Part 73

For a sufficient refutation of Lardner’s interpretation, see the last-cited section of Marsh’s Michaelis.

Footnote 594:

Hug’s Introduction, sec. 175.

Footnote 595:

Marsh’s Michaelis, ch. xxix. sec. 4.

Footnote 596:

Marsh’s Mich. _loc. cit._

Footnote 597:

De habitu mulier. c. 3. De Idolat. c. 4. et 15. De cultu fœminar. c. 10, as cited by Hug, sec. 175.

Footnote 598:

Eichhorn’s Einl. viii. 4. § 296.

Footnote 599:

_loc. cit._ Michaelis adds a hint, which may perhaps be as appropriate in England as in Germany: “To the doctrine, which St. Jude inculcates by this quotation, that we ought not to speak evil of dignities, not even of the fallen angels, but that we should leave judgment to God, I have no objection. And I really think, that they transgress the bounds of propriety, who make it their business, either in the pulpit or in their writings, to represent the devil as an object of detestation; since, notwithstanding his fall, he is still a being of a superior order. This reminds me of a certain oriental sect, which Niebuhr met with in the neighbourhood of the river Zab, in Assyria, and which, for the same reason as that which I have just assigned, will not suffer any one to speak evil of the devil.”

Footnote 600:

_loc. cit._

LECTURE XII.

THE CHRISTIAN VIEW OF RETRIBUTION HEREAFTER.

BY REV. HENRY GILES.

“AND GOD SAID TO JONAH, DOEST THOU WELL TO BE ANGRY FOR THE GOURD? AND HE SAID, I DO WELL TO BE ANGRY, EVEN UNTO DEATH. THEN SAID THE LORD, THOU HAST PITY ON THE GOURD FOR WHICH THOU HAST NOT LABOURED, NEITHER MADEST IT GROW; WHICH CAME UP IN A NIGHT AND PERISHED IN A NIGHT. AND SHOULD NOT I SPARE NINEVEH, THAT GREAT CITY, WHEREIN ARE MORE THAN SIX SCORE THOUSAND PERSONS THAT CANNOT DISCERN BETWEEN THEIR RIGHT HAND AND THEIR LEFT?”—_Jonah_ iv. 9, 10, 11.

Pain affects us, as it comes near to us. The war or famine, or any other calamity that afflicts a nation afar off, is but a vague report or a distant rumour; it may not pass unheard, but comparatively it is unfelt. It requires that grief shall touch and sting us in our selfishness; that we may know fully and truly what it inflicts on others. And it is thus that God at once rebukes and cures our insensibility, by bringing loss and sorrow home to our own souls: the withered gourd wrung tears from the surly and unamiable prophet: but the prospect of Nineveh with her mighty population in ashes had nothing with which to touch the fountains of his sorrows.

Admitting as I thus do that there is much of selfishness in our nature, yet persuaded that there is also much of sympathy and mercy in it, taking either the character of God, or that of man as a criterion, I have long regarded the belief of eternal punishment as one of those moral paradoxes which you cannot deny, and for which you cannot account. Most of human creatures, so far as they accord with their humanity, shrink from inflicting or beholding pain; and when they can inflict it wantonly, or behold it without compassion, we can pronounce on them no sentence of deeper reprobation than to call them _inhuman_. We tread not knowingly on the crawling worm; we hear not insensibly the inarticulate voice of the sick and dumb animal: and yet many of us who would not look unmoved on the last spasms of an expiring dog, can believe that God regards with ruthless sternness the eternal tortures of numberless eternal spirits. We cannot gaze without compassion on the tear in the infant’s speechless eye, and yet some of us can believe that God has created such beings to look up through all eternity from hopeless torture. We cannot think on the racks by which tyrant-man has tortured his brother-man—on the dungeons in which he has imprisoned him, and shut out from him the sun of heaven and the breath of nature, without a feeling of repugnance and a sentiment of indignation, and yet Christians can believe that God, whom they call “the good, the merciful,” has constructed for his creatures means of undying anguish and dungeons of boundless darkness, where the smile of hope never gleams, where the light of mercy never comes. We lament war, and yet, if orthodox, we believe that God maintains in his dominions regions of everlasting warfare; we lament the madness and abuse of passion, and yet, if orthodox, we must believe that God allows that madness and abuse to be eternalized in all their extreme malignity. We lament physical and mental suffering; except on the visitation of mercy none of us would desire to go through the lazar house, where despair and anguish lie low together, where the head is heavy and the pulse is fevered; or through those asylums which give refuge to humanity in its last calamity, and its worst; and yet, if orthodox, we can believe that God perpetuates throughout everlasting ages the worst evils of the body, the fiercest passions, and the most awful madness of the soul. And yet this great, this glorious universe is his—is his workmanship—it came not up in a night, it is not to perish in a night—the earth is long to be green, and the heavens are to be bright. Throughout the space that has no limit, throughout the time that has no end, the stars are to shine, and systems are to move onward in their unmeasured and their trackless glory. And yet, if orthodox, we must believe there is an endless hell whose smoke of torment must ascend for ever against their brightness. These, the works of God’s hands, are marred—the majesty of his power defeated—Paradise is made a wilderness, and hell is made populous. If we think of the world with any degree of realising truth, we shall feel this result to be most tremendous, and we shall wonder that God with infinite power should have created such a lovely universe to be defaced; that he should have peopled it with such capacities for good, to be exercised for ever only in the production of evil; that he should have given them immense and eternal capacities only to be immense and eternal capacities for misery. This, if true, is the greatest miracle and the greatest mystery unquestionably in the divine government.

