The Common Belief: its Consequences. The Gospel a Message of Eternal Life.
The immortality of the righteous is most positively affirmed in the Word of God. No Christian will for one moment call this in question. Have we equal assurance that the wicked will also live forever? Is every individual soul, without respect to its character here, or its condition hereafter, endowed with the same deathless nature? This is the common belief — with the exception of a very small class of Atheistic Materialists, who, like the Saducees of old, deny all spiritual and future existence, to the good and bad alike — men of all creeds, and of no creed, have very generally everywhere united in calling themselves immortal, and have held to this belief with great tenacity?
It early became one of the most cherished and popular doctrines of the Papal Church. Protestant Christians have received it by inheritance and handed it down to us as an almost self-evident truth as one of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion. It is true, that our Lord and His immediate disciples taught with extra-ordinary emphasis and constant reiteration that eternal life is the peculiar portion of the children of God, and that all His irreclaimable enemies are doomed to inevitable death and destruction. But, giving to these terms no literal but only a metaphorical signification, Christians of all denominations very generally hold, in common with unbelievers and the world at large, that there is no difference between saints and sinners in respect to the deathless nature of their souls. It is held that every child of Adam that is born into the world, is born to a life that is absolutely endless. That the life which God gives to every soul in its creation is an unconditional gift, depending upon no contingencies whatever; that the creature can neither lose nor forfeit, nor extinguish it by any act of his own, and that the Creator will never, for any cause whatever, destroy it or take it from him, how much soever he may despise or abuse the gift, or fail of the end for which he was created; that the flame of life once kindled in the infant soul will burn on so long as God Himself endures; that there is no power in sin, which bringeth forth death, to put an end to it; that the waters of Lethe cannot quench it, nor the blasts of God's anger at the judgment extinguish it, nor the gnawing worm, nor the devouring fire of hell consume it, nor the agonies of the second death destroy it. It will survive the wreck of nature and the crash of worlds, and throughout all the revolving cycles of an unending future hold on its way unextinguished and inextinguishable like the life of the self-existent God who gave it being.
Thus far most believers and unbelievers in Revelation are agreed. But when the inquiry is raised as to the conditions of that unending existence, there is a very wide divergence of belief. The Word of God evidently teaches, and that portion of the Christian Church usually denominated evangelical holds, that man has fallen from the condition of purity in which he was originally created, and that by sin the whole human race have forfeited their right to an eternal life of blessedness, and have fallen under the penalty of God's holy law that condemns them to death and destruction; — that is to say, when interpreted to harmonize with the doctrine of the deathless and indestructible nature of the soul, to the literal death of the mortal body and the unending wretchedness and miseryof the "immortal soul."
But, by the great mercy of God, a ransom has been provided in Christ, Who has died in the place of the sinner, by which sinners may be, and many will be, rescued from this fearful doom; but as for the rest — alas that any should fail of salvation; but the Scriptures give no encouragement to hope for the salvation of all men — eternal wretchedness and despair are the inevitable portion of their "undying" souls.
This doctrine, which is set forth more or less distinctly in our various Church creeds and systems of theology, finds expression in the Westminster Assembly's Catechism in these words: "All mankind by their fall lost communion with God, are under His wrath, and so made liable to all the miseries in this life, to death itself and to the pains of hell forever." "God having out of His mere good pleasure, from all eternity, elected some to everlasting life, did enter into a covenant of grace to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery and to bring them into an estate of salvation by a Redeemer."
Christians may differ with respect to the terms of this formula, and with respect to other points of doctrine, and also with respect to the number of the saved and of the lost; but they agree in this: that the final doom of the unsaved, whether the number of such be proportionally great or small, is one of unending wretchedness and despair.
It follows as a necessary deduction from this belief, that this once holy and happy universe will never be restored to its original perfection; that sin bringing death and misery in its train having once gained a lodgment here, whether with or without divine permission, it is not necessary now to inquire, will never be exterminated or expelled. It may, like a raging fire, be localized and circumscribed within certain limits, but it will never like that fire exhaust itself and die out, nor will it ever be extinguished by God Himself, but will rage on without ever coming to an end. And so long as Jehovah lives and reigns, holiness and sin, happiness and misery, praises and curses, life and death, will also continue and run parallel with each other to all eternity. Heaven will resound with the songs of the redeemed, and hell with the curses of the damned throughout the ceaseless flow of eternal ages; and the time will never, never come when Infinite Love, Divine Wisdom, or Almighty Power will have so successfully triumphed over the works of the devil as to have utterly destroyed them, nor over death and hell as to have destroyed them, nor when His justice will have so vindicated itself by the sufferings of the unsaved that they can be permitted to expire, nor when the foundations of His government will be secure, and the loyalty of His obedient subjects assured without this terrible exhibition of Hisinfinite wrath, like the smoke of a furnace, rolling up forever before their eyes.
