity, Book xiv., ch. 2.
�Eternal Punishment.
x9
Bui it goes beyond the teaching of Mr Newman in
asserting—
3. That hell is a chaos of unrestrained passion, from
which all check of law and order has been permanently
withdrawn.
4. That all the inhabitants of hell are mingled together,
so that any one may attack another whenever he pleases,
and
5. That all, of whom we should be disposed to judge
most leniently, retain their better characteristics, remain
ing, in short, precisely what they had been on earth. This
last axiom seems scarcely to harmonize with those which
precede it.
On a subject of such fearful moment every statement
should be sifted with all sobriety and earnestness. It
might be not difficult to present illustrations, such as have
now been noticed, even under a ludicrous aspect; but it is
more seemly to ask calmly how, if these things are so, each
man is to be rewarded according to his works. The brutal
murderer and the blood-thirsty despot remain what they
were ; their cruelty is not lessened, their physical force
seemingly not abated. The philosopher and moralist, the
man of learning and elegant tastes, the child who has died
almost in infancy, remain also what they were ; and all,
murderers, philosophers, and children, are hurled together
into an everlasting chaos. The strong can choose out vic
tims who cannot resist them : the weak can find none to
torment in their turn, and, according to the supposition,
they have no wish to torment any one. Hell is not the
habitation of any human affection: yet the child carries
thither her love for her parents, her brothers, her teachers,
(the remembrance of good and holy lessons, which now she
has learnt to value, and for valuing which she must be the
better) nay, she yearns for their blessedness not only be
cause it is a condition free from torment, but because
they are with their Loving and Most Merciful Father.
The sceptical philosopher whose life was a pattern of
moral strictness, the man of refined habits, of ready bene
volence, and good feelings remain likewise what they were,
and they are to be punished by being thrown with those
who never had a thought or care whether for elegance,
�20
Eternal Punishment.
philosophy, or morality. The school-girl may be tormented
by Ahab or Caesar Borgia, Shelley may find himself as
sailed by Jonathan Wild or Commodus. It may well seem
*
profane thus to put names together ; but if such a theory
be true, the conclusion is perfectly justifiable, and we are
justified further in maintaining (1) that on this supposi
tion the punishment is wholly unequal, unless all have
committed the same amount of sin, and are equally steeped
in guilt (which yet they are admitted not to be) or unless
all become equally fiendish (which it is asserted that they
do not).
(2.) In either case the less guilty are the greater suf
ferers. If all are made equally diabolical by the mere
passing from this world into the next, still, in undergoing
this change, some will have lost much more good than
others, many losing very little, others losing a great deal.
And if they do not all become equally bad, then the sensi
tive and refined, the benevolent and honourable man will
be trampled on by furious beings, who will lead an endless
carnival of violence, and whom he can by no possibility
resist.
(3.) The latter class would scarcely be punished at all.
The remorse of conscience they may with whatever success
put aside, and on their passions there is to be, by the
hypothesis, no check whatever. Even while on earth,
they had shown only the faintest signs of good, and hacl
approached as nearly as possible to a delighting in evil for
its own sake. To take a number of the most hardened
criminals, and leave them shut up by themselves to their
own devices, would scarcely be called punishment in any
human code. To coop up with these other criminals of
quite a different stamp, weak, sensitive, and specially open
to softer and finer feelings, would indeed be punishment,
but it would be confined wholly to the latter, while it would
give a zest to the horrible passions of the former. But
further,—(4.) Evil, on this hypothesis, is to increase and mul
• To raise an objection on the score of mentioning names is to betray a
doubt as to the individual existence of all human souls after death ; nor did
Mr Newman fail to discern and to denounce all such hidden unbelief. See
more especially the Sermon already cited. (Vol. IV, Sermon 6.)
�Eternal Punishment.
21
tiply for ever. Bishop Butler’s Sermon on Resentment
will show clearly enough the course of that passion when
uncontrolled, even on earth. But here all check, divine
and human, is to be removed for ever. In some way or
other we are to suppose that all will feel the sting of
remorse ; but, according to this idea, they will at the same
time have the will and the power to repeat the sins for
which, they suffer, nay, to add to them sins incomparably
more tremendous.
(5.) But this notion puts almost wholly out of sight
the Undying Worm, and the Everlasting Fire of Divine
wrath. It represents the lost as preying on each other,
but it pictures none of them as brought face to face with
the Anger of God against all Sin. It reduces the punish
ment inflicted on sinners to mere vindictiveness, from
which even the idea of a stern though just retribution is
shut out. In other words, the sentence of an infinitely
Perfect Judge has nothing whatever moral about it. It is
a mere physical banishment, where sinners may or may not
feel the sense of an irreparable loss. The degree to which
they feel it has no reference to any action of God on their
hearts, but is determined wholly by the tenor of their life
on earth. In comparison with the sensitive moralist, the
ruffian will feel none ; and, in short, the Divine Hatred for
Sin will never be really brought home to him.
Yet further, the popular theology of the day leads the
mind to fasten on an utterly mistaken idea of the nature of
Eternal Punishment ■ it has led those who have indulged
themselves in framing theories of Universalism, to hold
that sin may be compensated by a fixed amount of punish
ment, like the definite penalties of human law. They who
maintain that all sinners suffer endless torment do so on
the ground that endless torment alone can be an adequate
recompense for any sin; it is no matter of surprise that
their opponents should believe in a deliverance from the
Eternal Fire after it has been endured for “ a sufficient
time.
Fixed penalties have no necessary tendency to
produce a change of character. “ It is true that human
laws, which aim more at prevention of crime than amend
ment of the offender, do mete out in this way, beforehand,
a certain measure of punishment for a certain offence.
�11
Eternal Punishment.
The man who covets his neighbour’s property may, if he
like, obtain it dishonestly, at a certain definite expense.
He knows that he may possibly escape altogether; or, at
the worst, he can only suffer this or that prearranged
penalty, after suffering which he may remain (so far as the
effect of the punishment itself is concerned, and unless
other influences act upon him) as bad and as base a
villain as before. But God’s punishments are those of a
Bather. . . . We have no ground to suppose that a
wicked man will at length be released from the pit of woe,
when he has suffered pain enough for his sins, when he has
suffered time enough, a 4 certain time appointed by God’s
Justice.’ But we have ground to trust and believe that a
man in whose heart there is still Divine Life, in whom
there lingers still one single spark of better feeling, the gift
of God’s Spirit, the token of a Father’s still continuing
Love, will at length be saved, not from suffering, but from
sin.”*
But the orthodox theology, which severs all men into
two classes, to be fixed at the moment of their death, still
maintains that the final cause of the Divine Government of
the world is the Victory of Righteousness over sin. It still
asserts that when the last enemy has been destroyed God
shall be all in all. Yet, according to the hypothesis of the
Bishop of Oxford, the vast majority of the whole human
race of all times and countries, all wicked heathen, all
wicked Christians, all children who die with faults not
repented of, all mere moralists, all men of indifferent or
negative characters, depart into a realm where Lawlessness
reigns supreme, and from which all external check has been
deliberately withdrawn. In this anarchy is involved the
permission and the power to sin afresh perpetually in
infinitely increasing ratio. Here undoubtedly the calcula
tion of numbers may, or rather it must, come in. The
children of Adam may be beyond any earthly census, but
they are not innumerable. As Mr Newman cautiously and
reverently expressed it, that which gives especial solemnity
to the thought of death “ is that we have reason to suppose
that souls on the wrong side of the line are far more
numerous than those on the right.”f It is dishonest and
* Colenso on Romans, p. 263.
f Sermons, Vol. IV (Serm. 6), p. 101.
�Eternal Punishment.
23
■cowardly to palter and dally with such a subject as this.
If the words of the Bishop of Oxford are true, then Satan,
who is the lord of this lawless realm, has for ever severed nine
tenths, possibly nineteen twentieths, possibly more, of the
whole human race from the Love and the Law of God.
Brom this vast Kingdom he has banished God; and in it
he may exult in the endless aggrandizement of sin. Some
very indisputable proof is needed for the belief that the
Victory of God means nothing more than this; and, ungu^stionably, no man
COLCOfi would ever speak thus
of any earthly King who had lost nineteen-twentieths of
his Kingdom, over which he had been obliged to abandon
all control. We might give him all the credit which a
qualified success deserves; we might say that he had put
bounds to rebellion, and prevented the rebels from harming
those who had not joined them; but it would be an absurd
mockery to say that he had overthrown and destroyed his
enemies and recovered all his ancient power. If popular
theologians speak truly, the Victory of God would be even
more partial, and Ahriman will indeed have triumphed
over Ormuzd.
We may dismiss from our thoughts such Pandemoniums
of unbounded ferocity. The most intense conviction of the
■endlessness of hell torments does not call for them., The
penalty of an undying remorse rather implies that they
who are lost shall not be suffered to torment each other.
The supposition that they are so permitted involves a per
petual miracle to keep such torture within due bounds, if
any pretence of justice in the measure of punishment is to
be maintained. It involves further the very strange idea
that they have the Divine Licence to commit a certain
amount of sin, and add perpetually each to his own amount
of guilt. The best form of the popular theology sweeps
.away all such monstrous absurdities, and interprets the
Undying Worm as an unavailing agony of remorse, an
indescribable and fruitless yearning after a Righteousness
.and Love which they have learnt too late to value. But if
it gets rid of some folly, it fails to meet or to remove the
.serious moral difficulties involved in the doctrine. It
asserts the strict apportionment of penalty according to
each man’s deserts; it leaves no room for any such just
�24
Eternal Punishment.
proportion. The very essence of proportion is the idea of
gradation; but “ can there be any possible gradation of
endless, infinite, irremediable woe ? . . . The very essence
of such perdition is utterly, and for ever and ever, to lose
sight of the Blessed Eace of God. . . . What would alL
bodily or mental pain whatever be, compared with theanguish of being shut out for ever and ever from all hopeof beholding one ray of that Light ? And even bodily or
mental pain, however diminished, yet if continued without
cessation or relief for ever and ever, how can this be spoken
bi aS ‘ fe'W stripes ’ ”* for any to whom few stripes are to
be apportioned ? It supposes the sinner to undergo .an
agony to which it will be impossible for him to realise any
increase ; to such an one the announcement that his neigh
bour’s sufferings are greater must appear only an idle and
malicious mockery. At the utmost he will only be able to
take in the difference by an intellectual effort. Is the
Divine Justice not concerned with convincing the sinner of
its own reality ?
