Part 74

2. Next I affirm that sin is evil, and that sin is punishable; and our doctrines make not light of the evil, or disguise the awfulness of the punishment. Sin is evil: we deny not that; how could we? It is an eternal truth written on the heart and life of man, proved with unequivocal and gloomy evidence in the whole history of the world. Sin is evil to the individual; evil in the sufferings it prepares for him, and a still greater evil when it hardens him beyond suffering. Each one of us will judge this question for himself according to his degree of moral sensibility, and according to the circumstances of his moral history; but whatever be that sensibility, or whatever be that history, our moments of most profound anguish have ever been those in which we have felt the shameful consciousness of wrong thoughts or wrong actions. Not, it is true, when the evil passions or evil deeds held their tyrannical sway over us, but when the spell was gone, when the mind’s eye grew clear, and the hour of reflection came with sorrow, and the sad pale light spread over the hand-writing on the wall, from which conscience might shrink but could not fail to read. The worst, the most hardened, the most degraded of human creatures, those whom the world may think have bidden farewell to conscience, have moments in the dark silence of thought when the sword of remorse with all its poisoned tortures sinks into their wounded bosoms. And in such hours, it is not outward loss, or outward suffering, but inward agony that afflicts them most; it is not that they have sunk into the dregs of poverty; it is not that they have been reduced to dependence and exposed to insult; it is not that pride passes them with cold and withering scorn; it is not that pity and hope seem banished from their path; that all appear to frown upon them; that externally for them there is no longer peace on earth or light in heaven—it is, that the brightness and the freshness of their own hearts are gone; that sacred affections are a waste; that conscience, when not silenced into apathy, is enraged into an accuser; that their own respect is lost beyond recovery, and no delusion, however self-deceiving, can again restore it. The heart-consuming grief, the wrath and tribulation treasured up in a life of sin, the righteous judge of the earth alone can know. And these are all the more bitter if that life had ever been blessed with holier associations. There is a courage which can repel the scowl of others; there is a pride, a madness, if you will, which can despise their opinions, or feel independent of their esteem; there is a fortitude which can endure physical suffering to its last infliction; but there is nothing in time, in place, or in circumstance, which can fortify us against our own thoughts, against our own feelings, and especially the feelings of the divinity within us, that struggle to the last for empire over evil; that come ever and ever to tell us of what we had of good or might have had; that haunt us with reproach and sorrow when we have become traitors to our better nature. Not to speak of conscience with its stinging sense of violated conviction; not to speak of wasted time, ruined power, and a wreck of hopes; to say nothing of alienation from God, and the fear of a future world, I can conceive of memory dwelling on spots, which once were spots of light, becoming the tormentor of a fallen soul, the vindicator of duty and of God; I can conceive of one looking back from the bare desolateness of sin to a youth that once had been pure, full of joy and full of virtue, to homes that had been glad with every affection that sweetens life, to sabbaths that had repose for the stainless spirit, and prayer for unpolluted lips; gazing with breaking hearts and weeping eyes over a part marked with vice and misery, that had been a future glorious with promise; all this I can conceive in connection with even the felon in his cell, or with some wretch whose cough, like a knell of despair, awakens the midnight silence of the street, whose latest pang is spent in some hidden retreat of filth and sorrow, of sin and loathsomeness.