This subject committed to my charge I feel to be truly solemn and awful. Next to the idea of a God, that of a future state is the most important. The character we ascribe to God operates on our own, or is created by it; and so our conceptions of the future life reacts on human conduct, and human sentiments. We may see this painfully in the mistakes and abuses with which harsh views of the future life have clouded the Christian church, and poisoned the heart of Christendom. These gloomy sentiments from many robbed religion of solace, and the breast of peace. I have seen beings maddened and convulsed by visions of Calvinism. I have heard them long for annihilation as a consummation most desirable—not in the remorse of sin, but in the tortures of superstition.—I have seen them look forward with pleasure to the church-yard turf under which they were to rest for ever from their troubles, and sleep in peace their “eternal sleep.” This sombre belief has at once desolated and darkened earth. Faith it has turned to a boundless fear; the dread of the future it makes the bitterness of the present, and is equally the parent of stern self-infliction, or of remorseless intolerance. It was this that in older days drove the ascetic to the desert; that made nature and the face of his fellow hateful to him; that filled his ferocious solitude with unearthly terrors; that trained, instead of a saint, a theological savage: it was this which aroused religious wars; which infused into these wars a spirit of fury; that demonised humanity; that made a most merciful nature a stranger to mercy: it was this which brought man in nearest resemblance to that vile and wicked being whom his worst and blackest passions had formed: it was this belief that tore out the heart of flesh and put in its place the heart of stone—a heart which no appeal could soften, and which no appeal could move. It was not until there was a hell without hope, that there was a heart without mercy. I believe it to be quite capable of proof, that no mere worldly wickedness has ever cursed mankind with so many sufferings as the belief of this doctrine; that has ever heaped on them so many cruelties, and made them agents of cruelties in return. Why have wars for religion ever been the worst? The reason is obvious: the soldiers of religion are not soldiers of flesh; the soldiers of religion enter into no earthly service; they enlist under the god of battles and of vengeance. It is against the hated, and the vile, and the accursed, and the lost, they carry destruction; they are but the executioners of the righteous decrees of God, and theirs are the championship of piety, and the chivalry of heaven. When the weak contend with the weak, mutual need begets mutual mercy: but when the natural ferocity of passion assumes the authority of God, and clothes itself with the armour of the skies, the gulf in which all charity is buried, is broad and unfathomable as that which is commonly placed between heaven and hell. This belief was one of the main causes of the most horrible religious persecutions. It was not until the generous and gentle sensibility of the religious nature was debased by coarse picturings of physical tortures and of endless miseries, that the sacerdotal arm became terrible as death, and the sacerdotal spirit was drenched in wrath as dire and unrelenting as that which they fashioned beyond the grave. Before priestly and popular imaginations God became an awful punisher. They created in heaven a throne of inexorable judgment, and from that throne the word of fate went forth which could but once be spoken, and cut off hope for ever. They freed themselves from human compunctions, and emulated the stern despotism which they preached or believed. Fear is the parent of cruelty—and in religion, as in character, the slavish spirit is ever the most unfeeling. The truth is, that whether in idea or in act, familiarity with torture stupifies the heart and indurates the senses. That frequent contemplation of pain destroys sympathy, and that pain, when once it can be carelessly seen, can be easily inflicted, are facts which observation has placed beyond the need of argument, and experience beyond the reach of contradiction.