But the orthodox theology has also to deal with the
relation of those who are saved to those who are lost.
Once, at least, they all meet for recognition before the
Throne of Judgment. There parents are to look on children
once loved and cherished, now appointed for the burning ;
there the husband is to see the wife whom he loved to the
last borne away into the lake of fire; there brothers, whose
love was one but whose lot is now different, are to take
their farewell, and to see each other again no more. That
the sinners shall mourn for the blessings which they have
lost, and. that their anguish should be increased by the very
consciousness that they who loved them once are blessed,
still, need perhaps in such a scheme present no great diffi
culty ; but the happiness of the righteous must not be
disturbed, and some solution must be found for the huge
perplexities so produced. No theologian ventures to assert
that we are to hate all sinners in this life ; rather, our love
should be deepened by the consciousness of their sin and need.
The miserable wretches who haunt the filthy courts of crowded
cities are to be sought out with the more tenderness and.
Colenso 'on Romans, pp. 199, 200.
�Eternal Punishment.
2$'
zeal, because they are exasperated against an order which,
to them, appears thoroughly iniquitous. Their blasphemies
are not to deter us from seeking to do them good; after a few
years are past, they will prevent God from so doing. In
some way or other, the Righteous in Heaven are to acquiesce
in a necessity which is laid on the Divine Being Himself.
We do not hate them now, but we shall hate them hereafter
nay, those who are lost shall retain their love for us long after
the last lingering feeling has been extinguished in ourselves..
We may struggle to escape from the labyrinth of unintel
ligible contradictions, but the conclusion remains that the
assurance of our own salvation will enable us to look with
serene indifference on the departure of lost friends into hell.
At the least, that conscientiousness will not be allowed to
interfere with our bliss. This can only be done by one of two
suppositions,—either we shall come to hate all sinners
because we detest sin, or we shall be able to forget sin and
sinners altogether.
But if it be impossible (as for men in this life at least
it would seem to be impossible) to feel an unmixed hatredfor any being not wholly evil, then the mere comfort of
those who are saved demands that all who are lost shall
cease to retain the least affinity with good. Hence it
became a logical necessity to maintain that hell is the
habitation of no human affections, or in other words that
the accident of death rendered wholly wicked those who
had been only partially wicked before. But if some
writers have discerned in the parable or history of the rich
man and the beggar, the evidence of this sweeping change,
the idea of hell torments enforced by the Bishop of Oxford
implies that over some at least no change has passed unless
it be one for the better. The philosopher and the moralist
retain their refined and kindly feelings ; the very essence
of their torture is that they do retain them and must retain
them for ever. The school-girl, who died with a lie on her
lips, still loves her kinsfolk and her friends, or, rather, she
has learnt to set on their love a value of which she had not
dreamed on earth. She has been taught to mourn over her
banishment from those who are good, over the thought
that she cannot with them share the love of God. The’
case may be put even more forcibly. According to
�26
Eternal Punishment.
Archbishop Whately, the terrors of the Day of Judgment will
be felt only by those “ who will then, for the first time, have
a faithful and tender conscience.”* That men should
have such consciences, is the special desire of the Divine
Spirit; and in this theory the Day of Judgment at once
accomplishes the victory of righteousness over sin by
■changing the hearts of all sinners. It is to this, then, that
the good have to look forward; and, if memory survives in
Heaven, it must tell them that the gates of hell have closed
-on faithful and tender consciences. The prospect may be
bewildering ; the retrospect would be intolerable. In two
ways only can men, during this life, deal with the thoughts
so forced upon them. All other feelings may here be
swallowed up in a fierce vehemence to save the souls of
■others and our own. The idea of endless vengeance may
send us forth to drive men into Heaven with the ecstatic
fervour of Knox or Loyola; or else our efforts may be
■centred on ourselves. The one aim of life may be to force
our way through gates which can be opened but to few.
We may learn to crush all natural feeling, and the selfish
ness so acquired we may carry into Heaven. The very
intensity of our joy may lie in the thought that we have
escaped the fires which are tormenting those whom we had
known on earth. Archbishop Whately shrinks from this
idea of a triumph worthy of Mahomet or Montanus. In
his belief, we shall be able in Heaven to do effectually what
we can only in part accomplish here. On earth a good
man, “ in cases where it is clear that no good can be
done by him, strives, as far as possible, though often
without much success, to withdraw his thoughts from evil
which he cannot lessen, but which still, in spite of his
effort, will often cloud his mind. We cannot, at pleasure,
■draw off our thoughts entirely from painful subjects which
it is in vain to meditate about,—the power to do this com
pletely would be a great increase of happiness.” The
blessed “ will be able, by an effort of the will, completely
to banish and exclude every idea that might alloy their
happiness.”f It might have been an easier, perhaps a
more merciful, solution to extinguish at once and for ever the
* Scripture Revelations of a Future State, p. 158.
t Scripture Revelations of a Future State, pp. 282, 283.
�Eternal Punishment.
27
memory of their life on earth. The theory of Archbishop
Whately is one which not a few good men would reject for
themselves in this life, and which the great founders of the
Mendicant Orders would have indignantly thrust aside. It
was the first characteristic of these merciful teachers, that
they could not and would pot dismiss from their minds the
thought of evil which they could not remedy. They
needed not the modern casuistry which takes “ the wide
prevalence of evil in the world as a proof that God cannot
-expect us to harass ourselves incessantly in resisting it.”
To Bishop Copleston it was the most difficult of questions
to determine “ with what degree of evil existing under
our eyes we might fairly indulge a feeling of complacency
and a desire for repose and enjoyment.”* They knew
nothing of repose and enjoyment, for beings who all their
life long must walk on the very verge of hell. They
believed what they professed: and they lived, therefore,
unlike those who are able to dismiss a mere dogma from
their mind. It may be more difficult for the comfort
loving theologians of the present day to explain how it is
that good men on earth rise above the selfishness of heaven.
Teachers of a sterner, if not a better school, find in
the dogma of eternal reprobation the paramount need of
crushing these instinctive or acquired longings for ease and
comfort: and as long as the penalty is regarded solely with
reference to ourselves, it serves most effectually to point
the warning and enforce the lesson. If the whole proba
tion of the sons of men is bounded to their life on earth,
then it is indeed fitting that our days here should know
nothing’ of feasts and merriment. If things go smoothly
with us, it is our business to make them go roughly. The
philosophy of Amasis and Poly crates is fully justified by
the conditions of the Christian’s life ;t and they who accept
these conditions, must feel it in truth a very small part of
their duty not to let the whole year go round “ without a
break and interruption in its circle of pleasures.The
case is altered when, from ourselves, we look on others;
* Bishop Copleston’s philosophy was probably right. It assumes the
aspect of a frightful apathy only when taken along with the dogma of end
less punishment, which there is no evidence that he did not hold.
f Newman’s Parochial Sermons. Vol. VI, Serra. 2, p. 27.
J Ibid.
�28
Eternal Punishment.
and it presents difficulties yet more grave when we come
to dwell on the method of Divine Government itself. In
some way or other the Justice of God who appoints an end
less torment for all who die with any sin not repented of,
must be consistent with an order of things in which
the time of trial may be cut short by an accident. If
natural feeling struggles against the' idea of an infinite
penalty for the sin of a mortal life, it demands still more
imperatively that, in such case, all should have the same
amount of trial. But the child is cut off at school; the old
man lives to heed or disregard warnings repeated through
the life time, perhaps, of three generations. Kay, the sloth
or thoughtlessness of mortal man may be the whole cause
which determines the endless torture of the unbaptised
*
infant.
Some live until they appear to love evil for
its own sake; others are cast into the lake of fire,
when, as theologians admit, they were all but fit for
heaven. The moment of death changes all alike into
beings of unqualified evil.
The loss of some is as
nothing compared with that of others ; and the doom may
come after a thousand warnings, or without any. Yet the
theology which maintains all this insists also that God is
infinitely merciful and loving. It must, at the least, be
admitted that, if in spite of all authority, they who
profess to believe these dogmas have to overcome a
natural repugnance, some among them at least have in this
task achieved no mean success. But they have to persuade
others to accept their own convictions. The decrees of
Councils, or the language of Canons and Articles, may suffice
for themselves ; but some attempt must be made to show
that their belief is enforced by passages of the Old
Testament or the New which seem to make against it.
Men do not at the first glance see how an endless punish
ment for all can be consistent with the few and the many
stripes, how others can suffer torments less tolerable than
those appointed for the men of Sodom and Gomorrha, if
* The theology of Augustine was almost more uncompromising. An
unbaptised infant lay sick: a convert, sincerely penitent, desired baptism on
his deathbed. The priest, when summoned, was asleep or at dinner, or he
would not go. It was the result of a Divine Decree that the child and the
convert should be damned.
f Colenso on Romans, p. 211.
�Eternal Punishment.
29
it be impossible to conceive of any increase to the latter.
If hell is the habitation of no human affections, it is hard to
understand why the rich man in Hades should appear to
be changed for the better rather than the worse. The
necessities of a theological position have provided the
solution; but the firmest believer would probably admit
that it will not generally suggest itself to the natural mind.
To men who have not received a higher illumination, the
rich man appears to be represented not as blaspheming or
even murmuring, not as hating God or exulting in the
ruin of others, but as anxious ’ that his brothers may
not fail to win the blessings which he has lost. To
such it would seem that our Lord assumed “ that even
in the place of torment there will be loving, tender
thoughts in a brother’s heartand they may be tempted
to reason further, that “ if there can be such, as they can
not come from the Spirit of Evil, they must be believed to
come from the Spirit of all Goodness. While there is life,
there is hope. In fact, the rich man is represented as less
selfish in the flames of hell than he was in this life. The
Eternal Fire has already wrought some good result in
him.”* But they who maintain the dogma of endless ven
geance can afford to look down on notions so crude as
these ; rather they feel it their duty to insinuate that none
but men of unclean lives can ever entertain them. To
them the prayer of the rich man to Abraham is simply the
blasphemous expression of a desperate irony, while his life
on earth was the result and token of a conscious and
definite unbelief in the existence of an unseen world.
