Part 8

Among the evangelicals, only one voice, so far as I know, is heard to protest against eternal torture; and all honour is due to the Rev. Samuel Minton, for his rare courage in defying on this point the opinion of his "world," and braving the censure which has been duly inflicted on him. He seems to make "eternal" the equivalent of "irremediable" in some cases and of "everlasting" in others. He believes that the wicked will be literally destroyed, burnt up, consumed; the fact that the fire is eternal by no means implies, he remarks, that that which is cast into the fire should be likewise eternal, and that the fire is unquenchable does not prove that the chaff is unconsumable. "Eternal destruction" he explains as irreparable destruction, final and irreversible extinction. This theory should have more to recommend it to all who believe in the supernatural inspiration of the Bible, than the Broad Church explanation; it uses far less violence towards the words of Scripture, and, indeed, a very fair case may be made out for it from the Bible itself.

It is scarcely necessary to add to this small list of dissentients from orthodox Christianity, the Unitarian body; I do not suppose that there is such a phenomenon in existence as a Unitarian Christian who believes in an eternal hell.

With these small exceptions the mass of Christians hold this dogma, but for the most part carelessly and uncomprehendingly. Many are ashamed of it even while duteously confessing it, and gabble over the sentences in their creed which acknowledge it in a very perfunctory manner. People of this kind "do not like to talk about hell, it is better to think of heaven." Some Christians, however, hold it strongly, and proclaim their belief boldly; the members of the Evangelical Alliance actually make the profession of it a condition of admittance into their body, while many High Church divines think that a sharp declaration of their belief in it is needed by loyalty towards God and "charity to the souls of men." I wish I could believe that all who profess this dogma did not realize it, and only accepted it because their fathers and mothers taught it to them. But what can one say to such statements as the following, quoted from Father Furniss by W. R. Greg in his splendid "Enigmas of Life:" I take it as a specimen of Roman Catholic _authorized_ teaching. Children are asked: "How will your body be when the devil has been striking it every moment for a hundred million years without stopping?" A girl of eighteen is described as dressed in fire; "she wears a bonnet of fire. It is pressed down all over her head; it burns her head; it burns into the skull; it scorches the bone of the skull and makes it smoke." A boy is boiled: "Listen! there is a sound just like that of a kettle boiling.... The blood is boiling in the scalded veins of that boy. The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is boiling in his bones." Nay, even the poor little babies are not exempt from torture: one is in a red hot oven, "hear how it screams to come out; see how it turns and twists about in the fire.... You can see on the face of this little child"--the fair pure innocent baby-face--"what you see on the faces of all in hell--despair, desperate and horrible." Surely this man realized what he taught, but then he was that half-human being--a priest.

Dr. Pusey, too, has a word to say about hell: "Gather in mind all that is most loathsome, most revolting--the most treacherous, malicious, coarse, brutal, inventive, fiendish cruelty, unsoftened by any remains of human feeling, such as thou couldst not endure for a single hour.... hear those yells of blaspheming, concentrated hate as they echo along the lurid vault of hell."

Protestantism chimes in, and Spurgeon speaks of hell: "Wilt thou think it is easy to lie down in hell, with the breath of the Eternal fanning the flames? Wilt thou delight thyself to think that God will invent torments for thee, sinner?" "When the damned jingle the burning irons of their torment, they shall say, 'for ever;' when they howl, echo cries, 'for ever.'"

I may allude, to conclude my quotations, to a description of hell which I myself heard from an eminent prelate of the English Church, one who is a scholar and a gentleman, a man of moderate views in Church matters, by no means a zealot in an ordinary way. In preaching to a country congregation composed mainly of young men and girls, he warned them specially against sins of the flesh, and threatened them with the consequent punishment in hell. Then, in language which I cannot reproduce, for I should not dare to sully my pages by repeating what I then listened to in horrified amazement, there ensued a description drawn out in careful particulars of the state of the suffering body in hell, so sickening in its details that it must suffice to say of it that it was a description founded on the condition of a corpse flung out on a dungheap and left there to putrefy, with the additional horror of creeping, slowly-burning flames; and this state of things was to go on, as he impressed on them with terrible energy, for ever and ever, "decaying but ever renewing."