These are the views that have long been commonly held, by what is called, the Orthodox branch of the Christian Church. It is the doctrine of our "Confessions of Faith" of our Scripture Commentaries, and of our Theological Schools. It pervades our Christian Literature. It is sung in the songs of the Sanctuary. It is taught in our Sunday-schools, and around the fireside by faithful parents. It is reiterated in the exhortations and prayers of the conference room, and proclaimed with more or less earnestness and confidence from ten thousand pulpits, by the ministers of the gospel of Christ.
But it must be admitted that the doctrine of endless sin and endless misery is not as boldly preached as in former times; nor is it as cheerfully accepted. The main premise upon which this doctrine depends, viz.: that the human soul irrespective of its character and condition is immortal, may be as popular as ever; but thinking men shrink more and more from the terrible conclusion to which it leads them. When they stop to consider what is involved in the idea of suffering that is absolutely endless; what it is for conscious, sensitive creatures like themselves to writhe in the agonies of hell forever and ever, without the least possible hope of relief; when they consider what countless myriads of the human race, even with the most liberal construction of the testimony of the Scriptures concerning the number of the saved, must already have sunk into this abyss of woe, and. what multitudes are daily following them there; when they come to apply this doctrine, not to sinners in the abstract and in general, but to the case of their own neighbors and friends, and, it may be, to their own children and bosom companions who die, giving no evidence whatever of piety, they are appalled at the conclusion to which their creed and their logic lead them. Their faith cannot endure the strain that is put upon it. Something must give way. Holding to the idea of the endless, conscious existence of all men, beyond this life as a doctrine that is not for one moment to be doubted, they begin in their hearts to charge God foolishly with the cruelty and injustice which their creed attributes to Him, or to doubt the testimony of His Word as to the danger of losing the soul, and the necessity of laying hold of eternal life, or. to deny the existence of the God of the Bible, or to take refuge in some other form of unbelief, or, else, still clinging to their faith in God, and to the Scriptures as His Truth, they earnestly set themselves to find, and, perhaps, think they do find in these oracles, in spite of their most positive declarations to the contrary, the assurance of the ultimate salvation of all men. And even those who cannot relieve their burdened minds by doing such evident violence to the letter of the Scriptures, still hope, because they will, that possibly a second probation or some other way of escape will yet be found from the awful doom of endless misery which seems to be so surely threatened against all who die in their sins. They may not dare to deny explicitly a doctrine that has been held by so many of the wise and good who have gone before them, though they cannot reconcile it with their own sense of justice. They may not, perhaps, be willing to admit to themselves that they disbelieve it, lest they should seem to be sliding away from the true foundation; but they-cannot but hope it is not true. They accept it, if at all, under a kind of mental protest. It is that dark, dark mysterious doctrine upon which they cannot trust themselves to meditate, lest they should have hard thoughts of Him whom they wish to love and trust. Indeed they do love and trust Him not withstanding the cruel aspersion which their false theology or rather psychology, casts upon His name, but it is only as they include themselves among the saved; and — as for the rest, — they comfort their hearts by saying, and wisely saying, with faithful Abraham: "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"
In the rude and unfeeling ages of the past, when the severest penalties were inflicted for trivial offences, and when the chief object of punishment was torment, and the executioners of the law were called "tormentors," when human governments vied with each other in the severity of the tortures they inflicted upon the unhappy victims of their displeasure and even the death penalty was made as cruel and protracted as possible to those who suffered it, and medical aid was invoked to prolong their forfeited lives, that still more enduring agonies might be inflicted
upon them while dying, in those days, not so very long since past, but now happily passed never to return, when Church officers exercised the function of inquisitors under the pretense of doing the will of God, this doctrine of endless torment, so consonant with the spirit and practice of those ages of darkness and cruelty, might easily find and hold its place unchallenged in the creed of the Church.