During his mortal life he may have been sinful; now he is
*
utterly fiendish and diabolical. The teaching of the Bishop
of Oxford seems to involve conclusions not quite consistent
with these positions of the Archbishop of Dublin,f yet both
assert strenuously the endlessness of future punishment.
The former may countenance the notion that the greater
sin has the lesser penalty ; the latter appears to set aside
the ordinary meaning of words.
According to Dr Trench, the narrative was aimed
* Colenso on Romans, p. 214.
f Notes on the Parables, p. 454, &c. &c.
�30
Eternal Punishment.
against the Pharisees, and especially at their unbelief.
The rich man, or, if we must so call him, Dives, had fairly
brought himself to believe that the unseen world had really
no existence, and he calmly adopted and.clung to a course
of life consistently springing out of this cool intellectual
*
conviction.
The discovery of its reality, he made only
when it was too late. It may be. so; but the statement
seems to involve the conclusion that men cannot act as the.
rich man acted, with a clear knowledge of the consequences.
Yet the drunkard deliberately persists in his habit, knowing
not only that sobriety is a duty, but that his vice is ruinous
alike to his body and his soul. The settled purpose to
commit sin may coexist with a keen perception of the
misery of sin. Men may be, as Bishop Butler has insisted,
most unselfish in their viciousness, most disinterested in
deliberately putting aside what they know to be their
highest good.f The rich man in the parable may have acted
like Balaam ; but to assert that his unbelief arose from his
mental process of examination and rejection is as much an
assumption as the ascription to him of some human feeling
can possibly be. We are not told that his actions were
prompted by his belief; it is not implied that he knew any
thing about the beggar who lay sick at his gate ; and many
have fastened on his ignorance as conveying the most
fearful of all warnings to the thoughtless.^ The narrative
seems to represent him simply as putting aside the thought
of all responsibility, not as going through a mental process
in order that he may deny its existence, or as persevering
in the process until he has worked himself into full convic
tion. If it is not easy to see how a parable addressed
chiefly to Pharisees should dwell on extravagance rather
than covetousness, it is still more strange that an intel
lectual unbelief in an unseen world should be attributed to
men who believed a resurrection both angel and spirit.
But a closer scrutiny of the narrative will be rewarded
with further discoveries. It may teach us that the rich
man’s good things were “ good actions or good qualities
• Trench on the Parables, p. 456.
+ Sermon on the Character of Balaam.
j See especially Cope and Stretton, Visitatio Infirmorum, Office for a
careless sick person.
�Eternal Punishment,
3®
which, in some small measure, Dives possessed, and for
which he received in this life his reward.”* Dr Trench is
not prepared to reject the belief of Bishop Sanderson, that
“ God rewardeth those few good things which are in evil
men with these temporal benefits, for whom, yet in his
justice, he reserveth eternal damnation.” Bor nine days
Eblis feasted in his hall the beings who had bidden adieu
to hope ;f it was reserved for a Christian theologian to assert
that God bestows the means of a little sensual enjoyment
for the good qualities or deeds of the unconverted. If Dr
Newman urges sinners during Lent “ to act at least like the
prosperous heathen, who threw his choicest trinket into the
water that he might propitiate fortune,the Archbishop
of Dublin has been taught that “ the course of an unbroken
prosperity is ever a sign and augury of ultimate reproba
tion.” Doubtless the heart knows its own bitterness, and
there may be many breaks in a life of outwardly uninter
rupted success; but Dr Trench’s axiom might afford a
grim satisfaction to those who, in the midst of want and
wretchedness, regard the rich and the powerful as
unquestionably in the enjoyment of “ unbroken prosperity.”
There are probably not wanting those who may think that
this dangerous condition is fulfilled in Archbishop Trench
himself.
When a writer lays down such a criterion on his own
authority, it is hard to abstain from retorts and insinuations:
but the mere sense of truth and fairness must sometimes
call on us to speak, when we might have chosen rather to
keep silence. If Dr Trench is at a pinch to explain how
the sight of the lost, whom they are not suffered to help,
can fail to cast a shade on the happiness of the blessed, it
is simply because he has not availed himself of the ready
solution of his predecessor, Dr Whately. When he asserts
that the rich man’s request to Abraham is “ a bitter reproach
against God and against the old economy,” it might be
enough to reply that the narrative does not say so. But
the case is altered when Dr Trench proceeds to judge of
* Trench on the Parables, p. 474.
f Beckford’s Vathek.
$ Sermons, Vol. VI, p. 27. Dr Newman should rather have said
“ appease the jealousy of God <j>0ovep'ov to baip.oviov was the keynote of the
philosophy of Herodotus.
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Eternal Punishment.
the inward life of those who differ from himself. He has
a keen perception that, if suffering was already doing- its
work in the rich man, sufferings must be not “ vindicative,”
but “ corrective.” Such a doctrine, he believes, “ will
always find favour with all those who have no deep insight
into the evil of sin, no earnest view of the task and
responsibilities of life, especially when, as too often,
they are bribed to hold it by a personal interest, by
a lurking consciousness that they themselves are not
earnestly striving to enter in at the strait gate, that their
own standing in Christ is insecure or none.”* Dr Trench
is,' of course, not obliged to believe or to assert that such a
fear lies at the root of the convictions expressed by Mr
Maurice, or Mr Wilson, or the Bishop of Natal; but he
does most distinctly and unequivocally deny to them “ any
deep insight into the evil of sin, any earnest view of the
task and responsibilities of life.” The verdict of Dr Trench
might fairly justify us in rejecting the criterion that a tree
is known bv its fruits, or in questioning the truth that
charity thinks no evil. He seems to agree with Aquinas
that while the rich man asked that his brethren might not
come into his place of torment he was really longing for
their damnation. If his request was nothing but a blas
phemous scoff, Dr Trench can hardly think otherwise.
Yet surely he could not have alleged this opinion of Aquinas;
except from the mere necessity of maintaining a foregone
conclusion. It is impossible to conceive of a condition of
heart more thoroughly diabolical. In short, the being who
can indulge in such a wish must be wholly and intensely
bad. But absolute iniquity shuts out the idea of remorse,
and leaves no room for any suffering except that which is
physical, or any mental feelings except those of violent and
furious rage ; and these leave no place for that aching void,
that unavailing agony of sorrow for a good irrecoverably
lost, which is generally asserted to be the special sting in
the misery of the wicked. Nay, more; this idea that all
men become devils in hell, wild in their own unbounded
wickedness, alone constitutes the logical necessity for the
physical tortures of fire and brimstone, as well as for the
* Notes on the Parables, p. 478.
�Eternal Punishment.
agency of demons to inflict those outward stripes for which
only, on this hypothesis, any feeling will be left.
This logical necessity was clearly present to the mind
of Bishop Pearson. If it was certain that the pains of hell
were simply vindictive, and the same measure of endless
duration was the portion of all the lost, then the punish
ment of sinners must be regarded as something different
from the righteous wrath of God against all sin. If the
punishment was endless, the wicked must live through
endless time to suffer it. “ Otherwise there would be a
punishment inflicted and none endured, which is a contra
diction.”* Bishop Pearson had a quick eye for the incon
sistencies of his opponents ; on his own side he can see
none. He is careful to assert that punishment shall be
strictly apportioned to sin, “ so that no man shall suffer
more than he hath deserved.”f He insists also that they
shall be “ tormented with a pain of loss, the loss from God,
from whose presence they are cast out, the pain from them
selves in a despair of enjoying Him, and regret for losing
Him.” Modern theology has substituted a savage delight
in tormenting each other in place of this endless remorse.
Bishop Pearson was scarcely concerned with examining an
idea which probably never entered his mind. But the diffi
culty involved in the enormous differences between one man
and another at the time of death, belongs to all ages and
countries alike. Bishop Pearson knew, as the Bishop of
Oxford knows now, that young children have died in sin.
It is cowardly to evade the irresistible conclusion. The
little children are doomed, not less than the Devil himself,
to a punishment which “ shall not be taken off them by any
compassion.” These, the sinners of a day, whose sins lay
in playing truant and telling a lie to hide it, shall no more
than the great Tempter of Mankind .live to pay the utter
most farthing. They, not less than Herod or Alexander
VI., or Agathocles or Danton (it matters not whom we
take), shall suffer the endless “ horror of despair,” because
“ it were not perfect hell if any hope could lodge in it.” It
needs some special illumination to enable ordinary men to
see how these children suffer no more than they deserve.
* Pearson on the Creed, Art. xii., p. 463.
f lb., p. 467.
D
�34
Eternal Punishment.
The time has come when the whole subject must be
met calmly and fearlessly. There may be sophistry and
evasion on both sides. Orthodox theologians have not
withheld both these imputations from Mr Maurice, whose
worst fault is an indistinctness of expression which some
times assumes an air of paradox. Something’ of this
ambiguity lies at the root of his reluctance to extend the
idea of time into that of eternity. It may be true that
“ the continual experiments to heap hundreds of thousands
of years on hundreds of thousands of years,” do not
put us even on the way to the idea; but it seems
not less certain that we cannot conceive of existence
except as an extension of duration.
*
It is better to
say plainly and honestly that the idea of any end to the
life of the righteous involves also the idea of the most dis
interested injustice,—an injustice the more horrible in pro
portion to the greater advance of the good in conformity
to the Divine will. It is well to say not less honestly that
the idea of an end to the misery of the wicked involves no
such imputation, if at the same time it is maintained that
so long as there remains any resistance, so long must the
sinner abide under the burning wrath of God. Án infinite
resistance implies an infinite chastisement; nor can we
allege anything to prove that the wicked cannot prolong
their resistance for ever, except the difficulty of believing
that the Divine Will cannot finally subdue the disobedience
of every enemy.f Nor is it of much use to dwell on verbal
arguments drawn from the words which in our English
Bibles are represented by everlasting punishment and the
unquenchable fire. J But it is more than ever necessary to
* Christian Berrem' rancer, January 1854, p. 225. Art., Maurice’s Theo
logical Essays. This article presents the arguments for the doctrine of
endless punishments with perhaps as much force as they can be expressed ;
but the reviewer was apparently mistaken in thinking that Mr Maurice’s
main objections were merely verbal.
f It was this difficulty which led Scotns Erigena to affirm the final
restoration of the Devil himself, and to cite Origen and others in support of
this belief.—See Milman’s Latin Christianity, Book xiv., ch. 2.