I should almost ask pardon of tender-hearted men and women for laying before them language so abominable; but I urge on all who are offended by it that this is the teaching given to our sons and daughters in the present day. Father Furniss, Dr. Pusey, Mr. Spurgeon, an English Bishop, surely these are honoured names, and in quoting them I quote from the teaching of Christendom. Nor mine the fault if the language be unfit for printing. I _quote_, because if we only assert, Christians are quick to say, "you are misrepresenting our beliefs," and I quote from writers of the present day only, that none may accuse me of hurling at Christians reproaches for a doctrine they have outgrown or softened down. Still, I own that it seems scarcely credible that a man should believe this and remain sane; nay, should preach this, and walk calmly home from his Church with God's sunshine smiling on the beautiful world, and after preaching it should sit down to a comfortable dinner and very likely a quiet pipe, as though hell did not exist, and its awful misery and fierce despair.

It is said that there is no reason that we should not be contented in heaven while others suffer in hell, since we know how much misery there is in this world and yet enjoy ourselves in spite of the knowledge. I say, deliberately, of every one who does realise the misery of this world and remains indifferent to it, who enjoys his own share of the good things of this life, without helping his brother, who does not stretch out his hand to lift the fallen, or raise his voice on behalf of the down-trodden and oppressed, that that man is living a life which is the very antithesis of a Divine life--a life which has in it no beauty and no nobility, but is selfish, despicable, and mean. And is this the life which we are to regard as the model of heavenly beauty? Is the power to lead this life for ever to be our reward for self-devotion and self-sacrifice here on earth? Is a supreme selfishness to crown unselfishness at last? But this is the life which is to be the lot of the righteous in heaven. Snatched from a world in flames, caught up in the air to meet their descending Lord, his saints are to return with him to the heaven whence he came; there, crowned with golden crowns, they are to spend eternity, hymning the Lamb who saved them to the music of golden harps, harps whose melody is echoed by the curses and the wailings of the lost; for below is a far different scene, for there the sinners are "tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and the presence of the Lamb; and the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever, and they have no rest day nor night."

It is worth while to gaze for a moment at the scene of future felicity; there is the throne of God and rejoicing crowds: "Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets," so goes out the command, and they rejoice because "God has avenged them on her," and again they said "Alleluia, and her smoke rose up for ever and ever." Truly God must harden the hearts of his saints in heaven as of old he hardened Pharaoh's heart, if they are to rejoice over the anguished multitude below, and to bear to live amid the lurid smoke ascending from the burning bodies of the lost. To me the idea is so unutterably loathsome that I marvel how Christians endure to retain such language in their sacred books, for I would note that the awful picture drawn above is not of my doing; it is not the scoffing caricature of an unbeliever, _it is heaven as described by St. John the divine_. If this heaven is true I do not hesitate to say that it is the duty of every human being to reject it utterly and to refuse to enter it. We might even appeal to Christians by the example of their own Jesus, who could not be content to remain in heaven himself while men went to hell, but came down to redeem them from endless suffering. Yet they, who ought to imitate him, who do, many of them, lead beautiful lives of self-devotion and compassion, are suddenly, on death, to lose all this which makes them "partakers of the Divine Nature," and are to be content to win happiness for themselves, careless that millions of their brethren are in woe unspeakable. They are to reverse the aim of their past lives, they are to become selfish instead of loving, hard instead of selfless, indifferent instead of loving, hard instead of tender. Which is the better reproduction of the "mind of Christ," the good Samaritan tending the wounded man, or the stern Inquisitor gloating over the fire which consumes heretics to the greater glory of God? Yet the latter is the ideal of heavenly virtue. Never will they who truly love man be content to snatch at bliss for themselves while others suffer, or endure to be crowned with glory while they are crowned with thorns. Better, far better, to suffer in hell and share the pains of the lost, than to have a heart so hard, a nature so degraded, as to enjoy the bliss of heaven, rejoicing over, or even disregarding, the woes of hell.