But, in these "last days," under the softening influences of the gospel, when so much is done to assuage human sorrow and even brute suffering, and to relieve the distresses of even the most undeserving, and mercy is mingled with justice in the punishment of the worst of criminals. and even the death penalty is made as humane and summary as possible, men cannot but ask whether the majesty of the Divine government to which all human governments must look, both for their authority to punish and for an example of the manner and spirit in which it is to be administered, can only be vindicated by the inflictions of tortures too horrible to think of, and protracted without end? Is there no such thing as death, actual death under the government of heaven? Has the Almighty Creator no alternative but to imprison the helpless victims of His displeasure and to pour out upon them forever and ever the vials of His wrath? Has He no way of putting an end to their miserable existence; or does He choose to prolong their forfeited lives, that they may never cease to suffer?
And when they are told that this is the inevitable doom, not only of the rejectors of the gospel and irreclaimable sinners in Christian lands, but of countless multitudes who were born in sin and to whom no Saviour was ever offered — of creatures who owe both their existence and the conditions of their existence to the sovereign will of Him who saw and predetermined all things from the beginning, they cannot but feel that there is a flaw some where in the chain of reasoning that leads to such monstrous conclusions, though they may not be able to detect it.
The great divines of a former generation could school their severe and-logical minds to accept all the terrible conclusions involved in the dogma of the deathless nature of the human soul, which they had received from their fathers. They could in their zeal for the glory of God's justice believe and teach to their docile hearers that the perpetual spectacle of the agonies of lost souls in hell would serve to augment the joys of the redeemed in heaven, and that "should eternal punishment cease and the fire be extinguished, it would put an end to a great part of the happiness and glory of the blessed." (See sermons of Dr. Hopkins, Pres. Edwards, etc.*)
It is taxing too heavily the faith of the men of the present day to insist upon their believing doctrines, how ever hoary with age and fortified by hum in authority,
that are abhorrent, at once to their reasons and their moral sense. Men will no longer be held to those views of God and His government that prevailed when all sovereigns were tyrants and justice was but another name for vengeance. They will not be terrified by threatenings they do not and cannot believe will be executed, nor persuaded to flee to a refuge of which they have ceased to feel the need. They cannot be aroused to seek for an immortality which they have been made to believe is fully assured to them. If an alternative is threatened which to their minds is truly incredible, the truth which it is meant to enforce will soon lose its power to move them. In this way the glorious gospel is made of none effect through the tradition of the elders, and men in increasing numbers are seen turning away their ears from the truth mixed as it is with human dogmas, and turned unto fables. They forsake the altars at which their fathers worshipped, and betake themselves to other forms of belief or of unbelief that have, at least, the merit of seeming to be reasonable, however far they may be from the faith once delivered to the saints.
*Pres. Edwards in his sermon on Rev. 18 : 20, entitled “The end of the wicked contemplated by the righteous ; or the wicked in hell, no occasion of grief to the righteous," (Vol. 4), after showing how "the two worlds of happiness and misery will be in view of each other," remarks, "The saints in glory will be far more sensible of it than now, we can possibly be. They will be far more sensible how dreadful the wrath of God is, and will better understand how terrible the sufferings of the damned are ; yet this will be no occasion of grief to them. They will not be sorry for the damned ; it will cause no uneasiness or dissatisfaction to them, but on the contrary, when they have this sight, it will excite them to joyful praises.'' * * * * However the saints in heaven may have loved the damned, while here, especially those of them who were near and dear to them, in this world, they will have no love to them hereafter." * * * It will occasion rejoicing in them as they will have the greater sense of their own happiness (the italics are his) by seeing the contrary misery," * * When they shall see how miserable others of their fellow- creatures are who were naturally in the same circumstances with themselves ; when they shall see the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they in the mean time, are in the most blissful state and shall surely be in it to all eternity ; how will they rejoice !"
This is just the result we have to deplore at the present day. Everywhere throughout Christendom the people are casting off the restraints of religion and forsaking the Sanctuary. Scepticism among all classes, especially among the educated, is becoming very general. Even among those who professedly hold to those forms of belief usually termed evangelical, there is a scepticism more or less latent as to the final and irreversible doom of those who die in their sins, a kind of half-doubting hope of their ultimate salvation, which greatly- weakens the power of the gospel.