J Probably not much will be gained by efforts to determine whether
the writers of the New Testament attached a distinct idea of duration to
the word anários, which, as coming from the root i, to go, originally ex
pressed the simple idea of motion. It is of the utmost importance to bear in
mind th:s first restricted and sensuous meaning of the word. (See Max
Müller, Lectures on the .Science of Language, Second Series, pp. 67, 249,
�Eternal Punishment.
35
meet assumptions by plain denials. Bishop Pearson may
rest his own belief on the fact that the same adjective is
applied in the Greek Testament to the state of the wicked
and the good; but it becomes a mere question of fact, to be
determined manifestly by each man’s judgment, when it is
asserted that the texts of Scripture declaring the endless
punishment of the wicked “ are so decisive and plain, that
they must be taken to mean what they appear to do, unless
some positive ground of reason or morals can be shown against
it.”* Such ground can be shown, and a man must indeed
have thrown dust into his own eyes, if he can think that a
sweeping assertion can put aside the distinction of the few
and the many stripes, of the more tolerable punishment of
Gomorrha than of Capernaum, of the fire which is to save
the men whose work of hay or stubble it shall nevertheless
consume. It is a profound casuistry which sees nothingbut diabolical blasphemy and rage in what is admitted to
be the only full picture given in the Gospels of the state of
the impenitent after death. One or two phrases of the
New Testament at the most may be wrested into the asser
tion that all those who die impenitent are tormented for
ever ; a far greater number appear altogether to contradict
it, and these must be taken to mean what they appear to
rnean, “ unless some positive ground of morals or reason can
be shown against it.” Morals and reason would appear to be
decisive against a dogma which issues in a labyrinth of in
explicable and almost ludicrous contradictions, and which
seems to impute to the Merciful God an intensity of vindic
tiveness which the human mind is utterly unable to realise.
But it is asserted that reason and morals call for the
maintenance of this dogma from another point of view.
It is urged that “ the release from the notion of Eternal
Punishment would be felt by the great mass as a relief
336, 527.) But it may be more tempting to lay a stress on the word
KÓAatris, which, according to Aristotle, is essentially temporary, end to
maintain that the English translators were not warranted in rendeiing
7rdp &(ri3e<rTov by fire that never shall be quenched. The verbal adjective
can at best express mere quality or capacity. But it seems idle to apply
such subtleties to the Greek of the New Testament. If it were not so, .
something might be made of the term fiicravos., as applied to sickness and
plagues; but it seems to be used precisely as we use the word trial without
reference to any intended effect on the sufferer.
* Christian Remembrancer, January 1854, p. 225.
�36
Eternal Punishment.
from the sense of moral obligation, and, relying on the
certainty that all would be sure to be right at last, men
would run the risk of the intermediate punishment, what
ever it might be, and plunge into self-indulgence without
hesitation.”* The reviewer of Mr Maurice knew of course
that men do so now in spite of this doctrine, and further
“ that there is no limit to the powers of imagination by
which men can suppress the reasonable certainty of the
future, and make the present everything.” But he thinks
that “ the belief in endless punishment is the true and
rational concomitant of the sense of moral obligation ”
and that “ a general relaxation of moral ties, a proclama
tion of liberty and security, the audacity of sins which had
before been abashed, carelessness where there had been
hesitation, obstinacy where there had been faltering, and
defiance where there had been fear, would show a world in
which the sanctions of morality and religion had been
loosened, and in which vice had lost a controlling power,
and got rid of an antagonist and a memento.”f It is im
possible to regard with indifference the least possible risk of
weakening the sense of moral obligation; but it is a mere
question of fact, and human experience may carry us some
little way towards deciding it. Men are, undoubtedly, able
to suppress the reasonable certainty of the future ; but they
are also able to heap sin on sin in spite of a penalty of
which they have almost an ever present dread. Hell is
emphatically the Italian’s bugbear. The Englishman can
talk about it, and dismiss it from his mind; but it haunts
the Italian by day and by night. His flesh creeps and
his blood runs cold in the silence of his secret chamber,
and the first temptation which crosses his path is followed
by his submission. But there are more sweeping methods
of evading this belief. The Church of Rome modifies the
dogma by the purgatorial fire: the popular belief of Pro
testants dispenses with purgatory altogether, and sends all
men practically to heaven. At the least, it answers the
question, whether there are few saved, by the implied
assertion that very few, indeed, are lost. Hence the belief
in endless punishment may be the rational concomitant of
* Christian Remembrancer, January 1854, p. 233.
f Christian Remembrancer, lb. p. 234.
�Eternal Punishment.
37
a sense of moral obligation; but its effects are practically
nullified, and its removal would only widen a little more
the road which is now held to lead to heaven those who
live the common life of all men.
*
Dean Milman admits
that there is a natural revolt against the doctrine: men
wish to evade it, and they consolidate their sophistry into
a system. None, or at the most but few, really maintain
now that all who do not die in the active Love of God
remain for ever face to face with His Anger. There would
be no such scruple in believing- that in all, without respect
of persons, the Eternal Eire will continue to purge away
the dross from the pure ore as long as any dross remains.
The check on sin would be increased in power, and the
sense of moral obligation quickened, because it would be
set free from a belief which to natural human instinct
appears self-contradictory and immoral.
But what is the experience of legislators in all ages and
countries ? If men will not be deterred by any penalty
short of endless damnation, that is to say, a penalty than,
which they can conceive none higher, then clearly all
apportionment of civil punishment must merge in the
one penalty of death. The idea is a very old one ; but,
whether in England or at Athens, it has simply defeated its
own ends, if that end be the diminution of crimes. Diodotos warned the Athenians that they might punish all
their enemies with death, but they would only induce them
still more to run the chances of escape.f The same
gambling spirit runs into things spiritual. The same
doctrine which tells the good man that if he dies with any
sin not repented of he will sink into hell still leaves it
possible that the wicked man may live to repent. Thou
sands believe with Balaam that the mere wish to die thedeath of the righteous man will somehow or other issue in
its fulfilment.
There remains yet the fact, which it is impossible to
ignore, that the mitigation of a penalty is not necessarily
followed by the multiplication of the offences for which it
is inflicted. When Cleon proposed to punish the revolted
Mitylenteans by an indiscriminate massacre of all the men,
* Jowett on the Epistle to the Romans, Vol. I, n. 417, &c.
t Thucydides, iii. 45.
�38
Eternal Punishment.
he was carrying out a theory of punishment which seems
to have been heartily accepted by Archbishop Whately. In
his belief, as in that of the Athenian demagogue, “the
object proposed by human punishment is the prevention of
future crimes by holding out a terror to transgressors.”*
Both alike put a part for the whole ; and, if the theory
were true, it would relieve judges from all duty of appor
tioning punishments for offences. English judges of the
present day feel this task of apportionment more and more
to be a very strict duty; and it would seem that people do
not steal more sheep and handkerchiefs because they
no longer run the risk of being hanged for the crime.
Undoubtedly, if there is but the one penalty of death for
almost all offences, the task of legislation is wonderfully
simplified. It implies no exalted idea of Divine justice if
we believe that its penalties are fixed by the same kind of
vindictive indolence. The legislation of England is more
and more making the reformation of the offender a co
ordinate object with the prevention of crime. According
to the popular theology, it has already risen to a higher idea
than is exhibited in the Justice of an all-merciful God.
SECTION III.
Philosophical Arguments alleged in Defence
Dogma of Endless Punishment.
of the
But from the contradictory theories and notions of popular
preachers and commentators, or even from the positive state
ments of Creeds, Articles, and Canons, we may pass into the
calmer regions of philosophical argument. The conditions
of our life here may teach us something about that which
shall be hereafter: and, if we believe that one and the same
God rules over all worlds, it is impossible to ignore and
foolish to depreciate the force of this argument from analogy.
But the name even of Bishop Butler must not tempt us to
* Scripture Revelations of a Future State, p. 219.
�Eternal Punishment.
39
draw a single inference which it does not fully warrant.
Every question connected with or arising out of it is, as
Butler liimself admits, a mere question of fact. We may or
may not be able to determine it; but on those which we fail
to answer we must be content to suspend all judgment. It
matters little whether Butler took a high or a low view of
religion ; but it can never be useless to show, if it can be
shown, that he lias in any instance overstepped the bounds
which must be set to all reasoning from analogy. The
most stringent scrutiny is needed to ensure that the alleged
dogmas of revealed religion shall not draw from the con
ceptions of natural religion an aid which the latter cannot
logically afford. If the argument is to carry any weight as
addressed to unbelievers, this rigid indifference becomes
an indispensable duty.
The Analogy of Butler may be as wearisome as a long
journey through deep sand; and we may miss in it “not
only distinct philosophical conceptions but a scientific use
of terms.”* It is of more moment to remark that the
science of the Analogy does not altogether harmonize with
the science of the great Sermons which have done more to
preserve his fame. The account given in the latter of
human nature may appear to allow but little scope for a
fervent or an ecstatic piety; but it asserts unequivocally
that the happiness or the misery of man is the direct and
inseparable result of his actions and his habits. Man stands
in an immediate relation to his Maker, not merely as being
the work of His hands, but as possessing affections and
desires which can have their complete satisfaction in
nothing less than God Himself. His work is to see that
the several parts of his nature are kept in due proportion
to each other, as well as in subordination to that higher
principle of reflexion which ought to be absolute in power
as it is supreme in authority. And throughout it follows,
that by the very necessity of His Nature, God, who cannot
■change, must regard with love every creature which seeks
so to conform its will to the Divine will, must acknowledge
them and draw them towards Himself, in proportion as they
thus strive to do their proper work. Hence the final cause
* Essays and Reviews. Ninth Edition, p. 293.
�4o
Eternal Punishment.
of man is conformity with absolute Righteousness and
unfailing Love. This conformity may also involve his hap
piness, but in the order of ideas it precedes it.