But there is worse than physical torture in the picture of hell; pain is not its darkest aspect. Of all the thoughts with which the heart of man has outraged the Eternal Righteousness, there is none so appalling, none so blasphemous, as that which declares that even one soul, made by the Supreme Good, shall remain during all eternity, under the power of sin. Divines have wearied themselves in describing the horrors of the Christian hell; but it is _not_ the furnace of flames, _not_ the undying worm, _not_ the fire which never may be quenched, that revolt us most; hideous as are these images, they are not the worst terror of hell. Who does not know how St. Francis, believing himself ordained to be lost everlastingly, fell on his knees and cried, "O my God, if I am indeed doomed to hate thee during eternity, at least suffer me to love thee while I live here." To the righteous heart the agony of hell is a far worse one than physical torture could inflict: it is the existence of men and women who might have been saints, shut out from hope of holiness for evermore; God's children, the work of his hands, gnashing their teeth at a Father who has cast them down for ever from the life he might have given; it is Love everlastingly hated; good everlastingly trampled under foot; God everlastingly baffled and defied; worst of all, it is a room in the Father's house where his children may hunger and thirst after righteousness, but never, never, can be filled.

"Depart, O sinner, to the chain! Enter the eternal cell; To all that's good and true and right, To all that's fair and fond and bright, To all of holiness and right, Bid thou thy last farewell."

Would to God that Christian men and women would ponder it well and think it out for themselves, and when they go into the worst parts of our great cities and their hearts almost break with the misery there, then let them remember how that misery is but a faint picture of the endless, hopeless, misery, to which the vast majority of their fellow-men are doomed.

Christian reader, do not be afraid to realise the future in which you say you believe, and which the God of Love has prepared for the home of some of his children. Imagine yourself, or any dear to you, plunged into guilt from which there is no redeemer, and where the voice cannot penetrate of him that speaks in righteousness, mighty to save. In the well-weighed words of a champion of Christian orthodoxy, think there is no reason to believe that hell is only a punishment for past offences; in that dark world sin and misery reproduce each other in infinite succession. "What if the sin perpetuates itself, if the prolonged misery may be the offspring of the prolonged guilt?" Ponder it well, and, if you find it true, then cast out from your creed the belief in a Jesus who loved the lost; blot out from your Bible every verse that speaks of a Father's heart; tear from your Prayer-books every page that prays to a Father in heaven. If the lowest of God's creatures is to be left in the foul embraces of sin for ever, God cannot be the Eternal Righteousness, the unconquerable Love. For what sort of Righteousness is that which rests idly contented in a heaven of bliss, while millions of souls capable of righteousness are bound by it in helpless sin; what sort of love is that which is satisfied to be repulsed, and is willing to be hated? As long as God is righteous, as long as God is love, so long is it impossible that men and women shall be left by him forever in a state to which our worst dens of earth are a very paradise of beauty and purity. Bible writers may have erred, but "Thou continuest holy, O Thou worship of Israel!" There is one revelation that cannot err, and that is written by God's finger on every human heart. What man recoils from doing, even at his lowest, can never be done by his Creator, from whose inspiration he draws every righteous thought. Is there one father, however brutalized, who would deliberately keep his child in sin because of a childish fault? one mother who would aimlessly torture her son, keeping him alive but to torment? Yet this, nothing less,--nay, a thousand times more, for it is this multiplied infinitely by infinite power of torture,--this is what Christians ask us to believe about our Father and our God, a glimmer from the radiance of whose throne falls on to our earth, when men love their enemies and forgive freely those who wrong them If this so-called orthodox belief is right, then is their gospel of the Love of God to the world a delusion and a lie; if this is true, the teaching of Jesus to publicans and harlots of the Fatherhood of God is a cruel mockery of our divinest instincts; the tale of the good Shepherd who could not rest while one sheep was lost is the bitterest irony. But this awful dogma is not true, and the Love of God cradles his creation; not one son of the Father's family shall be left under the power of sin, to be an eternal blot on God's creation, an endless reproach to his Maker's wisdom, an everlasting and irreparable mistake.

No amount of argument, however powerful, should make us believe a doctrine from which our hearts recoil with such shuddering horror as they do from this doctrine of eternal torture and eternal sin. There is a divine instinct in the human heart which may be trusted as an arbiter between right and wrong; no supernatural revelation, no miracle, no angel from heaven, should have power to make us accept as divine that which our hearts proclaim as vile and devilish. It is not true faith to crush down our moral sense beneath the hoof of credulity; true faith believes in God only as a "Power which makes for _Righteousness_" and recks little of threats or curses which would force her to accept that which conscience disapproves. And what is more, if it were possible that God were not what we dream, if he were not "righteous in all his ways and holy in all his works," then were it craven cowardice to worship him at all. It has been well said, "that to worship simple power, without virtue, is nothing but devil-worship;" in that case it were nobler to refuse to praise him and to take what he might send. Then indeed we must say, with John Stuart Mill, in that burst of passion which reads so strangely in the midst of his passionless logic, that if I am told that this is justice and love, and that if I do not call it so, God will send me to hell, then "to hell I'll go."