In this Lecture I propose two objects:—First, to state my views on moral retribution, which in essentials I apprehend are those of Unitarians in general: Secondly, to examine the arguments which are advanced in favour of eternal torture, and to state my reasons for not believing them. I shall try to the utmost of my power to condense what I have to say, but I hope for your indulgence in return, if on a subject of such compass—on which so many volumes have been written—there should be some omissions. The end of this or any other lecture can never be to expound an important topic in all its completeness, so much as to suggest and excite inquiry concerning it.

I. I shall, in the first place, enter on the positive section of my lecture; and on this point, I am sorry to say that the frequent re-assertion of mistakes regarding our doctrines will put me to the painful necessity of much repetition.

1.—I commence with a few remarks on the nature of sin. One essential characteristic on which we have insisted—and we believe what we have asserted—is, that sin is a deep spiritual injury. The source of it is in the soul; it is the dark corruption of an evil heart. This I take to be one of the greatest and profoundest revelations of Christ, one which places him infinitely above all other moral teachers, and which makes Christianity the highest scheme of moral duty. False religions and false philosophies have been all at variance with this inward sense of duty. They have contrived numberless inventions as substitutes for it, or devised most ingenious means to nullify it. Priesthoods, with most imposing authority and mystical influence, have offered all sorts of spiritual panaceas to ease the wounded conscience. Ceremonies, with all graceful gesture and solemn import, have presented their beauty to the senses, and their spell to the fancies of superstition. Sacrifices without number—from the turtle-dove to the hecatomb; from the scape-goat driven to the desert, to the human being slaughtered to God; from the blood of life swelling round a thousand altars of vengeance, to the flowers and the fruits that were heaped upon the altars of mercy—all these have been tried to make religion for the senses, to make religion a flattery and delusion: but all were not sufficient; conscience is stronger than rituals, and to that conscience, to that spirit of God in the soul of man, Christ came; to that he was the Apostle and to that he preached. Christ went at once into the soul; he pierced the veil of sophistries and deceits by which men are ingenious to discover excuses to cover their selfishness and their wrong doings; he went to the seat of the evil, and struck at once to the root of bitterness. Others baptized with water, cleansing merely the outside, but he baptized with fire and the holy spirit, going to the innermost thoughts of the heart and the veins;—others preached on the keeping of feast-days and fast-days, but he taught of that God who is not the Lord of times or seasons, but the God of life in every hour—the God of the whole universe in every motion;—others called men to go to the temple, Christ called them to go into their closets and commune with their hearts;—others told them to wash their hands, Christ exhorted them rather to cleanse their spirits;—others told them to fear men who could kill the body, Christ warned them not to fear man who could only kill the body, but to fear God who could kill the soul as well as the body. He was truly the prophet of eternity—the preacher for eternity. He was truly the preacher of the invisible, and the herald of it—he needed not that any should testify of man, for he knew what was in man—he required no testimony, for he had the knowledge of humanity in his own nature deep and true, but guiltless—and he spake out of the fullness of his own full heart: it was therefore that he spake as never man spake: it was therefore that the common people heard him gladly—for his words had power to those thoughts and affections which are native to bosoms of all men; it was therefore that he spake with authority, and not as the scribes: for they discoursed on the traditions of the fathers, but he appealed to the inspirations of God—they spake of what had been written on tables of stones, but he spoke of what had been written on the fleshy tables of the heart. Others made sin to consist in resistance to the priest or to the king—but Christ showed it to be an alienation of the soul from God, the apostacy of the conscience from its own sense of duty. It is that which is within, he taught, that defiles the man; a man may wash his hands seven times a-day, but not once cleanse his heart; he may often wash his hands, and yet never in innocency. He showed that sepulchres might be beautified outside, and inside be only rottenness and corruption.—His apostles learned of him this most profound, most divine philosophy, and so they preached it to the world. To be carnally minded, says Paul, is death; to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Whatsoever, says the same apostle, a man soweth, that shall he also reap; he that soweth to the flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption, but he that soweth to the spirit, shall of the spirit reap everlasting life. Lust, (or evil desire,) saith Saint James, when it hath conceived, bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. This is the gospel doctrine on the inwardness and spirituality of sin; and we preach no other gospel, and we teach no other doctrine. A solemn consequence attaches to our view which is also powerfully enforced in the New Testament scriptures, but which the vicarious scheme tends directly to subvert—I mean the personal nature of transgression. Sin we hold to be no transferable quality, and this was most lucidly proved here by one of my brother lecturers. With the sinner himself lies the guilt; with him who contracts it it must lie; it cannot be acquired by imputation, nor can it be punished by imputation. If one doctrine be more clearly taught in scripture than another, it is this, that the offender shall be answerable only for his own sins; and for these, as surely as there are a conscience, a future world, and a God, he must be answerable.