The Analogy introduces us to views of a very different
kind. In the Sermons the constitution of man involves
the need of conformity with the Divine Nature: in the
Analogy God annexes certain results to certain acts. In the
former Virtue is the natural condition of man,—implying
a necessary communion with the Source of all Truth and
Goodness : in the latter it is something which God has
promised to reward and which may yield to its pos
sessor a “ secret satisfaction and sense of security.” In
the Sermons the Love of God is represented as the
direct and necessary complement of human nature; in
the Analogy the idea of God as a master and governor is
the first to occupy the mind of man. In the formcr by
the very necessity of His Nature, God loves the creatures
whom he has made capable of being kindled by his Love ; in
the latter “ the true notion, or conception of the Author of
nature is that of a master or governor prior to the consi
deration of his moral attribute.”* The whole method of
Divine government becomes a complex machinery, admi
rably adapted, it may be, for its special purpose, but imply
ing the exercise of an arbitrary will which has prede
termined certain results without reference to an Eternal
and Unchangeable Law.f The Sermons speak of the con
stitution of a man as flowing directly from the nature of
God; the Analogy seems rather to separate the goodness of
virtuous men from the goodness of God, and to make
them independent centres of righteousness. Erom the
Sermons it follows, of necessity, that the end of human
life is not happiness but a conformity to the Divine
Nature; in the Analogy we are taught that God has
* Butler’s Analogy. Part I, ch. ii., p. 3S.
t It is as well to remember how rapidly this recognition of power as the
basis of the Divine nature may pass into a mere Baal worship. Congrega
tions have not unfrequentlv been edified and comforted by the assurance that
they .are in the hands of an all-powerful Being who happens also to be verv
merciful, and by the contrast of their fortunate position with the conceiv
able wretchedness of creatures made bjr a Deity whose delight lay simply
in tormenting them. Such talk might be dismissed at once, except as illus
trating the sort of argument which is sometimes used to reconcile the idea
of mercy with that ot an endless punishment of all sinners.
�Eternal Punishment.
4i
annexed pleasure to some actions and pain to others, and
that men “ act altogether on an apprehension of avoid
ing’ evil or obtaining good.” To use Butler’s favourite
phrase, God governs the world by a system of rewards
and punishments ; and apart from any dogmas of revealed
*
religion this conclusion is forced upon us by the analogy
of civil government.
Many probably, when they read that “ the annexing
pleasure to some actions and pain to others in our power
to do or forbear, and giving notice of this appointment
beforehand to those whom it concerns, is the proper formal
notion of government,” t will wonder whence Butler derived
his knowledge. That English legislation in his day was
not slow in inflicting pain for a vast number of actions, few
would care to deny ; it would not be so easy to give a list
of actions to which it annexed a feeling of pleasure. But
to what code of any age or people could this axiom ever bo
applied ? A paternal despotism in its palmiest days might
possibly exhibit some faint approach to such a system; but
otherwise human law contents itself mainly with pro
tecting persons and property and inflicting pains or penal
ties on those who injure either the one or the other. It is
careful to punish whatever it holds to be an offence; it
admits no obligation to reward all that men may regard as
generous or honourable. The very idea of equal govern
ment is, that it leaves good citizenship to be its own
reward, while it showers its rewards on a few, not because
they are better or more righteous than their neighbours,
but because they have had it in their power by whatever
means to do the state more service. It expects all citizens
to do their duty, without even telling them that they ought
* The Reviewer of Mr Maurice’s “Theological Essays” in the
‘ Christian Remembrancer,’ Jan. 1854, p. 209, earnestly denies that “analogy
is Butler’s primary argument for the truth of religion.” This is, of course,
quite true, if the Sermons and. the Analogy are taken together. Then,
undoubtedly his full system is grounded “ on an appeal to our consciousness
of a certain moral nature within us in the first place,” and “an immediate
inference from that moral nature in the next.” But the Analogy is pro
fessedly addressed to those who do not admit this consciousness of a certain
moral nature ; and for the time the argument from Analogy becomes his
primary argument. The result is a contradiction between the system
propounded in the Analogy and the Sermons.
t Analogy. Part I, ch. ii., p. 37.
�42
Eternal Punishment.
to feel pleasure in doing it, and certainly without caring
whether they feel the pleasure, or whether they do not.
The Athenian rose to a higher idea when he obeyed the
laws of his country, not because they might reward him
or give him pleasure, but from a simple sense of duty,
which rested neither on punishment nor reward. To lay a
special stress on these was at once the evidence of a mind
more or less degraded. Men of slavish natures might be
guided by pleasure and pain, and if they broke the law
might be chastised by those pains which are directly con
trary to the pleasures which they lose. The formal notion
*
of government was with Pericles something very different
from this.
It may, of course, be said that good citizenship must
bring pleasure ; but it does so by no appointment of human
law, and thus far the analogy is not conclusive. Still there
remains the general course of earthly things ; and to Butler
the popular belief of endless reprobation, perhaps, appeared
to be warranted by the physical effects of wickedness in
this life. A careful survey of them taught him that there
was no apparent proportion between the sin and its conse
quences, that the latter are frequently delayed till long
after the actions which occasioned them are forgotten, and
that after such delay they come “ not by degrees but
suddenly, with violence and at once.” It taught him that,
though after a certain amount of folly, it was often in the
power of men to retrieve their affairs, or recover their
health and character, yet real reformation was in many
cases of no avail towards preventing the miseries, sickness,
and infamy, annexed to folly and extravagance beyond that
degree. It further showed him (and on this he laid a still
greater stress) that “ neglects from inconsiderateness,
want of attention, not looking about us to see what we
have to do, are often attended with consequences altogether
as dreadful as any active misbehaviour from the most
extravagant passion.” There is something specious in the
supposed analogy ; but neglect and want of attention may
arise, and very often do arise, as much from weak mental
power as from an ill-regulated life; and their ill effects are
* Aristotle, Etbic. Nicom. X, 9,10. This great thinker expressly affirms
human punishment to be a process of healing, lb. II, 2, 4.
�Eternal Punishment.
43
quite as disastrous in the fomer case as in the latter. But
while the latter is morally worse as well as unfortunate,
we cannot assert this of the other. The results in this case
are external or physical, and will cease to affect the man
as soon as he is removed into a different condition of things.
Even with the other, some distinction must be drawn
between the will of the sinner and the physical conse
quences of his sin. The struggle of the will may begin
when the body has lost the power of obeying it. The
effects of intemperance last much longer than the seasons
of drunkenness ; and may be first felt in all their horrors
when the body has lost the power of resistance. The widest
inference from this cannot warrant the belief that these exter
nal results will be carried into a life which will not be physi
cal. We may feel absolutely certain that the opium-eater can
never regain a healthy condition of body ; but we cannot
deny that his will might at once begin to act effectually, if
the physical derangement in the lining- of his stomach were
*
removed.
The reason of the thing- can never prove that
the bodily misery so produced must accompany a man into
his future life. The physical results of sin may have been
on earth irremediable ; but Butler has allowed that many
who yet suffer them are reaKy penitent. At the utmost w
e
*
cannot, on the grounds of such analogy, deny that the
incapable will of the drunkard may recover its power when
the physical impediment has been removed ; and we cannot
possibly prove that it may not be removed by death.
From the analogy of the present order of things, Butler
passes to the sentiments of heathen writers on the subject
of future punishment. This subject, he rightly insists,
belongs most evidently to natural religion ; but he adds at
the same time that, “ Gentile writers, both moralists and
poets, speak of the future punishment of the wicked, both
as to the duration and degree of it, in a like manner of
expression and description as the Scripture does.”f It is
hard to deal with a sentence which, with a hundred others,
proves how little Butler aimed at “ a scientific use of terms.”
* Archdeacon Hare, in his “Mission of the Comforter,” refers to this
belief of Coleridge, that the loss of power in the will may be the punish
ment of such vices.
f Analogy. Part I, ch. ii., p. 42. Note.
�44
Eternal Punishment.
He has left us well-nigh to guess the meaning which he
attached to Scripture, Revelation, and Religion. The first
may mean a part of the Old and New Testament, or the
whole ; the second appears sometimes to mean the Bible,
sometimes a supposed communication made to Adam before
the fall or after it; the third is used to express sometimes the
law of God written on a man’s heart, and at others to mean
nothing more than the declarations of a particular book in
the Bible. But on the subject of future punishment it
seems useless to allege any argument in the statements of
heathen writers (supposing that all these had spoken alike)
with the statements of Scripture, when these are held by
antagonistic theological schools to prove directly opposite
conclusions. If, however, it be meant that Gentile writers
as a body maintain the endless punishment of all sinners
without reference to the measure of their sin, the statement
is not true.
*
The belief of almost all was at the best
shadowy and vague enough. Not a few refused to extend
their thought to any life beyond the present, or, if at times
they suffered their minds to rest upon it, it was to doubt
whether any but the noblest souls would be allowed to live
at all.f A still smaller number spoke out more clearly, but
it is impossible to wrest their words in support of the doc
trine of Bishop Pearson. Socrates does, indeed, draw a
distinction between pardonable and unpardonable sins, or
rather between sins which can and those which cannot be
healed; J but they who have committed the former are
purified without reference to their repentance before death.
It is the magnitude of the sin, not the disposition of the
sinner, which shuts him out from all hope of recovery.
But the class of sinners who are not benefited by their
sufferings is manifestly a very small one. It does not take
in the lying or dishonest little child, it pointedly excludes
* Due stress must be laid on the vast numbers among the heathen who
accepted the doctrines of Epicurus; and the full extent to which these
doctrines were carried is well shown in the fragments of Philodemus,
recently recovered amongst the Herculanean Papyri.—See the ‘ Edinburgh
Review,’ October 1862, page 346.
f “ Si non cum corpore extinguuntur magnae animre.’’ The doubting
hope of Tacitus was far too general not to weaken greatly the force of
Butler’s argument.
t icGma agapr^gara. Plato. Gorg. lxxxi.
�Eternal Punishment.
45
those who lead the common life of all men, it rejects those
■whom Dante would only not have thrust down into the
lowest dungeons of hell. Tyrants and kings and princes
are amongst them,—Tantalos, Sisyphos, and Tityos; but
the lot of Thersites is the happiest. It seems to be hard,
if not impossible, for a private citizen to enrol himself in
*
the company of transgressors who had sinned beyond all
hope of cure.