I need not say that sin is a great social evil. The fact is urged upon us with too painful a pressure, both from history and observation. Take the history of governments and nations; wars and bloodshed stain the record over its whole extent. And whence are these, but from the struggle and rivalry of selfish and sinful passions? From whence, says the apostle James, come wars and fightings among you; come they not hence, even of your lusts? From these we have had the oppression of strength against right. From these we have had the tyrannies and cruelties with which they surrounded their thrones of iron despotism; with which they made the glory of self the affliction of millions; with which so far as their power extended, they have been the scourges and the curses of mankind. From these we had the hatred one nation against another, men arrayed against each other to hew each other down, doing all iniquities, when interest or ambition called for them, enslaving one another, and selling one another, unmindful of all the claims of fraternity in the din of faction, and losing the sense of their common humanity in the difference of clime or the colour of the skin. Take the history of laws. I shall not allege those of the criminal code which until very recently made even Christian and enlightened countries vast arenas of legalised assassination: which spread a reign of terror over the face of empires, making the scaffold and the gibbet their principal symbols of civilization, and multiplying to enormous extent the very crimes, which, pretending to punish, they only publicly authorized and exemplified. I speak here more particularly of the spirit of partiality, injustice, selfishness, and rapacity in which much of legislation has been conceived and executed: classes of men turning the laws to their own purposes and leaving those unprotected who most required protection; commonly preying most on those who least could bear it. Except where the general sentiment of human right has been too strong for narrow passions, we may see in the long course of ages, principle sacrificed to personal interests, the good of masses betrayed or despised, the poor scorned, the ignorant neglected, the privileged orders hedged about with all sorts of protection, the classification of crime and criminals most unfairly adjusted, the distribution of penalties most unrighteously allotted; this I ascribe to selfish and evil passions. Once more, take the history of religion, and you have all the anger of faction made more stern with the rivalry of Creeds; the ambition of earthly dominion more aspiring by the addition of spiritual rule also; the powers of this world made more fearful by the powers of the world to come; both the visible and in visible existence subjected to priestly empire, and made tributary to priestly aggrandizement; the sword of the civil magistrate which had been sharp enough with one edge to deal the vengeance of man, receiving another edge from ecclesiastical authority, to vindicate the judgments of God. Thus we are compelled to read history, and thus in all its departments we are compelled to witness the dark traces which sin has left upon its pages. When we turn to the world around us, these evils are not the less glaring. Many sufferings, no doubt, are to be ascribed to our natural wants and weakness, but they scarcely deserve to be called evils, when we compare them with those which spring from moral derangements. Poverty is not so great an affliction as an all-devouring love for gain; sickness is not so great a misfortune as an insatiate desire for pleasure; and the ills of poverty and pain together, are not as fatal as the irritable wish for distinction which rules so widely in the world, with its fierce blood of turbulent passions. To these there are to be ascribed the worst social miseries that grieve the best hearts, and to remove or ameliorate which the finest spirits have ever directed their labours. To these we are to ascribe the covetousness which closes the hand of bounty, and shuts up the bowels of compassion; which becomes insensible both to justice and mercy; to these we are to ascribe all forms of sensuality, and all the abuses of passion; to these we are to ascribe all vices, material or malignant: and who, though he had the capacious mind of an archangel, can count the miseries which in all shapes spread contagion through society? Independently of those evils which no human eye can reach, those which present themselves on the very surface of observation are sufficiently extensive and fearful; intemperance, ignorance, grossness, hatred, strifes, with all their gloomy appendages; of unhappy homes; of loud and laughing and blushless infamy; of mad licentiousness, and late despair; of lost health, lost honesty, lost reason, which respectively close their career in the hospital, the prison, or the lunatic asylum.

3. As to evidence, then, for the existence of guilt, as to its extent and its evil, I think I can go as far as any Calvinist. I see the fact, and I have no wish to disguise it; it startles, but it does not subvert my faith. I grant sin to be evil—evil in the inward spirit—evil on the outward life—evil to the individual—evil to the species—evil in this world—evil in the next. In a certain sense, I am not prepared to deny that it leaves injurious consequences, which may be eternal; that the loss of innocence, that subversion of moral tastes, may implant habits which, for aught I know, shall be an everlasting injury to the soul, not utterly to destroy its happiness, or stop its progression, but to deprive it of advantages and advancement which a purer moral state would have given it. The evils of sin I hold to be terrible; the penalty of sin I hold to be inevitable—to be removed by no sacrifice, to be washed out by no expiation—to be escaped only in the criminals rising out of the corruption by experience and wisdom, to a purer moral state. The punishment of sin I believe to be not only inevitable, but also enduring, enduring in proportion to indulgence and malignity. Thoughts, I admit, which have wrought themselves into the very texture of the intellectual nature; feelings which have rooted themselves into the heart; habits that have grown into instinct, are not speedily to be destroyed. Moral punishment, in my idea, is identical with moral discipline, and moral discipline I consider to be such an arrangement of circumstances in the providence of God as shall lead us to self-correction; such a process of spiritual training as leave us the consciousness of our own liberty, but yet accomplish God’s wise ends by God’s boundless power. In building, then, the structure of our character, our Creator works not by miracle, but by experience, and this experience may be slow and painful. I believe most sincerely and profoundly in a future punishment; not vindictive, but corrective—for all wise punishment is, and must be, corrective. That the dispensations of God are not completed in this life, I think all the moral aspects of things here below make most manifest, and all analogies intimate, if Scripture had not expressly declared, that after death there is to be a more distinct exhibition of the divine government. That the results of character formed in the present life are to be carried into the future, and to influence it, I conceive our whole nature argues. Our existence, as spiritual beings, is properly connected and continuous; one state prognosticates another; and no two are absolutely distinct and separate. Our spiritual life consists of thought united to thought, and feeling to feeling, one operating on the other, or producing it, of a mysterious chain of consciousness, bound from link to link by successive memories, preserving unbroken the identity of our existence. Manhood is the growth of our youth, and immortality is the growth of our manhood; and the impressions of character pass from one stage to another, along the line of succession and sequence. There are no extremes, except to our outward observation. Looking at one stage of life, and then, after a long interval, seeing in the same person the apparently opposite characteristics, we take those things to be antagonists which are bound together by the inevitable connexion of cause and effect. The dreamer of youth becomes, perhaps, the misanthropist of age; the prodigal of youth, it may be, grows into the miser of age; the principle of action may in each case be the same—vanity or self-love; the passion is identical in principle, and changed only in form, from a change in circumstances. If we should meet an honest rustic in his peaceful fields, innocent and contented; if we should afterwards by accident behold him on a scaffold, it would be to us a seeming and terrible incongruity. But why? The two events are in our minds in naked contrast: could we, however, pierce the Spirit and trace the life of that unfortunate—watch it from the first intrusive evil thought successively dwelt on; from actions slightly wrong, unceasingly reiterated and darkening with every repetition, until the last deadly volition, and the last awful deed, we should have an analysis of sad consistency and of profound interest. There is something sublime in the reflection, that every human creature who treads the earth and breathes the air, has an inward history, a history unread by every eye but God’s; a history of solemn import, that has definite impression on the concerns of the universe, and is to live for ever in the annals of eternity.