I have purposely put first my strong reprobation of eternal hell, because of its own essential hideousness, and because, were it ever so true, I should deem myself disgraced by acknowledging it as either loving or good. But it is, however, a satisfaction to note the feebleness of the arguments advanced in support of this dogma, and to find that justice and holiness, as well as love, frown on the idea of an eternal hell.

The first argument put forth is this: "God has made a law which man breaks; man must therefore in justice suffer the penalty of his transgression." This, like so many of the orthodox arguments, sounds just and right, and at first we perfectly agree with it. The instinct of justice in our own breasts confirms the statement, and looking abroad into the world we see its truth proved by facts. Law is around us on every side; man is placed in a realm of law; he may-strive against the laws which encircle him, but he will only dash himself to pieces against a rock; he is under a code which he breaks at his peril. Here is perfect justice, a justice absolutely unwavering, deaf to cries, unseducible by-flatteries, unalloyed by favouritism: a law exists, break it, and you suffer the inevitable consequences. So far, then, the orthodox argument is sound and strong, but now it takes a sudden leap. "The penalty of the broken law is hell." Why? What common factor is there between a lie, and the "lake of fire in which all liars shall have their part?" Nature is absolutely against the orthodox corollary, because hell as a punishment of sin is purely arbitrary, the punishment might quite as well have been something else; but in nature the penalty of a broken law is always strictly in character with the law itself, and is derived from it. Men imagine the most extraordinary "judgment." A nation is given to excessive drinking, and is punished with cattle-plague; or shows leanings towards popery, and is chastised with cholera. It is as reasonable to believe this as it would be to expect that if a child fell down stairs he would be picked up covered with blisters from burning, instead of his receiving his natural punishment of being bruised. Why, because I lie and forget God, should I be punished with fire and brimstone? Fire is not derivable from truth, nor is brimstone a stimulus to memory. There is also a strange confusion in many minds about the punishment of sin. A child is told not to put his hand into the fire, he does so, and is burnt; the burning is a punishment, he is told; for what? Not for disobedience to the parent, as is generally said, but for disregarding the law of nature which says that fire burns. One often hears it said: "God's punishments for sin are not equal: one man sins once and suffers for it all his life, while another sins twenty times and is not punished at all." By no means: the two men both break a moral law, and suffer a moral degradation; one of them breaks in addition some physical law, and suffers a physical injury. People see injustice where none exists, because they will not take the trouble to distinguish what laws are broken when material punishments follow. There is nothing arbitrary in nature: cause and effect rule in her realm. Hell is then unjust, in the first place, because physical torture has nothing in common with moral guilt.

It is unjust, secondly, because it is excessive. Sin, say theologians, is to be punished infinitely, because sin is an offence committed against an infinite being. Of course, then, good must logically be rewarded infinitely, because it is duty offered to an infinite being. There is no man who has never done a single good act, so every man deserves an infinite reward. There is no man who has never done a single bad act, so every man deserves an infinite punishment. Therefore every man deserves both an infinite reward and an infinite punishment, "which," as Euclid says, "is absurd." And this is quite enough answer to the proposition. But I must protest, in passing, against this notion of "sin against God" as properly understood. If by this expression is only meant that every sin committed is a sin against God, because every sin is done against man's higher nature, which is God in man, then indeed there is no objection to be made to it. But this is not what is generally meant by the phrase. It usually means that we are able, as it were, to injure God in some way, to dishonour him, to affront him, to trouble him. By sin we make him "angry," we "provoke him to wrath;" because of this feeling on his own part he punishes us, and demands "satisfaction." Surely a moment's reflection must prove to any reasonable being that sin against God in this sense is perfectly impossible. What can the littleness of man do against the greatness of the Eternal! Imagine a speck of dust troubling the depths of the ocean, an aphis burdening an oak-tree with its weight: each is far more probable than that a man could ruffle the perfect serenity of God. Suppose I stand on a lawn watching an ant-heap, an ant twinkles his feelers at me scornfully; do I fly into a passion and rush on the insect to destroy it, or seize it and slowly torture it? Yet I am far less above the level of the ant than God is above mine.