The course of human life on earth will show that sins
of the flesh produce physical consequences which may last
indefinitely longer than the time spent in committing them.
Ordinary experience teaches us that actions tend to create
habits, and that habits retain over us a strong and per
manent hold. Human legislation claims to visit certain
acts with pains and penalties, and demands obedience to
Law without promise of recompense or reward. In some
countries it rises to a higher level, and, while more carefully
apportioning punishment, seeks in a greater degree to
reform the offender, and, so far as may be practicable, to
lessen rather than to raise the penalty. There is no analogy
between such a state of things and an endless torment of
all sinners without regard to their spiritual condition.
Such an idea can challenge belief on grounds of authority
alone ; and out of the whole cycle of Christian doctrines it
is the only one which rests wholly on this foundation.-]"
* Socrates is represented as inclining to the latter opinion, ou yap, olpat,
¿iftv aura>. Mr Wilson, in “Essays and Reviews,” p. 206 (9th Ed.), says
that the Greek “ could not expect the reappearance in another world, for
any purpose, of a Thersites or an Hyperbolus.” The words attributed to
Socrates seem to imply not so much that such men are not among the
inhabitants of the other world, as that they are not aviaroi. Hence they
come under the class of men who are benefited by their sufferings ; Tantalos
and Sisyphos represent the few who have sinned too deeply to leave their
torments any purgatorial power.
f If any exception must be made, it would seem to be that of the Fall.
But a denial of the fact that Adam fell leaves the question of a “ taint or
corruption naturally engendered in his offspring,” with all its consequences
just where it was before. The question of the Fall itself leads us into a
mythological inquiry, on which we cannot enter here. Some remarks
bearing on the subject will be found in M. Michel Breaks admirable analysis
of the myth of Hercules and Cacus. Paris: Durand. 1863.
�46
Eternal Punishment.
SECTION IV.
Present State of the Controversy as bearing on the
Position and Duties of the Clergy of the Church
of England.
Hence it is that, in spite of the antagonism of modern
science, in spite of the tacit abandonment of some parts in
the narrative of the Old Testament, in spite of the acknow
ledged hopelessness of defining their limits and the condi
tions of inspiration, the theologians who uphold the
popular belief cling to some theory of inspiration with
greater tenacity, it would seem, than ever. Hence it is
that the Christian world is fast splitting up into two sec
tions,—the one half-tempted to believe itself in antagonism
with Christianity, the other regarding the progress of
modern thought with an alarm alike unreasoning and
useless,—useless, because it is impossible to check the rising
tide,—useless, because the flood which assails a mere tra
ditional teaching does not even threaten the Body of Truth
which is the real inheritance of Christendom,—useless,
because this Truth will shine out with unclouded lustre
when the artificial safeguards of an inconsistent theology
shall have been swept away.
It is, of course, possible for a man to reject and deny
any truth or dogma whatsoever; but it must surely be a
distorted vision which can see a growing tendency in the
present day to set aside the great body of Christian doctrine.
If there is more and more a revolting against theories
which regard Power as the basis of the Divine nature,
there is less reluctance to believe that God is dealing with
men for their good. But if there be any one dogma which
can produce no other sanction than that of authority, it
must undergo the stringent scrutiny of an age, which,
with all its shortcomings and all its sins, is bent on getting
at the truth of facts. Men will not be deterred from
closely sifting every argument which upholds a doctrine at
variance with all natural instincts and affections. They
see that the Clergy, who maintain it, do not really
�Eternal Punishment.
47
believe it, that no one really believes it. They know well
how to distinguish a genuine from a spurious belief. They
know that the time was when men might be said to have
this faith, when the thought of the broad gulf yawning to
receive all sinners heightened their convictions of the
essential impurity of all material things. They know how
that belief displayed itself. Bernard believed it when he
deliberately broke up the home which he loved ; Jerome
believed it when he did battle with the fiends of hell in his
cave at Bethlehem ; Francis of Assisi believed it when he
took poverty for his bride and gathered round him the
hosts which forswore every earthly joy to avoid the flames
of hell. The forms of the Sacrifice might vary ; its essence
was the same. Macarius might plunge himself naked into
a morass and brave the sting of insects which might pierce
the hide of a boar. Simeon on his Pillar might afflict soul
and body with the heat by day and the frost by night; but
in one and all, in proportion to the sincerity of their faith,
there was the same vehement rejection not only of every
earthly pleasure but of everything which could only be termed
not a torment or a plague. The teachers of our day go
about to reconcile their belief in the final ruin of almost
all mankind with a natural love of ease and a feeling of
self-complacency. There is much speaking, and in a few,
at least, some self-sacrifice ; but the curse which they believe
to rest upon the world, rests on it, it would seem, in name
only. It does not lessen their liking for the world’s good
things: it does not break their sleep by night, or
greatly afflict their souls by day. They look on man
kind as on beings of whom few can escape the day
of the great vengeance; but they can mingle still in
the world of science, or trade, or politics, and shape
their words by the dictates of time- serving expediency. In
the eyes of Benedict or Columba or Dominic no further
proofs would be needed of a complete and deliberate unbe
lief. But while some still insist loudly that God cannot
have mercy on men after their pilgrimage here is ended,
while they place in the same fire the lying child and the
pitiless murderer, the greater number are content to speak
in more measured words, and to tell their people that jus
tice is with God the consummation, and not the contra
�48
Eternal Punishment.
diction, of that which is justice with men. It is impossible
to deny that such is becoming more and more the teaching
of the Clergy of the Church of England. The fierce denun
ciations which paralyzed many hearts with terror thirty
years ago are, by comparison, rarely heard now. Preachers
resort less and less to the elaborate dsemonology of Dante
or of Milton ; they instinctively abstain more and more
from any attempts to define the method of future punish
ment. Is it possible to bring together more convincingevidence that the doctrine is not really believed ? Is it
possible to produce a stronger reason why they who know
that these things are so should come forward boldly and
honestly to declare it ?
This age is one of much serious thought, and the
efforts to arrive at truth for the truth’s sake are neither
feeble nor insincere ; but it is not pre-eminently an age of
martyrs or confessors. They who have thought most
deeply and anxiously are conscious that they have passed
through more than one stage of belief and faith ; and they
feel that the change which is coming cannot, on the whole,
be accomplished with the same weapons which fought the
battle of Teutonic against Latin Christianity. No great
experience is needed to show them that others have under
gone, or are undergoing, the like changes. Not a few who
now, if pressed to declare their belief, would assuredly
refuse to accept the Bishop of Oxford’s pictures of hell
torments, received their Orders with an unquestioningacceptance of all Anglican theology. Not a few passed
from this state of temporary repose into a hard struggle
which only did not issue in their submission to the Church
of Rome. The teaching which had impressed on them the
Unity of the Church and the unimaginable fearfulness of
schism, justified and enforced the inquiry which was to
determine whether they were in the right position them
selves. It was of no avail that they led the holiest lives, if
they questioned but one single point in all the faith of
Catholic Christendom; it was of no avail that their faith
and their lives were what they should be, if their belief
was professed and their works done where they ought not
to be done and professed. The rising of a doubt was the
signal for flight, for to doubt and linger and to die in that
�Eternal Punishment.
49
doubt, was to be lost for ever. The Church of Rome was
Catholic, even by the admission of her enemies; her orders
were allowed to be valid; her dogmas retained the faith of
the Church in all ages, although they may have overlaid it.
She could offer them security, and security was everything
under a state of things in which the accident of a moment
might remove the Christian beyond the reach of hope and
mercy. It was hard to escape from these doubts and fears
without casting aside the burden of sacerdotalism. It was
hardly possible to remain withodt the pale of Rome, while
the paramount necessity of Catholic Communion seemed to
thrust aside every other; but it was easy to emerge from
these mortal fears into the belief in a Divine kingdom
embracing all ages and all lands, into a belief which did
not dare to limit the mercy of God, which cared little to
speak of virtue and vice, of punishments and rewards, but
which placed the salvation of man in the conformity of his
will to the Divine will, in a constant dependence on his
Love and Grace.
Such as this has been the history of many an English
Clergyman during the last ten or twenty years. They may
pass now by many names; they may be regarded by the
world as belonging to the High Church or the Broad
Church, but they who search such matters closely may see
that the foundation of their faith is laid on the conscious
conviction of a moral government of Righteousness, Truth,
and Justice, as men with all their wickedness construe and
accept those terms. It is impossible not to see whither
these things are tending; it is mere hypocrisy to pretend
that we do not perceive it. The sentences of Ecclesiastical
Courts may possibly arrest, but they cannot turn back the
course of modern thought. They do not profess to concern
themselves with the Truth as such ; and the truth as such
is the one end and aim to which every channel of science
and research is converging.
And, finally, the charge to such of the Clergy as hold a
faith like this to quit their posts and set up some new sect
will fall on unheeding ears. Why should they abandon a
Church in the body of whose teaching their faith is deeper
than ever, why yield up the posts entrusted to their charge
because some choose to determine what the Church has left
�5°
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undefined ? Why should they leave the centime of all happy
memories and all bright hopes when nowhere else can they
look to find the same peace and consolation ? Why should
the Bishop of Natal desert the Christian and the heathen
Zulus, for whom and among whom he has so long laboured
heartily and earnestly, because he will not and cannot
propound to them a dogma which makes the assertion of
Perfect Righteousness an unintelligible riddle ? Why
should he cease from the holy work of relieving from their
sadness the souls whom God had not made sad ? Why
should he not assure the trembling convert that his parents
are not thrust down into the lowest pit of hell simply
because they happened to die before the missionary came ? *
Why should he not go on to do his duty by entering his
most solemn protest against falsehoods which are “ utterly
contrary to the whole spirit of the Gospel,” and which
operate “ with most injurious and deadening effect both
on those who teach and on those who are taught” ? Plainly
he would be acting wrong were he not to do so. The
Church of England has accepted the task of preaching a
Gospel, nor can any say that she has wholly failed in
preaching it.
The judgment of the Court of Arches in the case of
Mr Wilson would, even if final, have availed little or
nothing on the other side. Dr Lushington insisted, in the
clearest language, that he was concerned not with the truth
of doctrines, but simply with the fact whether they are or
are not maintained by the Church of England. He accepted
the rule laid down in the Gorham case that “ if the Articles
of Religion are silent upon a point of doctrine, then, unless
the Rubrics and Formularies clearly and distinctly deter
mine it, it is open for each member of the Church to decide
for himself according to his own conscientious opinion.”