In ordinary phraseology, we speak of our existence as if death made a chasm in it; but temporal and eternal are but distinctions of imagination; our eternal life commences, and our earthly is but the first stage, the infancy of that awful and endless existence. If I see in our nature that which can survive change, I see that also in it which can take materials of joy and sorrow along with it. The faculties that make our life here must be those which shall make that which is to come. Memory then will be there, which is but the resurrection of our by-gone experience; and whether for good or evil, it will call up the spirits of buried deeds, and as the life has been, will be an angel of heaven or a minister of hell;—imagination, which may have been the nurse of piety or the slave of passion,—intellect, which may have had the glow of the seraph or the malice of the demon: accordingly, then, as these powers have been properly directed or abused, every instinct of our moral nature tells us must be the joy of a righteous soul, or the agony of an evil heart. What treasure will the good man find he has laid up for his immortal life, when the past arises to him in the lustre of a new world: the consciousness of good thoughts and good actions, the peace of assimilation with God, and of union with the best of men: the immortal love of those with whom he had companioned in his earthly journey, the gratitude of many from whose eyes he had banished tears, and from whose bosoms he had plucked out despair; who has been true to the claims of his nature, and accomplished the work of a disciple of Christ, and a child of God, and a brother of man. On the other side, what are to be his feelings, who awakens in eternity with emotions of isolation and repulsion, condemned in his own conscience, who now discovers he has all to learn which can fit him for the society of noble spirits, whose expanded faculties flash shame and sorrow on his guilty soul, and show him that his whole course was folly: the sensualist, who stultified his reason and profaned his affections: the hypocrite, that toiled but for the outward, betrayed his convictions, and was a living and incarnate lie; before his fellows, a whited sepulchre; before his God, a corrupted mass of falsehood: the profane man, on whose lips prayer rarely dwelt, but to whom cursing and bitterness were familiar: the persecutor, who finds at last that he has hated or tormented others for a falsehood, or a sound: the man of wild ambition, who, despising the true glory which comes from God, and consists in doing right, spreads terror around him, in pursuing a phantom: the worldling, whose spirit was enslaved to those treasures for which he wasted life, and which he has left behind him in the dust. The sense of right and wrong is powerful and eternal; and when bad men resist it, it may be safely trusted to effect its own work, both of correction and of punishment.

II. I shall here review some of the arguments pleaded for the eternal misery of the wicked, and state briefly the grounds on which I reject it.