Earnest Christians look with anxiety and concern upon the scepticism and irreligion of the present day. They are enquiring earnestly after the cause and the remedy. They ask, Why is it as knowledge and the spirit of inquiry increase and philanthropic efforts are multiplied, that infidelity, religious error and indifference increase? Why do not the masses frequent the house of God and listen to the ordinary preaching of the gospel as they once did? What shall bring them back to the sanctuary and to the faith of their fathers? What modifications in the services of God's house and in the method of presenting the truth are needed to accomplish this end? They do well to inquire. These are questions of vital importance. But does it not occur to any of them that their creed may require some modification: that the results they so much deplore are due quite as much to the nature of the dogmas that are preached, as to the manner in which they are presented, quite as much to the false light in which the great object of their worship is held up before them, as to the precise forms in which they are invited to worship Him ? Not that the gospel needs any modification; but is it not time to inquire whether all the human philosophy that is preached with it is also from God and a necessary part of that gospel? Whether all the errors, perversions, false interpretations, foolish conceits, and traditions by which it was confessedly overlaid in its transit through the dark ages, were fully exposed and rejected in the Reformation, so that none of them remain to weaken its power, or dim its lustre, or check its progress, in these last days? However practicable it might once have been, it is no longer possible to hold men to doctrines that contradict their intelligence, or to views of God and His government that are repugnant to their sense of justice.
This apparent falling away is not an evidence that the truth is losing its hold upon the hearts and consciences of men, but that they are becoming more critical in their inquiry, What is Truth? and less under the control of traditions that have no foundation in sound reason. The simple gospel has lost none of its virtue or power. It is as really adapted to the wants of the soul as when it was first preached by Christ and His apostles. It is now as ever the only hope of a lost world. It is the wisdom of God and the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth and there is no salvation in any other name. But so long as men are assured of their indefeasible claim to an immortality without Christ, they will have but little sense of their need of Him as their Saviour, or but little fear but that God in His great mercy will find a way to save them from the consequences of their sins, in the life beyond, if not in this life.
But it is not from suffering chiefly, that the gospel offers to save men, but from Death. This is what preeminently constitutes it Good News to perishing men. Christ died not primarily to save us from suffering, but from dying, He is the Author of Eternal Life to all who receive Him as their Saviour. So long as the minds of men are occupied by the delusive hope of an jmmortality already assured, the light of the glorious gospel cannot shine unto them in all its fulness and power. Christ, though robbed of His chief glory, may still receive the praise and admiration of men as the kind suffering Lamb of God. But it is only as they are made to see and feel that without His life in their souls they must perish forever, that they will seek Him in earnest as their Saviour.
The real gospel message is a proclamation of Life — Eternal Life through Jesus Christ to dying men — not to immortals, but to mortal men. The grand feature which distinguishes the saint from the sinner is not that the one is so much better in his moral character than the other that he may expect to be rewarded with eternal bliss, while the other will be punished with eternal misery. The world cannot see any such difference nor can they be made to believe that any such distinction will be made between them. But they can be made to believe and feel that they are by nature destitute of that principle of life without which, however moral they may be, they must perish forever. That this is the Life — the Eternal Life which is offered them in the gospel of Christ. That it begins in the new birth, that it is already begun in the soul of the saint, and though feeble as the natural life of the infant, it tends upward toward its source and will never be extinguished because it is the life of Christ within him, while the natural life turns inevitably to death and dissolution.
The Church of Christ by encouraging natural men as well as Christians, to expect immortality, have obscured the main distinctiqn between the regenerate and the unregenerate; they have dimmed the lustre of the gospel and greatly weakened its power. And this, we believe, is the chief cause of their want of success in urging it upon the world.
The doctrine of immortality only in Christ would, no doubt, meet with the bitterest opposition from men, who pride themselves on the deathless nature of their souls. But it has the merit of being credible as well as true. It is the doctrine of the Bible. It is the doctrine that Christ and His early disciples taught. When the Christian Church again receives it, as she will, there will be no difficulty in making men believe it, and believing it, they will cry out with an earnestness now rarely exhibited, "What must we do to be saved ?" The Sanctuaries will again be crowded to hear the words of this life. Christians will labor with a zeal and faithfulness to save perishing men, which can only be awakened and kept alive by a hearty belief, that they are actually going down to death, and, unless rescued and brought to Christ before they pass away from earth, they must be lost forever. Then, and not till then, may we hope for the speedy triumph of the gospel through the world.
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