No one can assert that he wilfully narrowed the terms of
communion ; some may think that he has suggested evasions
even greater than any which had been acted on before. As
*
long as it is not in plain terms denied that the Holy Scrip
tures contain all things necessary to salvation, any one
* The Bishop of Natal cites a forcible instance of such teaching. Com
mentary on Epistle to the Romans, p. 211.
�Eternal Punishment.
5i
might affirm that not a single book was written by the man
whose name it bears, or even at the time and place to
which it has been assigned. He might interpret figurative
language as historical; he might resolve statements of
facts into a transcendental mysticism. The judge was not
concerned with questions of interpretation. He demanded
no more than the admission that the books, or at least
some part or parts of each book, were written “under
Divine guidance.” He was ready to concede all liberty, if
only the plain, literal, and grammatical sense of authoritative
formularies was not contravened. So far as regards the
doctrine of Eternal Punishment, they who deny that it is
of necessity endless for those who undergo it might most
honestly have accepted the issue.
It may, of course, be said that nothing more than an
accident enables the Bishop of Natal, or Mr Wilson, or Mr
Maurice to accept these words of the Athanasian Creed in
their plain, literal, and grammatical meaning. It may be
urged that the author of that creed meant something very
different, and that it is mere evasion, if they maintain their
ground in the Church of England on a mere superficial
agreement like this. It may be so. Yet it is an evasion
not so great as those which Dr Lushington has deliberately
allowed on the subject of Inspiration. But they who believe
that the Divine Spirit still lives and works in the Church
of England will scarcely regard as an accident that which
will enable all her members and all the world to, respond
heartily and unreservedly to the whole will of God.
We must speak still more plainly. It may have been
the belief of those who drew up the Athanasian Creed that
all sinners must undergo the same endless punishment. It
was a notion which might well prevail in a hard and violent
age. But whether by accident or by the over-ruling Provi
dence of God, Who is using the Church of England as a
special instrument for preaching the whole Gospel of
Christ to every creature, the notion cannot be found dis
tinctly enunciated in any of her Canons, her Articles, or
her Formularies. No one really and practically believes in
this notion ; thousands virtually ignore it, and the highest
Ecclesiastical tribunal has affirmed that such a belief is not
imposed on the Clergy of the Church of England. But it
�&
Eternal Punishment.
is time to speak out the whole truth. It is time to say that
this dogma does not form part of the Gospel of Christ.
It is time to reject it utterly from our teaching, and to bid
all others look the question fully in the face.
The Church of England has not fettered her Clergy to
any definite statement on the endlessness of future punish
ment ; but if such were her dogma, if she asserted clearly
that all who do not die in the faith and fear of God are
tormented necessarily for evei’ and ever, then it is better to
say at once that that dogma must be rejected with a deeper
and more vehement indignation than that with which
Teutonic Christendom rose up against the worst abuses
and superstitions of Latin Christianity. The coarsest
development of the doctrine of Transubstantiation, the
wildest absurdities of Manichean fanatics, were not more
thoroughly opposed to the first principles of Justice, Law,
and Truth than a dogma which makes no distinction
between a perjured tyrant and a lying child. Most happily
such a Reformation is not needed in the Church of England
now; but if ever it be made necessary, the men who shall
carry it out will not be wanting. That Reformation is
sorely needed elsewhere; is it too much to hope that the
Church of England may be the appointed instrument
for hastening that mighty change which shall sweep away
the deadly bondage of an ancient and groundless super
stition ?
�APPENDIX.
No. I.
The “ Christian Remembrancer,” in an article which has been
reprinted by its author, Mr Cazenove, from the number for
April, 1864, has entered elaborately on the defence of the dogma
of never-ending punishment. Enough has been already said to
render a detailed reply to that article altogether unnecessary ;
but a few words may suffice to show how utterly futile its main
arguments are to those who will not grant the assumptions with
which the writer starts. We have reasoned chiefly on the basis
of the authoritative statements of the Church of England as
found in the xxxix articles, nor are we called on to admit any
thing more than may be legally required of her Clergy. But
it may at once be said that the Reviewer’s definition does not
satisfy the teaching of the Bishop of Oxford, or Dr Trench, or
Dr Newman, and that, if his definition be correct, the actual
teaching of such men falls to the ground. “ The dogma,” says
the Reviewer, “ which we have to consider is this,—that there
is a degree of hardness and impenitence of heart which is fraught
with everlasting evil to those who persist in it, and that sucli
obdurate sinners will ultimately be banished from the presence
of Gon and condemned to a state of misery that knows no end.
Upon the details of this fearful condition, neither the Church of
England nor the Church Universal has presumed to utter any
formal or authoritative decision. The reality and the eternity of
the misery is affirmed authoritatively ; the precise nature and
qualities of the sufferings and the nature and locality of the place
where they are to be endured, are open questions, matters of
opinion, not of faith.” But, if this be so, what right has any
Clergyman to draw pictures of demons torturing men by the
members which were the special instruments of their sins, and
point to men like Gibbon and Shelley, nay, even to lying school
children, as suffering the torments of an endless hell ? What right
have any to say that all who do not die in the true faith and
�54
Appendix.
fear of God have entered into that horrible state ? What right
have they to involve themselves and others in a dilemma which
would be absurd if it were not frightful ? for, repudiating (as
they must) the doctrine of Purgatory, they are bound to maintain
that all who are not at their death fitted for heaven must, by the
very necessity of the case, enter hell, and that this must, therefore,
be the lot of nineteen-twentieths of mankind. All these teachers,
it must be noted, uphold a dogma which is not the same as that of
the Reviewer; and what must be the worth of a doctrine which is
stated philosophically by theologians in one way, and alwrays
enforced by preachers in another I To speak briefly, the Re
viewer in the “ Christian Remembrancer ” has made a string of
assumptions, each one of w’hich calls for a distinct denial.
(1.) He assumes that Clergymen (or Laymen) of the Church
of England are bound to believe in the existence of many things
on which its articles are wholly silent—e. g., in that of angels and
of “ those fallen and apostate ones who have Satan as their head
and Captain,” and to admit that the latter sinned in the very
courts of heaven, that man sinned and straightway was ashamed
and penitent, but the demons showed no signs of faith or con
trition. This may be all very well in a treatise on Christian
mythology, but that it should be gravely brought forward in a
paper addressed to educated Englishmen is simply astounding.
(2.) He assumes that the Bible upholds the truth of his
dogma ; and very possibly it may, if we grant his principle “ of
explaining obscure and doubtful passages by the light of those
which are distinct and clear.” No Clergyman of the Church of
England is bound to admit any such principle, and every critic
would at once repudiate it, if it be meant, as here it is meant,
that we may explain ambiguous passages in one author by a com
parison with clear passages in another. The rule would be
scouted as ridiculous if applied to Herodotus and Thucydides,
Aristotle and Plato ; and St Paul and St Peter are quite as
much distinct authors as any of these can be, although we may
happen to have bound up their writings as part of a single volume
which we call the Bible, but of which Jerome and Augustine spoke
only as “ The Books.” It is, indeed, as manifest and as open
to any one to say that St Paul taught unqualified Universalism
as to another to affirm that the notion of an endless punishment
may be found in the words of some other of the Biblical writers. It
has been decided judicially that the Church of England does not
sanction this notion, and the assertion that it is not to be found
in the Bible at once upsets a mere assertion on the other side.
(3.) The Reviewer thinks that he has found an impregnable
stronghold in the alleged universality of certain beliefs. All
mankind, speaking generally, believe he asserts in an endless
�Appendix.
5$
punishment ; and he cites the text of Aristotle o navi ¿>okei tovt'
eivai (¡>apev with the assenting comment of Cicero. To this we
need only say that we are in no way bound to accept without the
strictest scrutiny any statement of Aristotle, or Solomon, or Lord
Bacon himself. The axiom is one of those stupendous fallacies
which have led mankind in all ages to forge their own fetters.
The argument from the universality of a belief proves nothing,
or rather it would establish the truth of many beliefs which
have been given up as horrible, disgusting, and degrading. The
very belief in evil angels, which the Reviewer looks on with so
much favour, exists simply as a mutilated and barren stock ;
in other words, those who profess it do not really believe it. Jt
did produce its legitimate fruit once, when it drove all Christen
dom to believe in witchcraft, and consigned to unspeakable
tortures and a frightful death, hundreds of thousands of miserable
wretches who had the ill luck to be accused of an impossible
crime. There has been, it would seem, a time in the history of
man when every nation, tribe, and family was given over to the
practice of human sacrifices ; the distrust of the mercy and love
of God, the utter forgetfulness of the moral character of God,
•on which that loathsome worship was founded, exists still, and
is the greatest barrier in the way of true Christianity. When
the ignorant peasant doubts whether God can be merciful to or
love a being so worthless as himself, he is giving utterance to the
same feeling which led the Carthaginian matron to drop her new
born babe into the blazing mouth of the favourite god of the
Hebrews. It is the reiterated warning of Jewish prophets and
of Christian teachers, that this distrust is a delusion only the
more horrible and fatal because it is universal. There is not an
atom of foundation for it; what a mockery, therefore, of philo
sophical method is it to say that it upholds one dogma while it is
admitted to overthrow another ?
(4.) The Reviewer argues throughout as against persons who
deny the sinfulness and the misery of sin and the certainty of a
righteous chastisement and discipline, who make nothing of
iniquity, and set lightly by the most sacred responsibilities. He
is arguing against some phantom of his own raising. The school
which he anathematizes does not exist. The very essence of the
teaching of those Clergymen against whom he thus insinuates or
implies an utter unbelief, is that no one sin goes unpunished,
and that all men in the measure in which they need it shall
feel the chastening hand of God. They may be wrong : but it is
simply false to say that they leave men to riot in sin, unchecked
and unwarned.
(5.) He endeavours to divert men from an impartial examina
tion of the subject, by throwing doubts on the orthodoxy of those
�$6
Appendix.
who venture to question the dogma for which he is contending.