When we consider the mild and merciful spirit of the Gospel,—when we reflect on it as a revelation of divine love made manifest in the most perfect form of human love,—we are at first sight astonished that so tremendous an idea as that of an infinite and eternal hell could ever have been connected with it, or so wretched a one as a seclusive, and comparatively all but an unpeopled heaven. And truly this could have never been, had the doctrine of immortal life been apprehended in the full spirit of Christianity. But the fact of man’s immortality made manifest in the Gospel has not generally been so apprehended, it has had from the first to contend against darkening and perverting influences. Converts to the faith of Christ brought with them many of the prejudices and errors of their former training, and what in the early ages of the church was the result of ignorance, in later ones became sanctified into the testimony of faith. Those who came from heathen superstitions to the religion of Christ, brought with them minds filled with material images; their worship or their age left no means for any others; and their belief in a future existence of necessity became shaped by these associations. A sacrificial worship symbolized their gods of wrath, and what they had attributed to many, they were unable to dissociate from one; physical pains and pleasures comprehended their whole notion of retribution and reward, and these their Christianity made eternal. Their hell and their heaven were therefore fashioned from the rude conceptions of their previous superstitions, and from the symbolic language of the Gospel crudely understood. The everlasting hell which thence grew out of the mistakes of the vulgar, and the speculations of the learned, it was too much the interest of priests to maintain, not to receive the sanction of the church with an earnest and zealous promulgation. Connected with other doctrines, what immense power was thus placed in the hands of ecclesiastics! With what deep and gloomy awe it shrouded the character of the priest! Once in the place of his ministry, he stood there not as the simple teacher of his brethren, and his equals, not as the mere expounder of his master’s gospel, but as the commisioned delegate of heaven, authorized by God to denounce his everlasting wrath on the guilty, to wield the thunder of an eternal vengeance. We cannot estimate the power with which such a doctrine would invest the hierarchy, and we are not therefore surprised that it is the last which any orthodox priesthood would be willing to resign,—one of those prime doctrines, to deny which has ever been stamped as heresy, from Origen to Servetus. If even in these times, when protestantism and other causes have done so much to take away the reverence with which the ministry was once surrounded, highly-wrought pictures of endless misery give men not deemed to have any supernatural authority such influence over the minds of their hearers, such despotism over their feelings and their consciences, what must it have been when superstition bent down the votaries before the church in prostrate submission, when the servants of her altar were regarded as the direct messengers of God,—as those ordained to stand between hell and heaven, with the key of both; to announce glad tidings, or empty the vials of indignation; to distribute God’s grace, or to proclaim his malediction. Many causes have been assigned for the growth of ecclesiastical supremacy, but this doctrine I am persuaded was the greatest of all; the priestly throne, which raised its ambition to the stars, was girded around by the lightning and tempests of eternal terrors. The doctrine of eternal torments derives much strength from ecclesiastical interest; and it is further sustained by all the logic of theological subtlety. Many writers on divinity seem to find a strange and morbid pleasure in describing the tortures of the wicked, both in nature and duration, exhausting all analogies to illustrate the incomprehensible; and all modes of thought and expression to explain the infinite. On this doctrine the transition from Romanism to Protestantism has impressed no change. If the Reformation broke some bonds that enslaved the freedom of religion, it removed no cloud which obscured its heaven: the fierce teachings of Augustine were only made more complete and systematic by the still fiercer doctrines of Calvin; and the dark sketch of eternal reprobation drawn in its outlines by the Carthaginian monk, received its last touches from the Genevan master: what in the olden church was broached only in the cautious reasonings of the schools, has in Protestantism been made the staple _materiel_ of theological declamation.

These doctrines have not only done much to obscure men’s minds as to the condition of the wicked in a future state, but also to mislead them in an equal degree on that of the righteous. This we observe in many of the popular notions of heaven. To millions, heaven seems to be for the soul what the grave is for the body—a place of mere repose. If something more than this, an elysium for indolence, a kind of region of complacent idealism, where the faithful and elect are to enjoy ecstacies and prayer, musings and melodies, which the coarse struggles of earth forbade, in which the cares of the world left no time to engage;—the clear skies and still waters of paradise, the golden harps, the incense, and the music of angels, to relieve from weariness, strife, and pain, toil-worn and time-worn spirits. Nor is such view of heaven ungrateful, tried as we are here with sin and tired as we are with labour; but this must not exhaust our thoughts of future bliss. Our highest happiness, even in heaven, must consist in highest action: no other happiness can exist for a moral and intellectual being than that which calls his faculties into energy, and supplies both with materials and objects on which to engage them. Our ideas in general of heaven are too much those of negation or contrast. We are here in sojourn, we think only of home there; we are here in conflict, we think only of peace there; we are here in labour, and there we only picture our rest; we forget that all these are worth nothing but as means to higher purposes, unsuitable as final conditions to creatures who bear within them the life that is henceforth to go on with that of the All-creative God.