—Every man, our Saviour declares, shall be judged according to his own works. Every one of us, the Apostle Paul asserts, shall give an account of himself to God. But no, saith orthodoxy, you must also be answerable for Adam, and upon your head must be a guilt that darkened the very dawn of creation; and so upon this principle guilt should descend from sire to son; the later we are in existence, the more tremendous should be this growing mountain of imputation, until the last man should sink under the burden of all the crime which had been from the first man to himself.—We are told that Unitarians make light of sin. But, I ask, what does orthodoxy make of justice? And I further ask, what does it make of scripture? If there were a judge on earth who decided as orthodoxy decides, he would be scouted as a monster: if there were a code of laws which contained such a standard, the common moral sense of mankind would reject it; nay, there is not a tribe of savages in the habitable world so blind to the idea of justice as not to repel the dogma of imputed and eternal punishment. And yet we are gravely told that God thus acts, and that the Bible thus teaches; we are constantly rebuked as wanting in faith and humility, because we can find no such principles in either providence or the Bible. The plain declaration of the prophet Ezekiel contains the spirit of both. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” As certainly as we have a moral sense, as surely as we can discern between right and wrong, we are compelled to acknowledge the one and utterly to repudiate the other. Give but the conscience justice, let common sense have but the slightest voice in the decision, and you might as easily attempt to gain a man’s assent to the broadest of contradictions, even to the admission that a part is equal to the whole, or that two and two are five, as to feel guilty for another man’s crime, to feel remorse for another man’s wrong-doing, to be penitent or humble for that in which we had no participation, or to confess the justice of punishment by a sentence which made him criminal before his existence. On the moral injuries of thus forcing men to contradict the first dictates of their nature, of destroying the personality of virtue on the one side by an imputed righteousness, and the personality of sin on the other by an imputed guilt, I intend not here to enlarge: but one evil I will just allude to; I mean the wrong it does to truth of sentiment. Feelings in their real existence which are most excellent and most beautiful, it distorts and falsifies. There are no virtues on earth that bring men nearer to heaven than humility and repentance. To be humble with a true humility is to be in the likeness of Christ; to be penitent with a true repentance is to be an object of rejoicing even to the angels of heaven: but when we hear it said that we are to be of lowly mind on account of inherited corruption, and penitent for imputed sin; when we try to force ourselves into emotions which are not native to the soul, unconsciously we undermine its simplicity and sincerity, and instead of virtues which must be of spontaneous growth, or not exist at all, we have sickly abortions of sentiment that are false, because unnatural; strained efforts that are at eternal war with experience; and high-sounding phrases that are as empty as echo and as cold as the frozen blast. Perversions like these are almost worse than vices, for vices, though they mar the life, may leave the moral judgment its integrity. Where there is true conviction there may be amendment, but when the inward sense is itself diseased, the case is all but hopeless. Whatever be the evil of sin, whatever be its punishment; whether the evil be infinite or limited, whether the punishment be eternal or temporal, let us at least beware of weakening that sentiment on which all morality is founded, the deep sense of personal responsibility. Unitarian views are often described as being unfavourable to spirituality; but if by spirituality I am to understand the inward life of man, the activity of his mental and moral energies, then I think these views eminently spiritual. The spirit of man is their great subject, and the spirit of God in the human, their great agency of salvation. Within the soul itself they place moral salvation or moral destruction, and within the soul itself they place the elements which constitute one or the other, the sense of guilt which makes its hell, the conscious holiness which makes its heaven. This inward power of conscience is the true distinction of spiritual life; and the righteous submission to it in our own hearts, we maintain, is the faith which justifies: a faith which is an indwelling vitality which consists not in forming propositions about God and Christ, and in enforcing them or submitting to them, but in making God and Christ realities in our secret thoughts; in confidence on the worth of goodness, in allegiance to duty, and in trust in the power and immortality of truth.