Any one who does this is sure to be found wanting with respect
to some cardinal doctrine of the faith (of course as these are
received by the Reviewer himself). Sir James Stephen assailed it,
but “ Mr Hopkins has shown his laxity and want of correct views
on the Incarnation ”; Mr Maurice impugns it, but “ is Mr Maurice
thoroughly trustworthy on the doctrine (z.e. the Reviewer’s doctrine)
of the Atonement ” ? Such insinuations are as irrelevant as they
are weak. Each of these doctrines is true or it is not true ; and it
argues mere unbelief to seek to ward off from any one of them
the most rigid scrutiny. What sort of reasoning is it to scare a
man from looking into one dark corner of his house, by telling
him that they who do so are sure to create disorder in some other
quarter’ ? But it is more to the purpose to say that the Clergy of
the Church of England are bound neither to the Reviewer’s dog
mas nor to his tests ; and they need concern themselves very
little to know wdiether he thinks them orthodox or not. To do
so would argue utter childishness. The theological world of
England is divided into sections, each of which impugns the other’s
orthodoxy. The High Churchman brands the Low Churchman ;
one school anathematises or more gently disapproves another ;
and then, forsooth, they who doubt whether God will commit to
hopeless pains the vast majority of his creatures, are bidden to
see that they be orthodox on all other points before they pry
into this one.
Finally the Reviewer, in utter contradiction to the Bishop of
Oxford and his followers, confines himself mostly to guarded
statements, which might lead the reader to suppose that this
fearful lot is reserved merely for an infinitesimally small fraction
of mankind ; but his hell is, nevertheless, one which contains
unbaptized infants (p. 477), and for Englishmen this is enough.
Dogmas which involve such admissions are not merely untrue,
but they are degrading and demoralizing to the last degree. At
the recent Bristol Congress Mr Keble was pleased to repeat to
the assembled Churchmen the remarks made to him by a poor
old widow, who, on hearing that the Church of England no longer
required her people to believe in the endless punishment of all
sinners, begged him not to tell her son, as she trembled for the effect
which these tidings would have upon him. Mr Keble’s inference
was that the decision in the case of Messrs Williams and Wilson
abolished all morality,—the plain fact being, nevertheless, that
the old woman’s wicked son had somehow or other convinced
himself that he would escape scot free. With such men the threat
of an inconceivable and utterly disproportionate punishment is
not likely to have much weight: to tell them that sin brings its
own punishment and that sinners if not here yet hereafter will be
�Appendix.
made to feel the wrath of God, may check them iu their .course,
but can never cause them to plunge deeper into sin.
This is the warning which they would most certainly hear
from such teachers as Mr Wilson and Mr Maurice, Dr Stanley
and Mr Jowett, the Bishop of Natal and Dean Milman. Like
the righteous prophets of old time, they maintain the absolute
and unswerving righteousness of God, while the upholders of the
popular dogma confuse the moral perceptions of mankind, and
give a fatal strength to the miserable sophistry by which men
cheat themselves into the idea that, be their lives what they may,
they will somehow or other come to die the death of the righteous
man.
No. II.
Remarks on a Sermon on “ Everlasting Punishment,” preached
before the University of Oxford on the Twenty-first Sunday
after Trinity, by E. B. Pusey, D.D.
While these sheets were passing through the press, Dr Pusey
has published a Sermon on which, as it misconstrues some state
ments made in the foregoing pages, a few remarks must be added.
It is certainly an unfortunate thing that the self-styled upholders
of the Catholic Faith should in the eyes of those who differ from
them appear always guilty of misconstructions or assumptions.
Dr Pusey’s Sermon so abounds on both as to make any attempt
at an argumentative reply mere labour lost. It is useless to
reason with those who are resolved to make use of ambiguous
terms, and who even themselves put on these terms more than
one meaning. But although the thought of convincing Dr Pusey
may be absurd, it may be of more use to arm others against his
assumptions, and perhaps against the general character of his
theology. If you answer the question, who is God ? what am
I ? honestly, you have, says Dr Pusey, subdued every difficulty
which men raise against the Faith. It may be so, if we admit
that the honest answer must be Dr Pusey’s answer. A second
assumption is based on a passage in the preceding paper,
p. 9, from which Dr Pusey draws the conclusion that “ human
reason is prepared to capitulate as to all the old difficulties which
it used to be so busy in parading, the Doctrine of the All Holy
Trinity or the Incarnation. ... It will even admit the mystery
of the Incarnation, and allow of that ineffable mystery of God
become Man, that God was born, was nourished at the breast,
E 2
�Appendix.
. . was nailed to the Cross, died." Dr Pusey heaps
assumption on assumption. A belief in the Trinity or Incar
nation is not necessarily his belief, and to the latter the Church
of England has certainly not committed either her Laity or her
Clergy. To the assumptions are added a few contradic
tions. “ What criminal,” he asks, “ ever by nature owned
the justice of the human law which condemned him ? If he admit
that he was in the wrong, yet what punishment does not seem to
him too severe ? ” We may perhaps be perplexed to know where
Dr Pusey has amassed these astounding experiences ; but it is
utterly impossible to reconcile them with the statement in the
very next page (7), that man’s conscience speaks out clearly that
punishment is the due reward of oui’ deeds. When he asserts
that .Reformation is not the object of Divine Punishment (6), he
assumes the very point in dispute, and allows his assumption to
lead him into a statement which should be well noted by English
men. He condemns what he calls the systematized benevolence
of modern legislation. “ Reformation of the individual offender
is proposed as the exclusive end of human punishment.” Dr
Pusey does not like this. We must suppose, therefore, that he
would like a little of the wholesome severity which Laud exer
cised on the ears of Prynne and Bast wick, and perhaps, in course
of time, we need not despair of restoring such pleasant exhibitions
as those which graced the execution of Robert François Damiens.
The next argument involves us in a discussion as to the meaning
of the word Eternity, which directly involves another question,—
what is Revelation ?-—a question equally assumed by Dr Pusey.
“ Who revealed to us,” he asks, “ that sin ceases in the evil, when
life ceases 1 ” (p. 9) ; and who revealed to us, we may ask, that it
goes on ? Dr Pusey’s conviction is founded on the existence and
the character of Satan ; and he must at once be told that the
Church of England does not commit her Clergy to any opinion
about either the one or the other, and they who reject the whole
of Dr Pusey’s dæmonology are, in her eyes, quite as orthodox as
he. They are not in the least bound to believe that Satan
belonged to the second order of beatified Intelligences, or that he
fell, or that he exists at all. Dr Pusey thinks he knows all
about him, and he also knows that the whole history of man
is confined to the last 6,000 years (p. 11). This is a matter
in which we may leave him to be dealt with by Sir C. Lyell,
or Professor Owen. But it is of little use to multiply words.
Dr Pusey builds on verbal expressions in the Gospels, thus
assuming again that evei-y word in those narratives forms part
of an indisputable history. Dr Pusey knows that the people of
England are beginning to doubt this, and he knows that the
reasons brought forward in a popular shape in “ Fraser’s Maga-
�Appendix.
$9
zine ” for January, 1863 (on Criticism and the Gospel History)
have not been answered. He cannot fail to know, further, that
the rich man in Hades is represented as better and less selfish
than he was on earth ; and yet he deals in pictures which would
do credit to the sensuous imagination of a Mahometan. “ Gather
in your mind all which is most loathsome, most revolting, the most
treacherous, malicious, coarse, brutal, inventive, fiendish cruelty,
unsoftened by any remains of human feeling : conceive the fierce,
fiery eyes of hate, spite, phrenzied rage ever fixed on thee,
glaring on thee, looking thee through and through with hate,
sleepless in their horrible gaze : hear those yells of blaspheming
concentrated hate, as they echo along the lurid vault of hell,
every one hating every one,” &c., &c. “ A deathlessness of hate
were in itself everlasting misery. Yet a fixedness in that state,
in which the hardened, malignant sinner dies, involves, with
out any further retribution of God, this endless misery.” (16.)
Shall we ever know what the upholders of this dogma mean ? Who
or what are Dr Pusey’s hardened and malignant sinners ? The
Bishop of Oxford shuts up in hell the lying school-girl and the
young man of excellent life who doubted whether the sun
and moon stood still at Joshua’s bidding : the Reviewer in
the “Christian Remembrancer” seems to think that unbap
tized children are there also. Do they suppose that people
will listen to them until they make their meaning plain,
or rather until they exhibit some better evidence that they
believe their own doctrine ? Before the Bishop and Clergy
of the Diocese of Oxford Mr Disraeli has made a mock of that
doctrine to point a contemptible jest against Mr Maurice
and Mr Jowett ; the ribald profanity of his taunt called forth
not the rebuke but the enthusiastic cheers of that reverend
*
assembly. We may therefore dismiss Dr Pusey’s pictures, with
the bare remark that they are drawn not from the teaching of
Christ oi- of St Paul, but from that Iranian dualism which made
the world a battlefield between Ormuzd and Ahriman. The
attitude which Dr Pusey has assumed makes it still more neces
sary to assert that his teaching is not the teaching of the Church
of England, which knows nothing of the Birth or Death of God.
Dr Pusey is not 'wise in parading phrases which, if they have
any effect, can only exasperate controversy and convert a gradual
process into a violent convulsion.
* Meeting of the Oxford Diocesan Society for the Augmentation of
Small Livings; as reported in the ‘Times,’ November 26, 1864.
Printed by C. W. Reyn ELL, Little Pulteney street, Haymarket, W.
�IH
i
�
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Eternal punishment: an examination of the doctrine held by the clergy of the Church of England on the subject of future punishment
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Place of publication: London
Collation: iv, 59 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Donated by Mr. Garley. Includes bibliographical references. Reprinted with additions from the 'National Review' no. XXXI, for January 1863. "With an Appendix containing a reply to the author on universalism and eternal punishment in the "Christian Remembrance" no no CXX, for April 1863, and some remarks on a sermon on everlasting punishment, by the Rev. E.B. Pusey". Date of publication from KVK (OCLC WorldCat).
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Presbyter Anglicanus
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1864
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Charles W. Reynell
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (<span class="highlight">Eternal</span> <span class="highlight">punishment</span>: an examination of the doctrine held by the clergy of the Church of England on the subject of future <span class="highlight">punishment</span>), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Eternal Punishment